Men of Men

"We are not finished yet," he said, and the young Matabele nodded.

"What is there still to do?" he asked simply, and Zouga felt a rush of gratitude and -affection towards him. He placed his hand on Bazo's shoulder and for a moment they considered each other gravely, then Bazo asked again, "What must be done?"

"The roadway is gone. There will be no work on these claims, not for a long time," Zouga explained, his voice dulled and his hand dropping wearily from Bazo's shoulder. "If we leave any tools or equipment down here, they will be stolen."

They had lost the gravel cart, the hoist with its iron sheave wheels and valuable rope, and the gravel buckets.

Zouga sighed, and the fatigue swept over him like a cold dark wave. There was no money to replace those essentials. "We must save what we can from the vultures."

Bazo called to his men in their own language and led them along the shapeless bank of broken earth from which protruded shattered pieces of equipment and tangles of sodden rope, to the deserted Devil's Own claims.

The fallen roadway had buried the eastern corner of number 142, but the rest of the claims were clear. However, a pressure crack had opened in a deep zigzag across the floor and some of Zouga's equipment had fallen into it and lay half submerged in muddy water.

Bazo clambered down into the fissure and groped for the mess of rope and tools, passing it up to the Matabele on the bank above his head. Here Zouga supervised them as they tied the tools into bundles and then staggered away with them to the high eastern bank, there to wait their turn for the single functioning gantry to hoist the bundles out to ground level.

As they worked the last pale rays of the sun pierced the mass of low cloud and struck down into the huge man-made pit.

In the bottom of the fissure Bazo found the last missing pick, passed it up, and then leaned against the bank to rest for a few moments. He felt that he no longer had the strength to climb out of the deep crack. The cold lio had numbed his legs and softened his skin until it was wrinkled and water-logged like that of a drowned man.

He shivered and laid his forehead on his arm, bracing himself against the bank of yellow earth. He felt that if he closed his eyes he would fall asleep on his feet.

He kept them open with an effort, and stared at the earth in front of his face. A trickle of rainwater was still running down from the level above his head; it had cut a narrow runnel a few inches wide and deep. Most of the mud had settled out of this little streamlet, and it was almost clear, only slightly milked with colour.

At one point in its trickle down the mud wall it had encountered an obstacle, and was pouring over it, forming a little plume of running water.

Suddenly Bazo was thirsty. His throat was rough and dry. He leaned forward, and let the trickle flow over his lips and tongue, and then slurped a mouthful.

The watery sun touched the bank, and a strange brilliant light flared inches from Bazo's face. It came pouring up, powerful and pure and dancing white, from the tiny freshet from which he was drinking.

He stared at it dully, and slowly it dawned upon him that the obstruction over which the water was pouring was something embedded in the gravel bank, something that glowed and flickered as the random beam of sunlight played upon it, something that seemed to change shape and substance through the trickling yellow-tinged waters.

He touched it with his forefinger, and the cold water ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow. He tried to work it loose, but it was firmly implanted, and soapy feeling in his raw numb fingers so that he could not get a fair grip upon it.

He took the buckhom whistle from around his neck and used the point to prise the pretty fiery object loose, and it dropped heavily into the raw pink palm of his hand, almost filling it.

It was a stone, but a stone such as he had never seen before. He held it under the trickle of rainwater, and with his thumb rubbed off the clinging mud until it was clean. Then he looked at it again, turning it curiously in the weak sunlight.

Until Bazo had arrived at New Rush he had never thought about rocks and stones as being different from one another, any more than one drop of water differed from another or one cloud in the sky was more valuable or useful than the others. The Matabele language did not differentiate between a granite pebble and a diamond, they were both simply "imitshe". Only the white men's maniacal obsession with stones had made him look at them afresh.

In all these months he had spent toiling in the diggings, he had seen many strange things and learned much of the white men and their ways. At first he had not been able to believe the extraordinary value they placed on the most trivial items. That a single pebble could be exchanged for six hundred head of prime cattle seemed some grotesque madman's dream, but at last he had seen that it was true and he and his little band of amadoda had become fanatical gatherers of pebbles.

Every sparkling or coloured stone they had pounced upon like magpies and carried proudly to Bakela for their reward.

This initial enthusiasm had swiftly waned, for there was neither logic nor system in the white man's mind.

The showiest stones were discarded contemptuously.

Lovely shiny red and blue pebbles, some of them shot through with different colours like ceramic beads, Bakela handed back to them with a grunt and a shake of the head. While occasionally, very occasionally, he would select some dull and uninteresting little chip and hand the delighted finder a gold coin.

At first, payment in coin had confused the Matabele, but they learned fast. Those little metal discs could be exchanged in their turn for anything a man desired, as long as he had enough of them he could have a gun, or a horse, a woman or a fine ox.

Bakela had tried to explain to Bazo and his Matabele how to recognize the stones for which he would pay a red gold coin. Firstly, they were small, never much bigger than the seed of the camel-thorn tree.

Bazo considered the stone in his palm. It was huge; he could barely close his fingers over it. The stones that Bakela wanted were usually of a certain shape, a regular shape with eight sides, one for every finger less the thumbs. This huge stone was not so shaped. It had one clean side, as though cut through with a knife blade, and the rest of it was rounded and polished to a strange soapy sheen.

Bazo held it under the trickle of rainwater again, and when he brought it out the film of water that covered the surface instantly coagulated into little droplets and shrank away, leaving the stone dry and glittering.

That was strange Bazo decided, but the stone was the wrong colour. Bakela had explained that they must look for pale lemon, or glossy grey, even brown colour. This stone was like looking into a clear pool in the mountains. He could see the shape of his own hand through it, and it was full of stars of moving light that hurled little darts of sunlight into his eyes as he turned it curiously. No, it was too big and much too pretty to be of value, Bazo decided.

"Bazo! Checha!" Bakela was calling him. "Come on, let's go where we can eat and sleep."

Bazo dropped the stone into the leather pouch at his waist and scrambled up out of the open fissure. Already the file of Matabele workers led by Zouga were plodding away through the mud, each of them bowed under a bundle of spades or picks, one of the big leather buckets or a coil of sodden muddy rope.

"He has the lives Of six men on his hands. I was there, digger with a I saw it all happen. He drove his team into Mark Sander son's gravel bucky., The accuser was a tall huge shaggy head of greying hair, heavy shoulders and heavier paunch. He was working himself up into a boil Of righteous indignation, and Zouga saw that it was infectious, the crowd was beginning to growl and surge restlessly around the wagon body.

The New Rush Diggers" Committee was in public session. Ten minutes previously they had formed themselves into a Board of Enquiry into the cave-in of number 6

Roadway.

A wagon had been dragged into the centre of Market Square to provide a platform for their deliberations, and around it was a solid packed crowd of diggers from the Number-6 Section. Since the cave-in, they had not been able to get back into the diggings to work their claims and they had just come from the mass funeral of the six men that had been crushed to death by the treacherous yellow gravel. Most of them had begun the wake for their mates and were carrying uncorked green bottles.

Mixed with the diggers were all the loafers of New Rush, the transport riders and merchants; even the kopie-wallopers had closed their offices for the meeting.

This was something that affected all their futures directly.

"Let's have a look at the little brighter," somebody yelled out at the back of the crowd, and there was a menacing growl of agreement.

"Right, let's see him."

Zouga stood beside the tall back wheel of the wagon, hemmed in by the press of bodies, and he glanced at Ralph who stood at his shoulder.

"He no longer had to look down at his son, their eyes were on a level.

"I'll go up and face them" Ralph whispered huskily.

Under the dark tan" his skin was grey and his eyes dark green and worried. He knew as well as Zouga did how grave was his position: he was to be tried by a mob that was angry and vindictive and mostly filled with cheap liquor.

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 accessibly 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 number 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 Buitfontein 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 number 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 and 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 goldenskinned, 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 and 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, broadshouldered, 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 burns 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 number 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 this 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 he 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 hardpacked 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.

Hendrick set it firmly on the floor of the hut, pressing the sharp points of glass into the clay. Then he closely examined the stone for a moment. One plane of the crystal had sheared through cleanly, leaving a sharp ridge around the rim, and the curved upper surface fitted neatly into Hendrick's cupped hand.

He placed the sharp ridge of the stone against the polished dark green curve of the broken bottle, then pressed down with the full strength of his right forearm and began to draw the edge across the glass. There was a thin abrasive screech that set his big white-starred teeth on edge, and behind the moving edge of the glittering stone a deep white groove appeared in the green glass, the stone had cut it as a hot knife cuts cheese.

Reverently the Griqua placed the stone in front of him, on the bare floor, and it seemed to be moving as the light played within its limpid depths, turned to magical stars of mauve and green and flaming crimson.

His voice had dried, his throat cleaved closed, he could barely breathe for iron bands of avarice had bound his chest, but his eyes glittered like a wolf in the firelight.

Hendrick Naaiman knew diamonds as a jockey knows fine horse flesh or a tailor the feel of good tweed cloth between his fingers. Diamonds were his salt, his bread, his very breath, and he knew that before him on the swept mud floor of this smoky little thatched hut lay something that would one day repose in the treasure house of the palace of some great king.

It was a living legend already: something that only a king could buy, something whose value, when converted to gold pounds or dollars, would stun even a rich man.

"Has this stone the spirit you seek?" Bazo asked quietly, and Hendrick swallowed before he could talk.

"I will give you five hundred gold queens for this stone," he answered, and his voice was hoarse, ragged as though he were in pain.

His words struck the dark group of Matabele the way the east wind off the sea strikes the forests of Tzikhama, so that they swayed and rustled with the shock.

"Five hundred," repeated Hendrick Naaiman. "Which will buy you fifty guns or many fine cattle."

"Give the stone to me," Bazo ordered, and when Hendrick hesitated, the assegai pricked him again so that he started violently.

Bazo took the stone and stared at it broodingly, then he sighed.

"This is a heavy matter," he said. "I must think on it.

Go now and return tomorrow at the same time. I will have an answer for you then."

Long after the Griqua left, the silence persisted in the darkened hut, broken at last by Kamuza.

"Five hundred gold pieces," he said. "I long to see the hills of Matopos again; I long for the sweet milk of my father's herds again. With five hundred gold queens we could leave this place."

"Do you know what the white men do to people who steal these stones?" Bazo asked softly.

"Not their stones. The Bastaard told us "No matter what the yellow Bastaard told you, you will be a very dead Matabele if the white men catch you.,"

"One man they burned alive in his hut. They say he smelled like a roasting joint of warthog meat," one of the others murmured.

"Another they tied by his heels and dragged behind a galloping horse as far as the river. When they were finished, he no longer looked like a man at all."

They thought about these atrocities a while, not shocked by them for they had seen men burned alive before. on one of the cattle raids to the east of Matabeleland their own regiment had chased two hundred Mashona men and women and children into the maze of caves that honeycombed the kopjes above their village.

It would have been a tedious task to hunt them out of the dark belly of the hills, so they had packed every entrance to the underground passages with branches of mopani trees and then put in fire. At the end some of the Mashona had run out through the flames, living torches of shrieking flame.

"Fire is a bad way to die," said Kamuza, and uncorked his own snuff-horn.

"And five hundred pieces is a great deal of gold," one of his friends answered him across the fire.

"Does a son steal the calves from his father's herd?" Bazo asked them, and now they were shocked indeed. To the Matabele the great herds of cattle were the nation's wealth, and the harsh laws and penalties that governed the management of the herds they had learned as part of their existence as "mujiba", the apprenticeship as herd boys which every Matabele boy must serve.

"It is death even to squirt the milk of another man's cow into your mouth," Bazo reminded them; and they all remembered how they had taken that chance at least once in the solitude of the bush, spurting it directly from the teat so that it dribbled down their chins onto their naked chests, risking their lives for a mouthful of warm sweet milk and the respect of their peers.

"It is not a calf," Kamuza reminded, "but a single little stone."

"Gandang, who is my father, looks upon the white man Bakela as a brother. If I take anything from Bakela, then it is as taking from my own father."

"If you take this stone to Bakela he will give you a single coin. If you take it to the Bastaard he will give you five hundred."

"It is a heavy matter," Bazo agreed. "I will think on it."

And long after all the others had curled on their reed sleeping-mats under the karosses of fur, he sat alone over the dying fire with the great diamond burning coldly in his right hand.

Three men rode into Zouga's camp that Monday morning, and Zouga stooped out of his tent to meet them, standing bareheaded in the sunlight.

Neville Pickering led the party, and as he stepped down from the stirrup, he said, "I hope we do not disturb you, Major, but I'd like you to meet some friends of mine."

"I know mister Hayes." Zouga shook the hand of the lanky Texan engineer and then turned to the third man.

"And of course I know mister Rhodes by sight and reputation."

Rhodes" hand was cool, the skin dry and the knuckles large and bony. It had the feel of strength, although his grip was quick and light. Zouga found the pale blue eyes on a level with his. The man was tall, and startlingly young, he could be very little older than twenty, young to have earned such a formidable reputation.

"mister Rhodes." Nobody, not even Pickering, used his Christian name. It was said he even signed his letters to his own mother "Your affectionate son, C. J. Rhodes".

"major Ballantyne." Zouga was startled again, for Rhodes had a slight voice, pitched high and with a breathless quality. "I am delighted to meet you at last. Of course, I have read your book, and there are many questions I should like to ask you., "Jordan, take the horses," Zouga called, and began to lead his guests towards the scant shade of the camelthorn tree. But Rhodes paused as Jordan scurried from the tent, obedient to his father's order.

"Good morning, young Jordan," he said, and the child stopped abruptly and stared up at him speechlessly, beginning to blush a deep pink with transparent heroworship, overcome at being recognized and addressed by name.

"I see you have taken to reading rather than fisticuffs now."

In his haste Jordan still carried a book in his hand.

Rhodes stooped and took it from him.

"Good Lord -" he said. "Plutarch! You have cultivated taste for one so young."

"It's a fascinating book, sir."

"Indeed it is, one of my favourites. Have you yet read Gibbon?"

"No, sir," Jordan whispered shyly, the blush subsiding to leave him only faintly pink. "I do not know where I could find a copy."

"I will lend you one, when you have finished this." He handed the battered dog-eared copy of Plutarch's Lives back to Jordan. "Do you know where my camp is?"

"Oh, yes, mister Rhodes."

Every day of his life Jordan made a detour on his way back from his lessons in the church, a detour that passed the tented and thatched camp where Pickering and Rhodes kept a bachelor mess, and Jordan passed with dragging footsteps. Twice he had glimpsed his idol at a distance and each time overcome with shyness had scampered away.

"Good. Call in when you are ready for it." For a moment longer he studied the angelic child, and then turned and followed the other men to the shade of the tree.

There were empty packing cases and logs to sit on, and the four men arranged themselves in a casual circle.

Zouga was relieved that it was too early to offer his guests liquor. He had barely sufficient money to buy food for his family, let alone to afford whisky, and he guessed that a bottle would not last long in this company; all three guests were drinking men.

They sipped coffee and swapped the news of the settlement for a few minutes before Pickering brought up the real business of their visit.

"There are only two schemes we have come up with to get the number 6 area back to work," he said. "The first is the ramp "I'm against that," Rhodes said brusquely, impatiently.

"Within months we'll be back at the same problem, just too damned deep!"

"I would agree with mister Rhodes," said Hayes, the engineer. "At best it would be only a temporary measure. Then the ramp itself would start collapsing."

"Major Ballantyne's idea is the only one worth considering," Rhodes cut in, and Zouga was struck forcibly by the man's manner of cutting through unnecessary discussion and getting to the core of a problem. "The idea of building stagings on the rim of the workings, and running wires to the floor of the diggings is the only one that will beat the problem of depth. Hayes, here, has done some drawings."

The engineer unrolled the plans he carried, spread them on the dusty earth at his feet and anchored the corners with diamondiferous pebbles from Zouga's tailing dump which had spilled into and was threatening to engulf the entire camp.

"I have considered a cantilever design." Hayes began to explain the drawings in crisp technical terms, and the others moved their seats closer and bowed over the plans. "We will have to use hand winches, and perhaps horse whims, until we can get a steam engine to do the haulage."

They discussed it quietly, asking penetrating questions and, when the answers were obscure, cutting down for them with sharp minds and quick words. There was no waste of words, no repetitions, no drawn-out discussion and the work went swiftly.

The stagings would be tall scaffoldings built on the edge of the pit, and they would house the haulage winches.

"We will have to use steel hawsers. Manila will never do the job," Hayes told them. "There will have to be a single wire to each individual claim. A lot of wire."

"How long to get it out?"

"Two months to Cape Town."

"How much is this going to cost?" Zouga asked the question which had been burning his lips all morning.

"More than any of us can afford," smiled Pickering. A man with a thousand guineas in his pocket was a rich man on New Rush in these days.

"What we cannot afford is not to do it," Rhodes answered him without a smile.

"What about those diggers who cannot afford their share of the stagings?" Zouga persisted, and Rhodes shrugged.

"Either they find the money, or they will not have a wire down to their claims. From now on it's going to take capital to work a claim on New Rush."

"Those who haven't got it, will have to sell out, it's as easy as that."

"Since the cave-in the price of claims in the number 6 has dropped to 100 pounds," Zouga said. "Anybody who sells now is going to take a hell of a knock."

"And anybody who buys at 100 pounds is going to make a killing," Rhodes answered him, and lifted his pale blue eyes from Hayes" plans, and for a moment held Zouga's gaze significantly. He was giving advice, Zouga realized, but what impressed Zouga was the strength and determination behind that level gaze. He no longer wondered why somebody so young commanded such widespread respect on the diggings.

"Are we all agreed, then?" he asked.

With less than twenty pounds cash in the world and his claims cut off eighty feet below ground level and partially covered by the earth fall of the roadway, Zouga hesitated.

"Major Ballantyne." They were all looking at him. "Are you in?"

"Yes," he nodded firmly. "Count me in." He would find the money, somewhere, somehow.

They all relaxed, and Pickering chuckled. "It's never easy to play it all on one card." He understood.

"Pickling, didn't I hear your saddle-bag clink when you dismounted?" Rhodes asked, and Pickering laughed again and went to fetch the bottle.

"Cordon Argent," he said as he pulled the cork. "The right juice for such an occasion, gentlemen."

They swished the coffee grounds from their mugs and held them out for a dram of the cognac.

"The number 6 stagings, fast may they rise and long may they stand!"

Pickering gave them the toast, and they drank together.

Hayes wiped his whiskers with the back of his hand and stood up. "I'll have the quantities ready to send off on the noon coach tomorrow," he said, and hurried to his mount. Men who worked for Rhodes were always in a hurry. But neither Pickering or Rhodes moved to follow him.

Instead, Rhodes stretched out his long legs in the stained white cricket flannels and crossed his dusty riding boots at the ankles, at the same time offering his coffee mug to Pickering.

"I'll be damned if we don't have something else to celebrate this day," he said as Pickering glugged cognac into their mugs.

"The Imperial Factor," Pickering suggested.

"The Imperial Factor," Rhodes agreed, and when he smiled the cleft in his smooth chin deepened and the melancholy line of his full lips under the fair moustache relaxed. "Even this awful creature Gladstone has not been able to halt the march of Empire northwards through Africa. The Foreign Office has moved at last.

The Griquas are to be recognized as British subjects, and Waterboer's request has been granted. Griqualand West is to become part of Cape Colony, and of the Empire.

We have lord Kimberley's assurance on it."

"That's wonderful news," Zouga interrupted.

"You think so?" The pale blue eyes sought and held Zouga's.

know it to be so," Zouga told him. "There is only one way to bring peace and civilization to Africa and that is under the Union Jack."

immediately there was a relaxation of the relationship between the three men, an unspoken accord, so that even without moving they seemed to have drawn closer, and their talk was easier, more intimate.

"We are the first nation in the world and anything less than our total duty is unworthy of us," Zouga went on, and Rhodes nodded. "We destroyed the slave trade on this continent; that was only a beginning.

When you have seen the conditions that still exist, the savagery and barbarism, to the north of us, only then can you appreciate how deep that duty still is."

"Tell me about the hinterland," Rhodes demanded in that thin, almost querulous voice that so ill-suited his big loose-knit frame.

"The hinterland." It was an unusual term, but it stuck like a burr, and Zouga heard himself use it as he described that wilderness through which he had travelled and hunted and prospected.

Rhodes sat on a log of firewood, the shaggy leonine head sunk forward, brooding and silent, only his eyes quick and attentive, listening with an almost religious fervour, rousing himself every few minutes, lifting his head to ask a question and then letting it sink again to the answer.

Zouga spoke of the wide slow rivers that ran in their deep valleys where the cream of tartar trees grew upon the banks and in the green shallows herds of hippopotamus challenged the traveller with gaping pink mouths and curved white tusks.

He described the deadly malarial swamps, vast stands of papyrus reeds swaying like dancers from horizon to horizon, where the sky pressed down, smothering the world under a heavy blue blanket sodden with steamy vapours, and he told of the relief of climbing the steep rocky escarpments to the cool high plateau of golden grasslands.

With words he showed them the vast and empty spaces, the plains dotted with moving herds of wild game, the cool green forests of standing timber, the streams of sweet water, crystal cold, from which a man could water his herds or his homestead.

He talked of vanished kingdoms of long dead kings, the Mambo and the Monornatapa, who had built cities of massive grey stone and left them to the smothering vines, their idols thrown down and shattered, the foundations of the walls menaced by the twisted grey python roots of the wild fig trees which found the joints in the stonework and forced them inexorably apart.

He told them of the square mine shafts that these vanished people had driven into the matrix and then abandoned, leaving the gold-bearing quartz where they had piled it before they fled.

"Visible gold,"he told them, "thick as butter in the reef.

Lying out there in the bush."

He spoke of the people, the remnants of the subjects of the Monornatapa, their glories long past, decimated by war. He told them of the conquerors, the Matabele, the cruel legions from the south, calling the subservient tribes "cattle" and, contemptuously, "Mashona, eaters of dirt", taking them as slaves, killing them as sport, to prove their manhood, or merely on the king's whim.

He described the wealth of the Matabele, their uncountable herds of cattle, thousands upon tens of thousands of fine beasts, glossy hump-backed bulls whose blood lines ran back to Egypt and the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, big rangy animals with widespread horns and hides of every colour from unrelieved black to purest white.

He told them of deep and secret caverns in the hills where the priests of the vanished kings still conducted their mysteries and sustained the oracle, weaving a gossamer net of witchcraft and magic which enfolded even their proud and arrogant Matabele overlords.

Then, as the day wasted away and the sun began to set behind a flaming curtain of red dust, Zouga told them of the kraals of the Matabele, the impis trained into the most merciless killing machine Africa had ever brought forth, racing barefoot into battle behind their tall rawhide shields, the plumes nodding and streaming from their dark heads and the dazzle of their assegais lighting the plains as the stars light the night sky.

"How would you fight them, Ballantyne?" Rhodes fired the question harshly, and it checked Zouga in full lyrical flow. They stared at each other for a moment, but a moment that was fraught with portent, a moment in which the lives of many thousands black men and white teetered in the balance. Then slowly the arm of the balance came down on one side, and the destiny of a continent moved, like a fiery planet shifting its orbit through the universe.

"I would thrust for the heart," Zouga said, suddenly his eyes cold and green, "a small mobile force of mounted men, "

"How many men?"

And suddenly they were talking war as the sun fell below the dusty mauve and purple plain, leaving the sinister shadows to draw in around the little group under the camel-thorn tree.

Jan Cheroot threw logs on the fire and they sat on in the ruddy wavering light and the talk was of gold and of war, diamonds and gold and war, Empire and war, and their words conjured columns of armed and mounted men from the night, dark phantoms riding into the future.

Suddenly Zouga checked in the middle of a sentence, his expression changed as though he had seen a ghost or recognized an old implacable enemy in the shadows under the camel-thorn tree.

"What is it, Ballantyne?" Rhodes asked sharply, swivelling the big untidy head to follow the direction of Zouga's gaze.

A Against the bole of the thorn tree stood the tall green soapstone bird-statue. Unnoticed until now, hidden by the welter of harness and loose equipment that festooned the branches around it, some trick of the flames, the fall and flare of one of the burning logs, had illuminated it with sudden and dramatic firelight.

It stood taller than the seated men, seeming to preside over their counsels, listening to and directing the talk of gold and of blood. The falcon head, timeless as evil itself, as ancient as the hills of the far land from which it had been hewn, stared back at Zouga with sightless, yet somehow all-seeing, blank eyes, the cruel curve of the beak seemed on the point of opening to emit the falcon's hunting cry, or to bury itself in living flesh. To Zouga it seemed that in the darkness above the statue the words of the prophecy, spoken so long ago in that deep cavern of the Matopos hills by the beautiful naked witch who was the Umlimo of Monomatapa, still persisted, hovering in the shadows like living things: The stone falcons will fly afar... There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Marnbos or the Monomatapas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.

In his memory Zouga heard the words again, spoken by that silken voice, and they seemed to echo against the dome of his skull and fill the drums of his ears.

"What is it, my dear fellow?" Pickering repeated the question and something slithered along Zouga's spine and crawled upon the skin of his forearms so that the hair came erect and he had to shudder to free himself of it.

"Nothing," he answered, huskily. "It's nothing; a grey goose walked over my grave." But he stared still at the statue and Rhodes followed his gaze.

"By Jove. Isn't that the bird you wrote about in the book?"

Rhodes sprang to his feet.

Eagerly he strode to where it stood and paused before it for a long silent moment before he reached out and touched the head.

"What an extraordinary piece of work," he said softly, and went down on one knee to examine the shark-tooth pattern that was carved into the plinth. In that attitude he seemed like a worshipper, a priest conducting some weird rite before the idol.

Again Zouga felt that superstitious flutter of nerves crawl like insects upon his skin, and to break the mood he called loudly for Jan Cheroot to bring a lantern.

In the lantern's beam they scrutinized the polished greenish stone, and as Rhodes ran his big large-knuckled hand over it his expression was rapt, the gaze of those strange pale eyes remote, like a poet hearing words in his head.

Long after Pickering and Zouga had returned to their seats by the log fire, Rhodes stood alone under the camel-thorn tree with the falcon, and when at last he left it to join them once more, his tone was brittle with accusation.

"That thing is a treasure, Ballantyne. It is unforgivable to leave it lying out under a tree."

"It's lain in worse conditions for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years," Zouga replied drily.

"You are right." Rhodes sighed, his attention straying back to the bird. "It's yours to do with as you wish." And then, impulsively, "I wish to purchase it from you. Name a price."

"It's not for sale," Zouga told him".

"Five hundred pounds," said Rhodes.

The sum startled Zouga, but his reply was immediate.

"No., "A thousand., "I say," Pickering intervened. "You can pick up ten claims in number 6 Section for that."

Rhodes did not glance at him, but he nodded. "Yes, you could, or Major Ballantyne could pay for his share of the new stagings with a thousand pounds."

A thousand pounds. Zouga felt himself tempted. A thousand pounds would see him clear.

"No." He shook his head. "I'm sorry." He felt he had to explain. "It has become the household god, my personal good-luck symbol."

"Good luck!" snorted Jan Cheroot from across the fire, and all three of them turned their heads in his direction.

None of them noticed him sitting on the edge of the shadows like a wizened little yellow gnome.

"Good luck!"the Hottentot repeated scornfully. "Since we picked up that verdamned bird we haven't seen a day's good luck." He spat into the fire, and his phlegm sizzled and exploded in a little puff of steam. "That bird has put blisters on our feet and rubbed the skin from our backs, it has broken the axles of our wagons and lamed our horses. It has brought us fever, and sickness and death. Miss Aletta died looking at that bird, and Jordie would have followed her if I hadn't thrown the verdamned thing out."

"That's nonsense," Zouga snapped sharply. "That's an old Hottentot maid's superstition."

"Ja," Jan Cheroot challenged him hotly. "Is it an old Hottentot superstition that we are sitting in the dust of this hell-hole, swatting flies and rubbing empty bellies?

Is it superstition that all around us they are pulling fat diamonds and we find only the droppings and manure?

Is it superstition that the earth has fallen on our claims and that it nearly swallowed Ralph? Is that your good luck that you boast the bird brings you, Master Zouga?

If it is, then hear the words of old Jan Cheroot and take the thousand pounds that mister Rhodes offers you; take it with both hands, and thank him for getting rid of that that -" Jan Cheroot ran out of words and glared across the fire at the birdshape under the thorn tree.

"Damn me," Pickering smiled. "But you nag like a wife."

None of them were surprised at the familiar address between servant and master. In Africa relationships like this were common; the servant considering himself to be part of the family with a voice in the affairs of the family, and his claim was accepted by all.

"Jan Cheroot has hated the idol since the day we discovered it."

"Tell me about that day, Jan Cheroot," ordered Rhodes brusquely; and Jan Cheroot puffed up visibly with selfimportance. There were few things he enjoyed more than an important and attentive audience and a good story to tell them. While he made a show of packing his clay pipe with black Magaliesberg shag tobacco and lighting it with an ember from the fire, the two boys crept out of the tent drawn by the prospect of a story. They glanced cautiously at Zouga and, when he made no move to send them back, they were emboldened.

Jordie sat next to Jan Cheroot and leaned his curly golden head against the Hottentot's shoulder, while Ralph came diffidently to sit with the men beside the fire.

"We had been one year in the bush," Jan Cheroot began, tone year without seeing a civilized man, one year trekking and hunting-" And the boys settled down with delicious anticipation. They had heard the story a hundred times before and enjoyed each telling more than the last.

"We had killed two hundred great elephant since leaving the Zambezi river, and we had fought bad men and savages. Our porters had mostly deserted or died of disease and wild animals, our provisions were long finished, no salt, no tea, no medicine and little gunpowder. Our clothes were rags, our boots worn through and repaired with the wet hide of buffalo.

"It had been a killing journey, over mountains with no passes and rivers with no names " and ordinary men would long ago have fallen and the birds would have picked their bones white. Even we were tired and sick and we were lost. Around us, as far as our eyes could see, there was nothing but wild hills and bad bush through which only the buffalo could pass."

"And you needed honey for your strength," Jordie burst out, unable to contain himself, and knowing the story word perfect. "Otherwise you would have died in the bush."

"And we needed honey for our strength or we would have died in the bush," Jan Cheroot agreed solemnly.

"Out of the bush came a little brown honey guide, and he sang thus -" Jan Cheroot imitated the high-pitched burring call and fluttered his fingers in an uncanny imitation of the bird."

"Come!" he called to us. "Come, follow me, and I will lead you to the hive."

"But he wasn't a real honey-bird, was he, Jan Cheroot?"

Jordie cried excitedly.

"No, Jordie, he wasn't a real honey-bird."

"And you followed him!"

"And we followed him for many days through bad country. Even when Master Zouga, your father, would have turned back, old Jan Cheroot was firm. We must go on, I told him, for by this time I, who have a deep knowledge and understanding of ghosts and spirits, realized that this was not a real honey-bird but a hobgoblin in the guise of a bird."

Zouga smiled softly. He remembered the incident differently. They had followed the bird for some hours, and it was Jan Cheroot who had lost interest in the hunt and had to be prodded and cajoled to continue.

"Then suddenly -" Jan Cheroot paused and flung out both hands theatrically, "- before our eyes, a wall of grey stone rose out of the bush. A wall so high it was like a mountain. With my axe I chopped away the vines and found a great gateway, guarded by fierce spirits "Spirits?" Zouga smiled.

"They were invisible to ordinary eyes," Jan Cheroot explained loftily. "And I put them to flight with a magical sign."

Zouga winked at Pickering, but Jan Cheroot ignored their smiles.

"Beyond the gateway was a temple yard, in which lay the falcon statues, cast down, some of them shattered, but all of them covered with heaps of gold, mountains of gold."

Zouga sighed. "Fifty pounds weight to be exact. Fragments and tiny pieces which we had to sift from the soil.

How I wish it had been a mountain."

"We gathered the gold from where it lay, and we took up that statue on our shoulders and carried it one thousand miles,"

"Complaining every step of the way," Zouga pointed out.

"until we reached Cape Town again."

It was after midnight when Jan Cheroot brought the saddled horses to the camp fire, and as Rhodes took the reins he paused in the act of mounting.

"Tell me, Major, this land to the north, this Zambezia as you call it in your book, what is it that keeps you from it? What are you doing here?"

"I need money," Zouga told him simply. "And somehow I know that the road to the north begins here. The money to take and hold Zambezia will come from the workings of New Rush."

"I like a man who thinks big, a man who counts not in ones and twos but in tens of thousands," Rhodes nodded approval.

"At this moment I count my fortune in ones and twos."

"We could change that." Rhodes shot a pale piercing glance towards the bird carving, but Zouga chuckled and shook his head.

"I would like first refusal," Rhodes persisted.

"If I sell, it will be to you," Zouga agreed, and Rhodes stepped up in the stirrup, swung a leg over the horse's rump, settled in the saddle and rode out of the camp.

Pickering edged his mount closer to Zouga and leaned down from the saddle to tell him seriously: "He will have it from you, in the end he will have it. "I think not." Zouga shook his head.

But Pickering smiled. "He always gets what he sets his heart on. Always."

He saluted Zouga with the hand that held the reins and then started his horse into a canter and followed Rhodes out onto the dusty starlit track.

"Give the stone to the yellow man," Karnuza urged quietly. "Five hundred gold queens, and we will return to our own people with treasures. Your father, the induna of Inyati, will be pleased, even the king will call us to the great kraal at Thabas Indunas for audience. We will become important men."

"I do not trust the Bastaard."

"Do not trust him. Trust only the yellow coins he brings."

"I do not like his eyes. They are cold and he hisses like a yellow cobra when he speaks."

They were silent then, a circle of dark figures in the smoky hut, squatting around the diamond as it lay on the clay floor and flickered with weird lights in the reflection of the fire.

They had argued since the sunset had released them from their labours. They had argued over the meal of stringy mutton with its rind of greasy fat and maize porridge baked until it was stiff as cake.

They had argued over the snuff-horn and beer pot, and now it was late. Soon, very soon, there would be a scratching at the door of the hut as the Bastaard came for his answer.

"The stone is not ours to sell. It belongs to Bakela.

Does a son sell the calves from his father's herds?"

Karnuza made a clucking sound of exasperation.

"Surely it is against law and custom to steal from the tribe, from the elders of the tribe, but Bakela is not Matabele. He is buni, white man, it is not wrong doing to take from him any more than it is against law and custom to send the assegai through the heart of a Mashona dog, or to mount his wife in sport, or to take the cattle of a Tswana and put fire into his kraal to hear his children squeal. Those are natural and right things for a man to do."

"Bakela is my father, the stone is his calf, given into my care."

"He will give you a single coin," Karnuza lamented, and Bazo seemed not to hear him.

He picked up the diamond again and turned it in his hand.

"It is a large stone," he mused aloud, "a very large stone." He held it to his eye and looked into the stone as though it were a mountain pool, and he watched with awe the fires and shapes move within it.

Still holding it to his eye, he said, "If I bring my father a newborn calf, he will be happy and give me a reward.

But if I bring him one hundred calves how much greater will be his joy, and one hundred times greater the reward that he will give me."

He lowered the stone and gave a series of orders that sent his men hurrying out into the night, to return immediately with the tools Bazo had sent them to fetch.

Then in silence they watched him make his preparations.

Firstly he spread a kaross of silver jackal pelts on the earth floor and then in the centre of the fur he placed a small steel anvil at which he had watched Zouga shaping horse-shoes and working the iron hoops to repair the wagon wheels.

On the anvil Bazo placed the diamond, and then he threw aside his cloak so that he stood stark naked in the firelight, tall and lean and hard, his belly muscles standing up in concentric ridges under the dark satiny skin and the wide rangy shoulders overdeveloped by practice with shield and spear.

With his legs braced wide, he stood over the anvil, and hefted the sweat-polished handle of the pick, feeling the balance and weight of the steel head that had become so familiar.

Bazo narrowed his eyes, measuring his stroke, and then he reared back with the pick almost touching, the thatched roof. He drove his body weight into the stroke, and the steel pick head came hissing down from on high.

The point caught the diamond exactly on the high centre of its curved upper surface, and the great stone exploded as though a bucketful of mountain water had been dashed to the earth. The sparkling drops, the shattered fragments, the glowing chips of priceless crystal, seemed to fill the whole hut with a burst of sunlight.

They pattered against the thatched walls, stung the naked skins of the watching Matabele, kicked little puffs of grey ash as they fell into the fire, and scattered on the lustrous fur of the silver jackal kaross, shining there like live fish in the net.

"Son of the Great Snake," hooted Kamuza joyously. "We are rich men." And the laughing Matabele flung themselves into the task of gathering up the fragments.

They picked them from the ashes, swept them up from the earthen floor, shook them out of the jackal skin kaross, and piled them into Bazo's cupped hand until it was filled to overflowing. Even then they missed some of the tiny chips that had fallen into the dust or the fire and were lost for ever.

"You are a wise man," Kamuza told Bazo with unaffected admiration.

"Bakela has his stones, a hundred calves , and we will have more coins than the yellow Bastaard would give us."

There was no work in the collapsed number 6 Section, no need to rise before dawn, so the sun was clear of the horizon when Zouga strode out of the tent, clinching his belt as he joined Jan Cheroot and the two boys under the camel-thorn tree.

The table was a packing-case, the lid stained with candle grease and spilled coffee, and breakfast was maize-meal porridge in chipped enamel bowls, unsweetened, for the price of sugar had recently risen to a pound a pound on the diamond fields.

Zouga's eyes were red-rimmed, for he had slept little the previous night, but had lain awake worrying and scheming, going over and over in his mind every detail of the plans for the new staging, and coming back each time to the most important detail, the one for which there seemed to be no solution: the cost, the enormous cost of it all.

The two boys saw his face, recognized his mood, and were immediately silent, applying themselves with complete absorption to the unappetizing grey gruel in their bowls.

A shadow fell across the group, and Zouga looked up irritably, squinting into the early sunlight with the spoon half raised to his lips. "What is it, Bazo?"

"Pick-ups, Bakela." The tall young Matabele used the English words. "Pick-ups." Zouga grunted.

"Let me see it." Zouga was immediately uninterested.

Almost certainly it would be a worthless chip of quartz or rock crystal. But Bazo placed a small bundle wrapped in a dirty scrap of cloth beside Zouga's bowl.

"Well, open it," Zouga ordered; and Bazo picked the knot, and spread the cloth.

"Glass!" thought Zouga disgustedly. There was almost a handful of it, chips and pieces, the biggest not much bigger than the head of a wax Vesta.

"Glass!" and he made the gesture of sweeping it away, and then stayed his hand as the sunlight fell on the pile and a shaft of it pricked his eyes in a rainbow burst of colours.

Slowly, disbelievingly, he changed the gesture of dismissal and reached hesitantly, almost reverently for the glittering heap, but Jordan forestalled him.

With a shriek of joy the child's small graceful fingers danced over the pile.

"Diamonds, Papa," he screamed. "They are diamonds, real diamonds."

"Are you sure, Jordie?" Zouga asked the question unnecessarily, his voice hoarse, realizing it was too good to be true. There must be many hundreds of precious stones in the pile, small, very small, but of what superb colour, white, ice-white, seeming to crackle like lightwng they were so bright.

Still hesitantly Zouga took one of the largest stones from Jordan's fingers.

"Are you sure, Jordie?" he repeated.

"They are diamonds, Papa. All of them."

Zouga's last doubts faded, to be replaced immediately by a deeper uncertainty.

"Bazo," he said. "There are so many-" And then something else puzzled him. Quickly he picked out twenty of the largest stones and stood them in a row across the top of the packing case.

"The same colour, they are all the same colour, exactly!"

Zouga shook his head, frowning, confused; and then suddenly the shadows in his eyes cleared.

"Oh my God," he whispered, and slowly all blood drained from his face, leaving the skin dirty yellow like a man ten days gone in malaria fever.

"The same; they are all the same. The breaks are clean and fresh."

Slowly he lifted his eyes to Bazo's face. "Bazo, how big -" his voice roughened and dried, so that he had to clear his throat, "how big was the stone before, before you cracked it?"

"This big." Bazo clenched and showed his fist. "With my pick I made it into many stones, for you, Bakela, knowing how you value many stones."

Zouga's voice was still a husky whisper. "I will kill you," he said in English. "For this, I will kill you."

The scar across his cheek turned slowly into an ugly inflamed weal, the stigmata of his rage, and now he was shaking, his lips trembling as he rose slowly to his feet.

"I will kill you." His voice rose to a bellow, and Jordan shrieked again, this time with terror. He had never seen his father like this before; there was a terrifying maniacal quality about him.

"That was the stone I was waiting for, you bastard, you black bastard, that was it. That was the key to the north."

Zouga snatched the Martini-Henry rifle from where it leaned against the bole of the camel-thorn tree beside the falcon carving. The steel clashed and snickered as he pumped a cartridge into the chamber and in the same moment swung up the barrel.

"I'm going to kill you," he roared, and then checked.

Ralph had jumped to his feet, and now he faced his father, stepping forward until the muzzle of the loaded and fully cocked rifle almost touched the entwined brass snakes of his belt buckle.

"You will have to kill me first, Papa," he said. He was as pale as Zouga, his eyes the same deep haunted green.

"Get out of the way." Zouga's voice sank into that croaking, husky whisper and Ralph could not answer him, but he shook his head, his heavy jaw clenched so determinedly that his teeth grated audibly.

"I warn you, stand aside," Zouga choked, and they stood confronting each other, both trembling with tension and outrage.

Then the muzzle of the heavy rifle wavered in Zouga's hands, lowered slowly until it pointed to the dusty red earth between the toes of Ralph's boots.

The silence went on for many seconds; then Zouga took a full breath and the barrel of his chest swelled under the faded blue flannel shirt.

With a gesture of utter frustration he hurled the rifle against the treetrunk and the butt snapped through.

Then he sank back into his seat at the packing-case table and his golden head sank slowly into his hands.

"Get out." All the fire and fury had gone from his voice; it was quiet and hopeless. "Get out, all of you."

Zouga sat on alone under the thorn tree. He felt burned out with emotion and anger, empty and blackened and devastated within, like the veld after fire has swept through it.

When at last he lifted his head the first thing he saw was the falcon squatting opposite him on its greenstone plinth. It seemed to be smiling, a cruel and sardonic twist to the predator's beak, but when he stared at it Zouga saw that it was merely a trick of shadow and sunlight through the thorn branches.

The kopje-walloper was a small man, with legs so short that his polished high-heeled boots did not touch the floor when he sat on the swivel piano stool behind his desk.

The desk filled most of the tiny galvanized-iron hut, and it was furnace-hot in the room; the heat quivered and danced down from the roof. On the raw deal planks of the desk stood the accoutrements of the kopie-walloperys trade. The whisky bottle and shot-glasses to mellow the man with stones to sell; the sheet of white paper on which to examine the goods for colour; the wooden tweezers, the jeweller's eye-glass, the balance and scales, and the cheque book.

The cheque book was the size of a family Bible, each cheque form embossed in gold leaf and printed in multicolours, the border depicting choirs of heavenly angels, sea nymphs riding in half clam shells drawn by teams of leaping dolphins, the Queen as Britannia with helmet, shield and trident, twisting cornucopia from which poured the treasures of Empire and a dozen other patriotic symbols of Victorian might.

The cheque book was by far the most impressive item in the hut, not excepting the buyer's flowing silk Ascot tie and the yellow spats that covered his boots. It was unlikely that a digger would be able to refuse payment offered in such flamboyant style.

"How much, mister Werner?" Zouga asked.

Werner had swiftly sorted the glittering heap of diamond chips into separate piles, grading them by size alone for each stone was of the same fine white colour.

The smallest stones were three points, three hundredth parts of a carat, barely bigger than a grain of beach sand, the largest was almost a carat.

Now Werner laid aside his tweezers. and ran his hand through his dark locks.

"Have another whisky," he murmured, and when Zouga refused, "Well, me, I'm having one now."

He poured both glasses full to the brim, and despite Zouga's frown pushed one across to him.

"How much?" Zouga persisted.

"The weight?"Werner sipped the whisky and smacked his thick liver-coloured lips. "Ninety-six carats, all told.

What a diamond it must have been. We will never see the likes again-' "How much in cash?"

"Major, I would have offered you fifty thousand pounds, if that had been a single stone."

Zouga winced and blinked his eyes closed for an instant, as though he had been slapped across the face with an open hand.

With fifty thousand pounds he could have taken Zambezia, money for men, horses and guns, money for wagons and bullock teams, machinery to mine the reef and mill the gold, money for the farms, the seed and implements. He opened his eyes again.

"Damn you, I'm not interested in what might have been," he whispered. "Just tell me how much you will pay for that."

"Two thousand pounds; that's my top price, and it's not an "open" offer."

The stone had splintered into almost two hundred chips. That meant a "pick-up" payment to Bazo of that many sovereigns. Zouga would intensely resent having to make that payment, but he owed it and he would make it. Of what remained after paying Bazo, at least a thousand would go for his share of the new stagings on the number 6 Section.

Eight hundred left, and it cost him a hundred a week to work his claims, so he had won himself two months.

Sixty days, instead of a land. Sixty days instead of a hundred thousand square miles of rich land.

"I'll take it," he said quietly, picked up the whisky glass and drained it. It burned away the bitter taste at the back of his throat.

Ralph's bird was a lanner, one of the true members of the family Falco, long-winged and perfect for hunting the open plains of Griqualand. At last, after many attempts, he had found her and taken her for his own, a falcon and therefore bigger than the male bird, which was not a falcon but a tercel or, in the case of a lanner, a "lanneret".

She was "eyas", the falconers" term for a wild bird taken at the nest when almost full-fledged. Ralph had climbed to the nest high on the top branches of a giant acacia and brought the bird down in his shirt, bleeding where she had raked him with her talons across his belly.

Bazo had helped him fashion the hood and jesses of soft glove leather for the proud head, but it was Ralph who walked her on his hand, hour after hour, day after day, stroking and gentling her, calling her "darling" and "beauty" and "lovely" until she would eat from his fist and greet him with a soft "Kweet! Kweet!" of recognition when she saw him. Then he introduced her to the lure of stuffed pigeon feathers, teaching her to hit it as he swung it on its long cord.

Finally, in the traditional ritual of the falconer, he sat up all night with the bird on his fist and a candle burning beside him. He sat with her in the trial of wills which would prove his domination over her, staring into her fierce yellow eyes, in the candlelight, hour after hour, outlasting her until the lids closed over her eyes and she slept perched upon his fist and Ralph had won. Then at last he could hunt her.

Jordan loved the bird for her beauty, and once she was trained Ralph occasionally let him carry her and stroke the hot sleek plumage under his gentle fingers. It was Jordan who found her name. He took it from Plutarch's Lives, which he was re-reading, and so the falcon was named Scipio, but Jordan accompanied the hunt only once, disgracing himself irretrievably by bursting into tears at the moment of the kill.

Ralph never invited him again.

The same rains that had undermined the number 6 causeway had flooded every depression and vlei for a hundred miles around the New Rush diggings. Slowly, in the hot dry months since that deluge, the shallower pools and swamps had dried out; but five miles south on the Cape Road, halfway to the low line of blue Magersfontein hills, there was still a wide body of open water, and already reed-beds had grown up around its perimeter and colonies of scarlet and ebony bishop birds had woven their hanging basket nests on the nodding reed staffs.

Amongst the reeds Ralph and Bazo built their blind.

They drew the long, leafy fronds down over their own heads, careful not to slice their hands on the razor-edged leaves; the fluffy white silks snowed down on them from the laden seed heads of the reeds, and they plaited the roof of stems in place, concealing themselves from the open sky.

Ralph scooped a handful of black mud and smeared it over his face.

He knew that his white face turned upwards would shine like a mirror, catching the eye of even a high-flighted bird.

"You should have been born Matabele, then you would not need mud."

Bazo chuckled as he watched him, and Ralph made an obscene sign at him with his fingers before they settled down to wait.

It was fascinating to see how Scipio, blind under the leather hood, could still pick up the beat of approaching wings long before the men could see or hear them, and they were alerted by the set of her head and the anticipatory stretch of her talons.

"Not yet, darling," Ralph whispered. "Soon now, darling."

Then Bazo whistled sharply and pointed with his chin.

Across the swamp, still two miles out, very high against the empty sky, Ralph saw them. There were three of them, big black wings curving on the downbeat in that characteristic unhurried, weighty action.

"Here they come, my love," Ralph murmured to Scipio, and touched the russet-dappled breast with his lips and felt the beat of the fierce heart against his face.

"God, but they are big," Ralph murmured, and the tiny shapely body on his arm was feather light. He had never flown her against geese before, and he was torn with doubts.

The V-shaped flight of geese went far out across the swamp in a leisurely descending circle and then they were coming back, low, flying into the sun; It was perfect. Scipio would have the sun behind her when she towered, and Ralph thrust his doubts aside.

He slipped the soft leather hood off Scipio's beautiful dove-grey head, and the yellow eyes opened like full moons, focusing swiftly. She shook out her feathers, swelling in size for a moment, puffing out her breast until she saw the thick black skein of geese against the sky, and her plumage flattened, going sleek and polished, steely in the early sunlight, and she crouched forward on Ralph's wrist.

Turning with her to follow the flight of the geese, Ralph could feel the rapier points of her talons through the cuff of his leather gauntlet and sense the tension of the small neat body. She seemed to vibrate like a violin's strings as the bow is drawn lightly across them.

With his free hand he broke the quick-release knot that secured the jesses to Scipio's leg.

"Hunt!" he cried, and launched her, throwing her clear of the reed; and she went on high like a javelin, towering swiftly for the sun on wings shaped like the wicked blades of a pair of fighting knives.

The geese saw her instantly, and stalled back on great wings that were suddenly ungainly with shock. Their tight V-formation broke up as each bird turned away two of them rising, driving hard for height while the third bird swung north again towards the river, dropped height steeply to pick up the speed he had lost in the initial stall of shock, and then levelled out low and winged hard, neck outstretched, webbed feet tucked up under his tail.

Scipio was still towering, going up on wings that blurred with speed and turned to golden discs in the early slanting sunlight.

Her tactics were those of the instinctive killer. She needed every inch of height that she could achieve. She needed it to exchange for speed when she began her stoop, her body weight was many times lighter than the huge birds she was hunting, and she had to kill with shock and speed.

Even as she went up her head was twisted to the side, watching, judging, as the game scattered away below her.

"Don't duck, my sweeting," Ralph called to her.

There was very real danger of it, for though Scipio was hungry to hunt, she had never been flown against birds such as these. Geese were not her natural prey; nature had not equipped her for the shock of binding to something so massive.

As she climbed so the difference in size of hunter and hunted was emphasized; and then abruptly Scipio was at the height she judged sufficient and she hovered, ten beats of Ralph's own heart as he watched her standing in the air.

She was daunted, the game was too big, she was going to duck.

"Hunt, darling, hunt!"he called to her and she seemed to have heard him. She screamed that terrible death cry of the falcon, high and shrill and fierce, and then she folded her wings and dropped into her stoop.

"She's taking the low bird," Ralph shouted his triumph; she was not going to duck, she had selected the goose that had dropped close to earth and was now crossing her front at an acute angle.

"There is the liver of a lion in that small body." Bazo's voice was full of wonder as he stared upwards at the tiny deadly dart that fell against the blue.

They could hear the wind hissing through her halfcocked wings, see the infinitesimal movements of her tip feathers with which she controlled that terrible headlong plunge.

The goose flogged at the air, heavy, massive, black flashed with frosty white, its panic evident in every beat of its frantic wings.

The speed with which Scipio closed was chilling.

Ralph felt the hair on the nape of his neck come erect as though an icy wind had touched him as Scipio reached forward with her steely talons.

This was the moment for which he and the bird had worked and trained so long. The supreme moment of the kill, an involuntary cry burst from his throat, a primeval and animal sound, as Scipio bound to the great goose and the sound of the hit was like a single beat of a bass drum that seemed to shake the very air about Ralph's head.

The goose's spread wings spun like the spokes of a wheel, and a burst of black feathers filled the air as though a shrapnel shell had been fired from a heavy cannon; and then the goose's body collapsed under the shock, one wing snapped and trailed down the sky as it fell, the long serpentine goose neck was arched back in the convulsion of death, and Scipio was bound to the gigantic black body, her talons locked deep into the still frantically beating heart. The impetus of Scipio's stoop had shattered bone in the big body and burst the pulsing blood vessels around the goose's heart.

Ralph started to run, whooping with excitement, and Bazo was at his shoulder, laughing, head thrown back, watching the birds fall, leaving a tracery of feathers like the plume of a comet in the sky behind them.

A hawk binds to its prey, from the moment of strike unto the earth. A falcon does not. Scipio should break, and let the goose fall, but she had not; she was still locked in, and Ralph felt the first frost of worry cool his excitement. Had his bird broken bone, or otherwise injured herself in that frightful impact?

"Beauty!" he called to her. "Unbind! Unbind!" She could be caught under the heavy goose and crushed against the earth. It was not her way to hold on all the way in.

"Unbind!" he screamed again, and saw her flutter, stabbing at the air with those sharp-bladed wings. She was stunned, and the earth rushed up at her.

Then suddenly she lunged, unbinding, breaking loose from her kill, hovering, letting the goose go on to thud into the rocky earth beyond the swamp, only then sinking, dainty and poised, and settling again upon the humped black carcass. Ralph felt his chest choked with pride and love for her courage and her beauty.

"Kweet," Scipio called, when she saw Ralph. "Kweet," the recognition call, and she left the prize that she had risked her life to take and came readily to Ralph's hand.

He stooped over her, his eyes burning with pride, and kissed her lovely head.

"I won't make you do it again," he whispered. "I just had to see if you could do it, but I won't ever make you do it again."

Ralph fed the goose's head to Scipio, and she tore it to pieces with her curved beak, between each morsel pausing to stare at Ralph.

"The bird loves you," Bazo looked up from the fire over which he was roasting chunks of fat goose, the grease dripping onto the coals and frizzling sharply. Ralph smiled, lifted the bird and kissed its bloody beak.

"And I love her."

"You and the bird have the same spirit. Kamuza and I have spoken of it often."

"Nothing is as brave as my Scipio."

Bazo shook his head. "Do you remember the day that Bakela would have killed me? In the moment that he took the gun to me he was mad, mad to the point of killing."

Ralph's expression changed. It was many months since he had intervened to save the young Matabele from the wrath of his father.

"I have not spoken of it before." Bazo held Ralph's eyes steadily. "It is not the kind of matter about which a man chatters like a woman at the water hole. We will probably never speak of it again, you and I, but know you that it will never be forgotten -" Bazo paused, and then he said it solemnly. "I shall remember, Henshaw."

Ralph understood immediately. "Henshaw, the hawk."

The Matabele had given him a praise name, a thing not lightly done, a mark of enormous respect. His father was Bakela, the Fist, and now he was Henshaw, the Hawk, named for the brave and beautiful bird upon his wrist.

"I shall remember, Henshaw, my brother," repeated Bazo, the Axe. "I shall remember."

Zouga was never entirely sure why he kept the rendezvous; certainly it was not merely because Jan Cheroot urged him to do so, nor the fact that the payment of 2000 pounds for the shattered chips of the great Ballantyne diamond had not lasted him as long as he had hoped, nor that the cost of the new stagings was rising all the time. His share looked to be more like two thousand than a thousand pounds. Sometimes in his least charitable moods Zouga suspected that Pickering and Rhodes and some other members of the committee were content to see the costs of the stagings rise and the pressure begin to squeeze out the smaller diggers. The going price of claims in the collapsed number 6 Section continued to drop as the cost of the stagings rose; and somebody was buying, if not Rhodes and his partners, then it must be Beit or Wemer, or even the newcomer, Barnato.

Perhaps Zouga kept the rendezvous to distract himself from these grave problems, perhaps he was merely intrigued by the mystery that surrounded it all, but when he looked at himself honestly it was more likely the prospect of profit. The whole affair reeked of profit, and Zouga was a desperate man. He had very little left to sell apart from the claims themselves. To sell the claims was to abandon his dream. He was ready to explore any other path, to take any risks, rather than that.

"There is a man who wishes to speak with you." Jan Cheroot's words had started it, and something in his tone made Zouga look up sharply. They had been together many years and there was little they did not know of each other's moods and meanings.

"That is simple enough," Zouga had told him. "Send him to the camp."

"He wishes to speak secretly, at a place where no other eyes will be watching."

"That sounds like the way of a rogue," Zouga frowned.

"What is the man's name?"

"I do not know his name," Jan Cheroot admitted, and then when he saw Zouga's expression, he explained. "He sent a child with a message."

"Then send the child back to him, whoever he is. Tell him he will find me here every evening, and anything he has to discuss I will be pleased to listen to in the privacy of my tent."

"As you wish," Jan Cheroot grunted, and the wrinkles on his face deepened so that he looked like a pickled walnut. "Then we will continue to eat maize porridge And they did not discuss it again, not for many weeks, but the worm was planted and it gnawed away at Zouga until he was the one who asked.

"Jan Cheroot, what of your nameless friend. What was his reply?"

"He sent word that it was not possible to help a man who refused to help himself," Jan Cheroot told him airily.

"And it is clear to all the world that we have no need of help. Look at your fine clothes, it is the fashion now to have the buttocks hanging out of the pants., Zouga smiled at the hyperbole, for his breeches were neatly patched. Jordan had seen to that.

"And look at me," Jan Cheroot went on. "What reason do I have for complaint? I was paid a year ago,"

"wasn't,"

"Six months ago," Zouga corrected him.

"I cannot remember," Jan Cheroot sulked. "The same way I have forgotten what beef tastes like."

"When the stagings are completed -" Zouga began, and Jan Cheroot snorted.

"They are more likely to fall on our heads. At least then we won't have to worry about being hungry."

Serious defects had shown up in the design of the stagings. They had been unable to support the weight of cable. The cables between them weighed over three hundred tons and they had to be stretched to sufficient tension to carry the gravel buckies without sagging excessively.

The very first day of operation the stagings at the north end of the section gave under the strain. Two winches tore loose and the wires fell twanging and snaking into the diggings. There had been a gravel bucky on the rope, carrying five black workmen down to the floor of the workings to begin re-opening the long deserted claims. They screamed the whole way down as the bucky spun and twisted, throwing them clear, and the tangle of snapping silver cables caught them up like the tentacles of some voracious sea-monster.

it took the rest of the day to bring out the fearfully mutilated bodies, and the Diggers" Committee closed the number 6 Section again while modifications were made to reinforce the stagings.

The number 6 Section was still closed.

Zouga had one bottle of Cape brandy leftwhich he had been saving but now he fetched it from his locker, pulled the cork with his teeth and poured into their two mugs.

He and Jan Cheroot drank in moody silence for a while, and then Zouga sighed.

"Tell your friend I will meet him," he said.

Pale dust chalked the sky above the plain, so that the distances drifted away, dreamlike and insubstantial, to an indefinite horizon.

There was no living thing, no bird nor vulture in the milky blue sky, no ripple of flocks nor smoky drift of springbuck herds through the low scrub.

In this loneliness the little cluster of buildings stood forlorn, long deserted, roofs sagging and the adobe plaster falling from the walls in chunks exposing the unsawn timber frames beneath.

Zouga touched the reins and brought the gelding down to a walk, while he slouched in the saddle, riding with long stirrups and the disinterested mien of a man on a long and boring journey, but his eyes under the brim of the wide hat were quick and restless.

He was uncomfortably aware of the empty rifle scabbard under his right knee.

"Unarmed." The invitation had been unequivocal. "You will be watched."

The man had chosen an ideal rendezvous. There was no approach to this deserted farmhouse except across miles of bare veld, no cover higher than a man's knee and it was good shooting light, with the sun in the west.

Zouga shifted his weight restlessly in the saddle, and the big ungainly Colt revolver under his coat dug into his side, a pain he did not resent, although the comfort it gave him was illusory. A man with a rifle could pick his shot and take his time as Zouga rode in.

The sheep kraal was part of the homestead, unplastered stone walls, and there was a well in front of the house, again with a stone coping. Beside the well lay the remains of a wagon, three wheels and the disselboom missing, the paint dried and cracked away, the weed growing up through the wagon bed.

Zouga touched the gelding's neck and he stopped beside the wagon. He dismounted swiftly, dropping off on the side farthest from the building, using the horse as cover, and while he made a show of adjusting the girth, he studied the empty building again.

The windows were dark empty holes, like missing teeth, and there could be an unseen marksman standing well back in the gloomy interior. The front door was blanched by the sun; Zouga could see the light through the cracks. It banged aimlessly and unrhythmically in the wind, and the wind hooted and moaned in the eaves and through the empty windows.

Behind the gelding's body Zouga loosened the revolver in his belt, making certain that it was ready to hand. He tied the gelding's reins to the wagon body with a slippery knot that would come undone at a tug, and then he consciously steeled himself, drew breath and squared his shoulders and stepped out from behind the horse.

He began to walk towards the front door, but his right hand was on his hip, under the tail of his jacket, almost touching the checkered grip of the revolver.

He reached the doorway, keeping clear of the entrance, and then flattened his back against the wall.

With faint surprise he realized that his breathing was rough, as though he had been running. Then another surprise, he was enjoying his own fear, the feeling of heightened sensitivity of his skin, the enhanced clarity of vision, the singing of the adrenalin in his blood, the nervous tension of his sinew and muscle, the awareness of being alive in the threat of death. He had been too long without this stimulant.

He placed one hand on the sill of the window and vaulted through it lightly, dropping to the earthen floor as he landed and rolling swiftly to his feet again in the corner, facing the room. It was small and empty, bunches of dusty cobwebs hung from the rafters, and the floor was scattered with the white-flecked droppings of gecko, lizards.

Zouga moved down the wall, keeping his back covered, and stepped through into the second room. The kagel fireplace was blackened with soot, and the smell of dead ash caught in his throat. He looked through the open doorway into the sunlit sheep kraal beyond. There was a riderless horse tethered in the angle of the wall. A grey, dappled quarters, uncropped dark mane and full tail almost sweeping the ground.

The rifle scabbard on the saddle was empty, and Zouga's nerves fizzed.

The unknown rider must have the gun with him.

Zouga loosed the long barrel of the Colt revolver in his belt, peering out into the sunlight.

"Keep your hand away from that gun." The voice came from behind him, from the empty front room through which Zouga had just passed. "Don't draw it, and don't turn around."

The voice was quiet, controlled and very close. Zouga obeyed it, standing awkwardly with his right hand under his coat, and he felt the touch of steel between his shoulder blades. It had been well done; the man had been lying outside, had let him walk through the house and then had come in behind him.

"Now very slowly bring out the gun and put it on the floor between your feet. Very slowly, please, Major Ballantyne. I don't want to have to kill you, but if I hear the hammer cocked I will, believe me, I will."

Slowly Zouga freed the heavy pistol and stooped to place it on the littered kitchen floor. He glanced back between his own legs and saw the man's feet. He was wearing velskoen of tanned kudu hide and leather leggings, big feet, big man, strong legs.

Zouga straightened up, holding his hands well away from his body.

"You should not have brought a gun, Major. That is very distrustful of you, and dangerous for both of us." He could hear the relief in the man's tone, and the voice was familiar, he searched his memory. That strange accent, where had he heard it? The footsteps retreated across the kitchen.

"Slowly now, Major, very slowly, you may turn around."

The man stood in the gloom of the soot-darkened walls, but the shaft of sunlight from the high window fell on his hands and the weapon they held.

It was a shotgun. Both big fancy hammers were at full cock,-and the man's fingers were hooked around the triggers.

"You!" said Zouga.

"Yes, Major, me!" The pockmarked Griqua Bastaard smiled at him, white teeth in the darkly handsome face and the gypsy ringlets dangling to his collar. "Hendrick Naaiman, at your service, once again."

"If you are buying cattle, it's a hell of a way to do business."

The Griqua was the one who had bought Zouga's bullock team the money he had used to buy the Devil's Own.

"No, Major, this time I am selling." And then sharply, "No, Major, do not move, and keep your hands there, where I can see them. I have loaded with Big Loopers lion-shot, Major. At this range it will cut you in half."

Zouga lifted his hands away from his sides.

"What are you selling?"

"Wealth, Major, a new way of life for you, and for me."

Zouga smiled bleakly, sarcastically.

"I am truly grateful for your kindness, Naaiman."

"Please call me Hendrick, Major, if we are to be partners."

"We are?" Zouga inclined his head gravely. "I am honoured."

"You see, you have something I need and I have something you need., "Go on."

"You have two excellent claims, they are truly excellent claims in all except they yield very few diamonds."

Zouga felt the scar on his cheek heating up, but he kept his expression neutral.

"And as you know, Major, my ancestry, the touch of the tarbrush, I think is the polite term, or more succinctly my kaffir blood, precludes me from owning claims."

They were silent then, regarding each other warily across the darkened kitchen. Zouga had abandoned any idea of going for the shotgun. He was starting to become intrigued by the articulate and persuasive voice of the tall Griqua.

"For that reason I cannot sell you my claims, not even at gunpoint," Zouga said quietly.

"No, no, you do not understand. You have the claims but no diamonds, while I have no claims but Hendrick drew a drawstring tobacco bag from his inner pocket and dangled it by its string from his forefinger.

"-But I have diamonds." He finished the sentence and tossed the bag across the room.

Instinctively Zouga reached out one hand and caught it. The bag crunched in his hands like a bag of humbugs, bringing back childhood memories. He held it, staring still at Hendrick Naaiman.

"Open it, please, Major."

Slowly Zouga obeyed, pulling open the mouth of the cloth bag, and then peered into it.

The light was bad, but in the bag something gleamed like the coils of a sleeping serpent.

Zouga felt the diamond thrill close its fist upon his chest. It never failed, he thought, always that choking feeling when the stones shine.

He tipped the bag and spilled a small rush of uncut diamonds into his hand. He counted them quickly; there were eight of them altogether.

One was a canary bright stone, twenty carats if it was a point. Two thousand pounds" worth, Zouga estimated.

"These are just samples of my wares, Major, a week's takings."

There was another perfect eight-sided crystal, slick and soapy silver-grey, bigger than the yellow diamond, at least three thousand pounds" worth.

Another of the stones was a symmetrical triangular shape, like those throat lozenges that tasted of liquorice, more childhood memories. A clear silver stone, limpid and lovely. Zouga picked it up between thumb and forefinger and held it to the light of the high window.

"These are I.D.B?" he asked.

"Dirty words, Major; they offend my delicate breeding.

Do not concern yourself further with where they come from, or how I get them. just be certain that there will be more, many more, every week there will be a parcel of first water stones."

"Every week?" Zouga asked, and heard the greed in his own voice.

"Every week," Hendrick agreed, watching Zouga's expression, and he knew the fly had touched the sticky strands of his web. He let the barrel of the shotgun sag towards the mud floor and he smiled that flashing flamboyant smile. "Every week you will have a parcel like this to seed into your own cradle, to throw out on your own sorting-table."

There was another stone in his palm. At first Zouga had thought it to be black boart, the almost worthless industrial diamond; but his heart bounced suddenly as the poor light caught it and he saw the deep emerald colour flash from its heart. His fingers trembled slightly as he lifted it.

"Yes, Major." Hendrick Naaiman nodded approval. "You have a good eye; that's a green dragon."

A freak stone, a green diamond, a "fancy" in the parlance of the kopje-wallopers. There were fancy diamonds the colour of rubies, or sapphires or topaz, and fancies commanded whatever the trade would bear. It was not impossible that this green dragon would fetch ten thousand pounds, and end up in the crown jewels of an emperor.

"You said partners?" Zouga asked softly.

"Yes, partners," Hendrick nodded. "I will find the stones. Let me give you an example. I paid three hundred to one of my men for that green dragon. You put it across your table and register it from the Devil's Own, " Zouga was staring at him fixedly, hungrily, his hands still trembling, and Hendrick stepped towards him confidently.

You should get four thousand pounds for a stone like that, a profit of three thousand seven hundred; and we share that fiftyfifty, because I am not a greedy man.

Equal partners, Major, eighteen fifty for you and eighteen fifty for me."

Zouga poured the glittering stones into his left hand.

His eyes had not left Hendrick Naaiman's lips.

"What do you say, Major? Equal partners." Hendrick transferred the shotgun to his left hand and reached out with his right.

"Equal partners," he repeated. "Let's shake hands on it."

Slowly Zouga stretched out his own right hand, fingers open, palm upwards. And then, as their fingers touched, he hurled the handful of diamonds into Hendrick Naaiman's face. All Zouga's strength was behind the throw, all his anger at being so sorely tempted, all his outrage at this devilish assault upon his own self-esteem.

The diamonds tore into Hendrick Naaiman's flesh, one sharp-sided crystal ripped open his smooth olive-skinned forehead above the right eye, another sliced his lip.

Involuntarily Hendrick threw up his hands, lifting the shotgun muzzle high before his face as he staggered back from this unexpected assault, but at the same instant his right hand closed over the pistol grip and his forefinger hooked for the triggers. The gun was still at full cock, each barrel loaded with lion-shot. Hendrick started to drop the muzzles, pointing for Zouga's belly.

Zouga grabbed the barrel six inches below the gaping muzzles and forced the gun upwards, grasping with his left hand for Hendrick's right wrist. The big Griqua jerked backwards with both arms, and Zouga made no effort to resist him; instead he lunged forward, thrusting the gun into Hendrick's own face. The blue steel barrels cracked against his cheekbone, and Hendrick gasped at the blow and reeled backwards. Zouga drove at him again, forcing him into the soot-blackened wall so that he grunted with pain, pinned there for a moment with the shotgun pointing at the roof. In these seconds Zouga reached with his left hand, hooked his thumb through the trigger guard and jerked back against the triggers.

Both barrels fired simultaneously.

The burst of gunfire in the tiny confined kitchen was deafening. The bright orange muzzle flashes lit the gloom like a lightning strike, and the charges of shot crashed through the rotten roof, blowing gaping holes through which the sun shot long bright shafts of light.

The massive recoil of the double-shotted gun drove the butt back into Hendrick's own belly, and he doubled over with a gasp of shock and agony.

The gun was empty, harmless. Zouga let it go and dived full length across the dusty floor. At full stretch his fingers touched the cool checkered grip of the ugly black Colt revolver. As he fumbled for it desperately, he heard the light crunch of footsteps across the earthen floor behind him, and rolled right, flicking over on his back without raising his head.

Hendrick was over him, the empty shotgun raised above his head with both hands like an executioner's axe, and he had already launched the stroke. The gun swung down in a wide arc, the blue steel glittering sullenly in the gloom and the hiss of it like the sound of a goose's wing. Zouga rolled again flipping his body aside.

But the butt of the shotgun caught him.

It was only a touch, high in the shoulder, but it jerked his head so that his teeth clashed in his skull, and his right arm was instantly nerveless, numb from his shoulder to fingertips. The Colt revolver went flying from his grip, spinning away across the kitchen floor until it hit the far wall.

Instantly Hendrick turned to chase the pistol, and Zouga kicked out at the back of his knee, landing solidly with the heel of his boot.

Hendrick's leg folded under the blow, and he would have gone down but the wall was there to hold him. He fell against it, pinned for a moment by his crippled leg, and Zouga rolled to his feet.

He stabbed with his good left hand, feeling the solid shock of the Griqua's jawbone under his fist. Then again Zouga caught him with the left and heard the gristle in the beaky nose give with a crunch like chewing on a ripe apple, and the fresh blood from Hendrick's nostrils gave him a fierce joy.

He was going to beat this man to a bleeding pulp.

"Wait!" Hendrick shouted. "Please! Don't hit me again."

The appeal was so frantic, the terror on the Griqua's bloody face so pitiful, that even in his own cold killing anger, Zouga checked.

He stepped back and lowered his hands, and the Griqua hurled the empty shotgun at Zouga's face. It was completely unexpected, Zouga was off-guard, and even as he started to duck, Zouga knew it was too late, and he hated himself for a fool.

It felt as though somebody had slammed a door behind Zouga's eyes, and his vision was suddenly narrowed and dimmed with blood. He hurled himself forward, and dived again for the revolver. He got a hand on the barrel, and as he touched it the full weight of Hendrick's charging body crashed into his back, driving him into a heap against the doorjamb. But he still had a grip on the pistol barrel, and he struck out blindly using it like a club.

He felt the steel butt sock into flesh, and he hit again and again, some of the blows dying in the air, others thudding into the floor, but others cracking against bone.

He was sobbing and panting, blinded by his own blood, and for seconds he did not realize that Hendrick no longer clutched and tore at him.

Zouga shrank back against the wall and wiped the blood from his eyes. Then he peered like an old man through the red film. Hendrick was beside him. He was on his back, his arms flung wide as a crucifix and the blood snored and bubbled from his nostrils. He lay very still, his breathing the only sign of life.

Zouga lowered the pistol, and used the wall to hoist himself to his feet. He stood there swaying, his head hanging, the pistol dangling from his hand that was suddenly so weak that he could barely support its weight.

"Master Zouga!" Jan Cheroot dashed into the yard, panting from his run, carrying the Lee-Enfield rifle at high port across his chest, sweat streaking down from under his brimless pillbox infantry cap and his face crumpling with dismay as he saw Zouga's bloody torn face.

"You took your time," Zouga accused him huskily, still clinging to the door for support. He had left Jan Cheroot with the rifle hidden in a ravine half a mile out across the dusty plain.

"I started running as soon as I heard the shots."

Zouga realized that the fight had lasted only a few minutes, as long as it takes a man to run half a mile.

Jan Cheroot unslung the water bottle from his shoulder and tried to wash a little of the blood from Zouga's face.

"Leave that." Zouga pulled away brusquely. "See if there is a rope in the Bastaard's saddle bags, something to tie him, a knee halter, anything."

There was a coil of braided rawhide rope on the pommel of the grey mare's saddle. Jan Cheroot hurried back with it and then paused in the door of the derelict shanty.

"I know him." He stared at Hendrick Naaiman's bloody snoring face. "I think I know him, but you made such a mess of him."

"Tie him," Zouga whispered, and drank from the water bottle. Then he unwound the silk scarf from around his throat and wetted it from the bottle before tenderly wiping away the blood and dust from his cuts and scratches.

The worst injury was in his hairline, where the breech of the broken shotgun had caught him; by the feel of it, it needed to be stitched.

Jan Cheroot was muttering insults and abuse at Hendrick Naaiman as he worked.

"You yellow snake." He rolled the Griqua onto his back. "You got shoes on your feet and pants covering your black arse, and you think you are a gentleman."

He pulled Hendrick's arms up behind him and trussed them, quickly and expertly, at wrist and elbow.

"You'd give a vulture a bad name." Jan Cheroot looped the rawhide around his ankles and pulled it up tight.

"Even the hyenas wouldn't eat dung alongside of you, my beauty."

Zouga capped the water bottle and picked up the empty tobacco bag.

Then he hunted for the diamonds.

They had been kicked and scattered about the kitchen.

The eighth and last was the green dragon, dark and inconspicuous In one gloomy corner.

Zouga tossed the bag to Jan Cheroot, and he whistled as he peered into it.

IDB," he muttered, his wrinkled brown face puckering into a sculpture of pure avarice. "The yellow snake was I.D.B."

"He wanted us to run those stones across our sortingtables."

"What shares?" Jan Cheroot demanded, playing with the stones.

"Half shares."

"That's a good deal. We could be rich in six months and get out of this god-damned and blasted desert for ever."

Abruptly Zouga snatched the bag back again. He had been through the temptation once already.

"Get his horse," he ordered angrily.

They hoisted the Griqua's inert body and threw it over the grey's saddle. As Jan Cheroot was tying the Griqua to the horse, Hendrick kicked his legs weakly and tried to raise his head, twisting his neck to peer blearily at Zouga.

"Major," he croaked, only half conscious. "Major, let me explain.

You don't understand."

"Shut your mouth," Zouga growled at him.

"Major. I am not a thief, let me explain about those diamonds."

"I told you to hold your mouth," Zouga warned, and wrenched the Griqua's jaw open, roughly digging his thumbs into the sallow bloody cheeks; then he thrust the bag of diamonds into his slack mouth.

"Choke on your bloody diamonds, you thieving, treacherous bastard," he told him grimly as he bound the man's mouth closed with his scarf, jamming the bag in place, while Hendrick squawked and rolled his eyes, jerking his head from side to side, his cries muffled and his spittle soaking the gay band of silk.

"That will keep you quiet until we get you in front of the Committee."

Jan Cheroot sat up behind the trussed Griqua on the grey's back and followed Zouga on the gelding.

He sucked his teeth mournfully, sighed and shook his head.

"What a waste!" he grumbled just loud enough for Zouga to hear. "That bag would take us back to the north."

He rolled his eyes sideways at Zouga, but there was no reaction.

"The Committee is going to see this yellow bastard lynched anyway.

He is as good as vulture breakfast already Hendrick wriggled helplessly and snuffled through his swollen nose.

If we just did the job for them, nice and quietly, a bullet in the head, and leave him for his brothers and sisters, the jackals and the hyena, man, nobody will ever know."

He glanced hopefully at Zouga again. "What's in that bag will take us north again, as far as we want to go."

Zouga kicked the gelding into a canter, and ahead of them the iron roofs and dusty tent cones of New Rush glowed ruddily in the slanting rays of the sunset. Jan Cheroot sighed, swatted the double-laden grey across the quarters and followed Zouga into the camp.

Pickering and Rhodes messed with a few other bachelor diggers directly beyond Market Square, at the edge of the main tailing dumps. There were two good spreading acacias to give them shade, and they had planted a hedge of milkbush around the cluster of iron huts and walled shanties.

Every member of the mess owned good claims and was recovering stones; he had to do so to afford the mess bills for champagne and old cognac that seemed to form the group's staple diet. One of them was the younger son of a belted earl, another was a baronet in his own right, although merely of the Irish aristocracy. Most of them were members of the Diggers" Committee, and their style had earned the group the title of "The Swells".

When Zouga rode into their camp, half a dozen of the Swells were lounging under the acacia trees, dining on Veuve Cliquot champagne, although the sun was still above the horizon, and wrangling amiably over the heavy wagers that they were placing against how many flies would settle on the sugar lumps that each had on the camp table in front of him.

Pickering looked up, his fair open features for once puckered in astonishment, as Zouga rode into the camp.

"Gentlemen," Zouga announced grimly. "I have something for you."

He leaned out of his saddle and cut the thongs that secured Hendrick Naairnan's heels to the saddle girth of the grey mare, and then tipped him off the horse, letting him fall head-first into the dust in front of the seated group of Diggers" Committee members.

I.D.B.," Zouga told them, as they stared at him.

Pickering moved first. He jumped to his feet.

"Where are the diamonds, Major?" he asked.

"In his mouth."

Pickering went down on one knee next to the Griqua, and he undid the scarf.

He worked the saliva-drenched bag out of Hendrick's broken mouth, and poured the contents onto the camp table amongst the flies and sugar lumps and champagne bottles.

"Eight," Rhodes counted them swiftly, and looked immensely relieved. "They are all there."

"I told you not to worry. I bet fifty guineas on them all being there. Don't forget it."

Pickering smiled at Rhodes and turned back to the Griqua, who was flapping around in the dust like a trussed chicken.

Pickering helped him solicitously to his feet.

"My dear fellow," he asked. "Are you all right?"

"He nearly killed me," Hendrick bleated bitterly. "He's a madman!"

"I told you to be careful," Pickering agreed. "He's not a man to trifle with. "He patted the Griqua's back. "Well done, Hendrick; you did a good job."

Then Pickering turned to Zouga. "We owe you a little apology, Major." He spread his hands and smiled winningly.

Zouga had been staring at him, unable to speak, his face so pale that his scratches and gouges stood out lividly. But now the scar under his eyes began to glow and he found his voice.

"A trap!" he whispered. "You set a trap for me."

"We had to be sure of you," Rhodes explained reasonably. "We had to know what kind of man you really were before we got you onto the Diggers" Committee."

"You swine," Zouga husked. "You arrogant swine."

"You came out of it with flying colours, sir," Rhodes told him stiffly. He was not accustomed to being addressed in those terms.

"If I had fallen for your trap, what would you have done?"

Rhodes shrugged his heavy shoulders. "The question doesn't arise.

You acted like a true English gentleman."

"You will never know how close it was," Zouga told him.

"Oh yes, I do. Most of us here have been tested."

Zouga turned to Pickering. "What would have happened, a lynching party?"

"Oh, my dear fellow, probably nothing so theatrical.

You just might have slipped on the roadway and taken a tumble into the diggings, or had the misfortune to be standing under a gravel bucky when the rope parted." He laughed merrily, and the men at the table laughed with him.

"You need a glass of Charlie Champers, Major, or something stronger perhaps."

"Do join us, sir," cried another, making room for him at the table. "An honour to drink with a gentleman."

"Come along, Major." Pickering smiled. "I'll send for the quack to see to that cut on your head."

Then Pickering stopped and his expression changed.

Zouga had kicked his feet loose from the stirrups and jumped down to face him. They were of an even height, both big men, and the group at the camp table was instantly enchanted. This would be more diverting than watching blue-bottles settling on sugar lumps.

,"By God, he's going to bang Pickling's head."

"Or Pickling his."

"Ten guineas the elephant hunter to win."

"I don't approve of brawling," murmured Rhodes, "but I'll take Pickling for ten."

"I say, the other horse has run a fair chase already. I do think you might offer some odds."

Pickering's smile had turned frosty, and he was on his toes, his fists clenched, and his guard half raised.

Zouga dropped his own guard and turned disgustedly to the group under the acacia.

"I've provided you with enough amusement for one day," he told them coldly. "You can take your bloody diamonds, and your damned Committee and you can, " There was a burst of clapping and laughing cheers to cover Zouga's outburst. Zouga swung back onto the gelding's back and kicked him into a gallop, and the ironical applause followed him out of the camp.

"I hope we haven't lost him." Pickering lowered his fists and stared after Zouga. "God knows, we need honest men."

"Oh, don't worry," Rhodes told him. "Give him time to simmer down and then we'll square him."

"Henshaw." Bazo held the woven reed basket on his lap and peered into it mournfully.

"Henshaw, she is not ready to fight again so soon."

They sat in a circle about the cooking fire in the centre of the thatched beehive. Ralph felt more at home here than in the tent under the camel-thorn tree. Here he was with friends, the closest friends he had ever known in his nomadic life, and here also he was beyond the severe and unrelenting surveillance of his father.

Ralph dipped into the communal three-legged black pot with his left hand and scooped up a little of the stiff fluffy white maize porridge. While he rolled it into a ball between his fingers he argued with the Matabele princeling opposite him.

"If it were you to decide, she would never fight again," Ralph told him, and dipped the maize ball into the flavouring of mutton gravy and wild herbs.

"Her new leg is not strong enough yet," Bazo shook his head.

Ralph popped the morsel and chewed as he talked.

"The leg is hard and bright as a knife."

Bazo puffed out his cheeks and looked even more lugubrious, and on her perch in the shadows behind him Scipio, the falcon, shook out her feathers and "kweeted' softly as though in sympathy with him.

Bazo's decision, although heavily influenced by Ralph's arguments and by the urgings of the other young Matabele, would be final. For it was Bazo who had made the original capture of the animal under discussion.

"Every night that she does not fight, we, your brothers, are the poorer," Kamuza came in to support Ralph. "Henshaw is right. She is fierce as a lioness and ready to earn us all many gold queens."

"Already you speak and think like a white man," Bazo replied loftily. "The yellow coins fill your head day and night."

"What other reason for that," Kamuza shuddered slightly as he pointed at the basket, "that thing. If it stings you, the spear of your manhood will shrivel like a rotten fruit until it is no bigger than the finger of a new born baby."

"What a shrivelling that would be," Ralph chuckled.

"Like a bull hippopotamus shrivelling into a striped field mouse."

Bazo grinned and made the gesture of placing the tiny basket on Kamuza's lap. "Come, let her suckle a little to give her strength for the conflict," he suggested, and the circle exploded with a roar of delighted laughter at Kamuza's patent horror as he yelled and leapt violently away.

The noisy jeers covered their own uneasiness at the close proximity of the basket, and they were immediately silent as Bazo cautiously lifted the lid.

They craned forward with sickly fascination, and in the bottom of the basket something dark and furry and big as a rat stirred.

"Hau! Inkosikazi!" Bazo greeted it, and the creature reared up on its multiple legs, raising the front pair defensively, and the rows of eyes glittered in the softly wavering firelight. Bazo lifted his own right hand to return the salute of long hairy legs.

"I see you also, Inkosikazi."

Bazo had named her Inkosikazi, the queen, for, as he explained to Ralph, "She is right royal in her rage, and as thirsty for blood as a Matabele queen."

He and Ralph had been unloading timber baulks at the eastern end of the new stagings, and as one load had swung upwards in the slings the great spider had come out from its nest between the sawn planks, and, raising its swollen velvety abdomen, had scampered over Ralph's arm and leapt ten feet to the ground.

The spider was the size of a dinner plate when its legs were extended. Its hirsute appearance and its extraordinary jumping prowess had given the species the common name of baboon spider.

"Get him, Bazo!" Ralph yelled from the top of the loaded wagon.

For now that Griqualand West and the New Rush diggings were part of Cape Colony and the British Empire there had been changes.

New Rush had been re-named Kimberley, after Lord Kimberley, the Colonial Secretary in London, and the town of Kimberley was starting to enjoy the benefits of British civilization and Victorian morality, amongst which was the total ban on cock fighting which was strictly enforced by the new administrator. The diggers, always eager for distraction, had not taken long to find an alternative sport. Spider fighting was the rage of the diggings.

"Don't let him get away!" Ralph vaulted down from the wagon, ripping off his shirt, but Bazo was quicker.

He whipped the loincloth from his waist and flared it at the spider like a matador caping the bull, bringing the huge arachnid to bay on its hind legs, threatening him with its waving arms, then, naked and triumphant, Bazo had flipped the cloth over it and swiftly bundled it into a bag.

Now he slowly but deliberately extended his own hand into the basket, and the spider raised itself higher, the wolflike mandibles chewing menacingly, and between them the single curved red fang rising from its shallow sheath, a pale droplet of venom shining upon the needlesharp tip.

There was not even the sound of breathing in the dark hut, and the soft tick and rustle of the ashes sounded deafening in the silence as they watched Bazo's open hand draw closer and closer to the creature.

Then he touched it with his fingertips and began to stroke the soft furry carapace. Slowly the spider subsided from her threatening posture, and the watchers sighed and began to breathe again.

Inkosikazi had fought five times, and five times she had killed, although in the last conflict against another huge and ferocious female she had lost one of her legs, chewed through at the elbow joint. That had been almost three months previously; but the severed limb had now regenerated itself, and the new leg was lighter coloured than the others like the fresh shoots on a rose bush.

Slowly Bazo turned his hand palm upwards and the spider scuttled up into it and crouched there, filling it completely without extending her many jointed legs.

"A queen," he said, "a veritable queen. "And then, frowning, he told her, "Henshaw would like to see you fight again." He glanced up at Ralph, and there was a mischievous twist to his full lips.

"Go to Henshaw and tell him if you will fight or no."

And he offered the spider to Ralph.

Ralph felt the crawling of the tiny feet of horror across his skin as he stared at the spider crouching like a hairy toad before his face.

"Come, Henshaw,"Bazo smiled. "Talk to her."

It was a challenge, and the watchers stirred with anticipation. If the challenge was not taken up, then their mockery would be merciless. Ralph tried to force himself to move, but his loathing was a cold nauseating lump under his ribs, and the sheen of sweat on his forehead was suddenly glacially cold.

Bazo was still smiling, but the challenge in his direct gaze was slowly changing to taunting disdain. With an enormous effort Ralph raised his hand, and at the movement the spider lifted itself and the soft bloated abdomen seemed to pulse softly, obscenely.

Only one person had ever handled Inkosikazi, and her reaction to a strange touch was totally unpredictable; but Ralph forced himself to reach out towards her.

Slowly his fingertips drew closer, six inches, two inches from the hairy body, and then the spider sprang. It launched itself in a high parabola, and landed on Ralph's shoulder.

The circle of watchers broke up in comic panic, yelling with terror and falling over one another to reach the single low doorway. Only Bazo and Ralph had not moved. Ralph sat with his hand still extended and the spider squatted massively on his shoulder. Infinitely slowly Ralph cocked his head and peered down at it, and it began to move; lifting the long bristled legs with a chilling daintiness, it crept sideways into the hollow of Ralph's neck, so that he could no longer see it but suddenly he felt the sharp points of its feet scratching the soft of his throat.

There was a horrified yell locked in the back of Ralph's throat, but he kept it there with a total effort of will.

The spider climbed his chin and hung upside down for a moment like a huge hairy bat, and Ralph did not move.

Instead he lifted his gaze and held that of the Matabele opposite him. The mockery was gone from Bazo's eyes, and behind him the other watchers drew closer, fascinated and fearful. Perhaps for a minute they sat like that, and then Ralph lifted his hand. The gesture was so calm, so controlled, that the spider showed only perfunctory symptoms of alarm, and then quite willingly scuttled onto the inviting fingers and Ralph transferred her gently back into her basket.

Ralph wanted to leap up and run out into the darkness, to be alone while he vomited up his horror, but he forced himself to sit and stare impassively at Bazo until the Matabele lowered his eyes.

"She will fight,"he said softly. "As you wish, Henshaw, she will fight again tomorrow." And he closed the lid of the basket.

Inkosikazi had not fought for almost three months, and the punters, always fickle, had forgotten her. Other champions had emerged in her absence and commanded the fanatic loyalty of their followers. They gathered four deep around the handlers, trying to peer into the baskets and assess the fighting metal of the caged creatures, as they waited for the first bout of the afternoon.

Although lantern-lit contests were held each evening behind Diamond Lil's canteen, Sunday afternoon was the one event of the week when every digger in Kimberley was free to crowd the western corner of Market Square and pick his fancy.

The arena was a square wooden structure, six feet by six and three deep, covered by a sheet of clear glass. This sheet of glass was the largest in Griqualand; originally intended as a display window for a ladies" dress shop on Main Street, it had miraculously survived the long wagon journey from the coast, and was now probably one of the most cherished items in Kimberley. Without it the sport would die, and Sunday afternoons would be tedium indeed.

The sheet of glass and the wooden arena were owned by a onetime kopje-walloper who had found there was more money in spiders than in diamonds. Ownership of the glass gave him a monopoly of the game and allowed him to charge a cruel entrance fee, and take a lion's share of the winnings.

Half a dozen wagons had been drawn up in a square around the arena to make grandstand accommodation for the crowds. The canteens around the square provided al fresco service, their waiters staggering under trays laden with foaming schooners of beer to quench the raging thirsts that men had built up during a week in the pit.

The female population had doubled and re-doubled since Kimberley had become part of the Empire, and the ladies used the occasion to show off a pretty hat and a nicely sculptured ankle. Their delighted squeals of horror when the fighting spiders were released into the arena added to the feverish air of excitement.

In one of the alleys that led into the square, Ralph and his Matabele were huddled in solemn discussion.

"I do not know what that name means," Bazo was protesting to Ralph.

"It is the name of a dangerous woman, who danced so beautifully that "when she asked for it the king cut off a man's head and gave it to her."

They all looked impressed. It was the kind of story which appealed to a Matabele.

"What is the name again?"Bazo asked thoughtfully.

"Salome, "

"But why cannot she fight under her real name?" Bazo glanced down at the basket under his arm. "Why must we change Inkosikazi's name for this fight? It is not a good omen."

Ralph looked exasperated. "If we use that name they will know it is the same Inkosikazi who has already killed five times. If we call her Salome, why, one spider looks like another. They will not recognize her. They will believe her to be unblooded, and we shall win more money."

"That is a good reason," Kamuza cut in, and Bazo ignored him.

"Who found this name?" Bazo insisted.

Jordie. He found it in the big book." That decided it.

Bazo had vast respect for the lovely gentle boy and his knowledge of books.

"Salome." He nodded. "It is agreed, but only for today., "Good."

Ralph rubbed his palms together briskly. "Now where is the money?"

And they all looked to Kamusa. He was the treasurer of the group. In their years of unbroken labour the gang of young Matabele had accumulated a hoard of gold and silver coin, for to their wages they had added the bounty on "pick-ups". Then of course there were the considerable winnings from Inkosikazi's previous bouts.

Kamuza kept this treasure buried under the floor of the communal hut, but he had reluctantly exhumed part of it the evening before, and now he produced a soft furry white bag, made from tanned scrotal skin of a springbuck ram, and reluctantly counted out coins into Ralph's hand. No white bookmaker would accept a wager from a black man, so Ralph was frontman for the Matabele syndicate.

"Make a book," Kamusa said, and Ralph scribbled a receipt for sixteen sovereigns on a page of his notebook, tore it out and handed it to Kamuza, who examined it minutely. He trusted Ralph without question. He could not read, but the rituals of European commerce fascinated Kamuza and he had seen white men passing slips of paper whenever they exchanged coin.

"Good." He tucked the receipt into the springbuckskin wallet.

"I have four gold queens of my own." Ralph displayed his life savings. "I will pay my share of the entrance fee and bet the rest of it."

"May the gods go with us all, Henshaw," said Bazo, and handed Ralph the precious little basket.

Ralph adjusted his cap to an angle that would hide as much of his face as possible. It was unlikely that his father would be amongst the crowd, and if he was, the cap would hardly disguise his firstborn sufficiently for him not to be recognized, so the gesture was instinctive, as was his fear of his father's wrath.

"I will wait here for the money," Kamuza told him.

"If she wins," Ralph agreed.

"She will win," said Bazo darkly. "Would that I could serve her with my own hands."

There was no law to prevent a black man entering a fancy in the lists, but none of them had ever done so.

The niceties of this complex society were unwritten but understood by all.

Ralph slipped out of the alley and mingled with the crowd, working his way through the press until he was on the outskirts of the group of handlers, each of them with his woven basket, as they waited to enter their fancy.

"Ah, young Ballantyne." Chaim Cohen looked up from his register, the wire-rimmed spectacles on the end of his nose, sweating jovially in the dust and blazing sun.

"Haven't seen you in some time."

"Didn't have a fancy, mister Cohen. Caught a new one now," Ralph lied glibly.

"What happened to, what did you call her, some kaffir name?"

"She died. Lost a leg and died after her last fight."

"What is your new lady's name?"

"Salome, sir."

"Salome it is, then. That will be two pounds, young Ballantyne."

The coins disappeared with uncanny speed into the enlarged pocket that Cohen had sewn into the inside of his long frock coat, and with relief Ralph sidled into the crowd, trying to lose himself until the draw was announced.

He found a place near the tailboard of one of the wagons, where he was partly concealed and from where he could watch the ladies in the crowd. Some of them were young and pretty, and they knew it. Every few minutes one would pass close enough to Ralph for him to hear the frou-frou of her petticoats and to smell her, for the heat brought out the subtle musk of womankind that was emphasized and not concealed by the sweet reek of French perfume. It seemed to catch in Ralph's throat, too poignant to breathe, and there was a hollow aching place at the base of his belly and weird thoughts in his head.

The fruity smell of cognac suddenly blotted out that French perfume and a hoarse voice close to his ear put the imaginings to flight.

"You are fighting a new fancy, I see, young Ballantyne."

"Yes, sir. That's right, sir, mister Lennox."

mister Barry Lennox was a big man, a brawler with a reputation for quick fists that was respected as far as the river workings. He was a plunger, who had bet a thousand guineas on a single cock fight, and won. That was in the days before civilization had reached the diggings, but now he chanced as much on the spider fights. He was a rich man by the standards of New Rush, for he owned eighteen claims in the number 4 Roadway block. He had the red-veined cheeks and husky voice of the heavy drinker, but what intrigued Ralph most about this man was that he employed three young women, not one but three women to keep house for him. One was a pretty pug-faced daffodil-yellow Griqua girl, another a boldeyed Portuguese mulatto from Mozambique, and the third a mulberry black Basuto with haunches on her like a brood mare. Whenever Ralph thought about this dusky trio, which was often, his imagination conjured up a garden of forbidden delights.

Of course, neither Ralph's father nor any other member of the Committee would acknowledge Lennox's existence and cut him elaborately on the street. Lennox's application to join the Kimberley Club had been met with a record-breaking fifty-six black balls. But Ralph removed his cap respectfully now, as Lennox asked throatily: "What happened to Inkosikazi? I made a bundle on her."

"She died, mister Lennox. Old age, I suppose."

"Baboon spiders live nearly twenty years and more," Lennox grunted. "Let's have a look at your new lady."

"I don't like to unsettle her, not just before a bout, sir."

"Does your daddy know where you spend your Sunday afternoons, young Ballantyne?"

"All right, sir." Ralph capitulated swiftly and lifted the lid of the basket a crack. Lennox cocked a bloodshot but knowledgeable eye at it.

"That looks like a strong left front, new grown."

"No, sir. Well, it might be. Caught her just the other day. Don't know her history, mister Lennox."

"Boy, you wouldn't be running a ringer, would you!

"Fess up now." Lennox looked sternly into Ralph's eyes, and Ralph dropped them.

"You don't want to go up before the Diggers" Committee, do you?

The shame you would bring on your daddy.

It might break his heart."

it might not break Zouga Ballantyne's heart, but it would certainly break Ralph's head.

Miserably Ralph shook his head. "Very well then, mister Lennox. It's Inkosikazi, she grew a new leg. I thought I'd get better odds, but, I'll withdraw her now. I'll go tell mister Cohen I lied."

Barry Lennox leaned so close that his lips touched Ralph's ear and the smell of fine old cognac on his breath almost overpowered him.

"You don't do anything so stupid, Ralph, my lad. You fight your fancy, and if she wins there will be a special treat for you. That's a promise. Barry Lennox will, see you right, and then some. Now, if you will excuse me, I've got some business to attend to." Lennox twirled his cane and drove a wedge into the crowd with his bowfronted belly.

Chaim Cohen climbed up onto the disselboom of the nearest wagon to the arena and began chalking up the draw on a greenruled board, and the bookmakers craned for the matchings and then began calling their odds for each bout.

"Threes on mister Gladstone in the first."

"Dreadnought even money. Buttercup fives in the second."

Ralph waited as bout after bout was drawn, and each time that Inkosikazi's name was omitted his nerves stretched tighter. There were only ten bouts, and mister Cohen had finished chalking the ninth already.

"Bout number 10," he called as he wrote. "This is a biblical match, gentlemen and ladies, a diamondiferous bout straight out of the Old Testament." Chaim Cohen used the adjective "diamondiferous" to describe anything from a thoroughbred horse to a fifteen-year-old whisky. "A pure diamondiferous match, the one and only, the great and deadly, Goliath!" There was a burst of applause and whistles of approval. Goliath was the champion spider of the diamond fields, with twelve straight kills to her credit. "Matched against your favourite is a pretty little newcomer, Salome!"

The name was greeted with indifference as the punters scrambled to get money onto the champion.

"I'm giving tens on Salome," called one desperate bookie as he tried to stem the flow of wagers. They were taking Goliath at odds on, and Ralph shared his distress.

Leaden-footed he traipsed back to the alleyway.

Kamuza had heard the draw announced.

"Give us back the sixteen queens," he greeted Ralph; but the demand stung Bazo: "Inkosikazi will drink her blood "The other is a giant "Inkosikazi is quick, fast as a mamba, brave as a honey badger."

Bazo chose the most fearless and indomitable fighters of the veld as comparisons for his fancy.

They argued while the sudden roar of voices from the Square signalled the beginning of the first bout, and the squeals of the ladies told that the kill had been swiftly made.

They argued fiercely, Bazo becoming so agitated that he could no longer sit still. He leapt up and began to giya, the challenge dance of the Matabele warrior preparing for battle.

"Thus Inkosikazi sprang, and thus she drove her assegai into the chest of Nelo,"Bazo shouted, as he imitated the death stroke of his fancy; but the Matabele always found difficulty in pronouncing the letter "R", and the Roman Emperor's was mutilated in the recounting of the battle.

"You must decide," Ralph broke in on his heroics, and Bazo abruptly ended his giya and looked at Kamuza.

In matters of money Kamuza was without question the leader of the group, just as Bazo was in all else.

"Henshaw," Kamuza asked gravely. "Are you risking your four queens against this monster?"

"Inkosikazi is risking her life," Ralph replied, without hesitation. "And I am risking my money for her."

"So be it, then. We will follow you."

There were only minutes left before the tenth bout of the afternoon. Already Chaim Cohen was upending his schooner of beer and, considerably refreshed, wiping the froth from his whiskers. At any moment he would climb back onto the wagon and call for the handlers to bring their fighters to the arena for the final bout.

Ralph still had five sovereigns to place.

"You said twelves," he argued desperately with the ferret-eyed bookmaker in the flowing Ascot tie.

"if you are betting your own fancy, then it's tens."

"That's welshing."

"Life is all a welsh," the bookie shrugged. "Take it or leave it."

"All right, I'll take it." Ralph snatched the slip and pushed towards the circle of wagons, and once again found his way blocked by the grand belly of Barry Lennox.

"Are you betting her yourself?"

"With everything I've got, sir."

"That's all I wanted to know, Ralph me boy." And he strode to the nearest bookmaker, pulling his purse from his hip pocket just as Chaim Cohen crowed from his perch on the wagon.

"Lovely ladies and sporting gentlemen! The tenth and final bout of the day! The mighty Goliath meets the dancing lady Salome!"

Goliath crabbed into the glass-topped arena. Her four pairs of legs undulated sinuously so that her progress was stately and deliberate.

She was a huge beast, newly moulted, for her chintyl armoured covering was a lustrous coppery colour and the long hairs that covered her abdomen and legs were burnished like newly spun gold wire. She left a double necklace of tiny stippled footprints in the swept sand of the arena floor, and the crowd cheered her. Their inhibitions had long been lost in the primeval conflicts in the little arena, and most of them had been drinking since noon: there was a peculiar ring of ferocity and cruelty in their voices.

"Kill her!" screamed a pretty blond girl with gold ringlets and flowers in her hat. "Rip her to pieces!" Her face flushed feverishly and her eyes were glittering.

"All right, mister Ballantyne. Put your fancy in," Chaim Cohen commanded, raising his voice to be heard above the uproar. But Ralph delayed a few seconds longer, letting the other spider complete its circuit and face away from his side of the cage. Then he lifted the sliding door and tapped the basket to rouse Inkosikazi.

She crawled forward cautiously, lifting her abdomen clear of the sand, stepping on the spiked toes of her ranked legs, and then freezing as she saw her adversary across the cage. Her multiple jewelled eyes were sparkling like chips of black diamond.

Goliath sensed her presence and leaped high, turned in the air and landed facing her. The two spiders confronted each other across the smoothly swept floor of white river sand, and only now was the difference in their sizes apparent. Goliath was enormous, swelling in rage, the long silken mane of burnished hair rising like the quills of a porcupine to enhance her size as she began to dance her challenge to her smaller adversary.

Immediately Inkosikazi replied to the challenge, raising and lowering her abdomen in time to the rhythmic swaying of her carapace, lifting her legs in pairs and weaving them with an awful grace, like the many-armed Hindu god, Shiva.

An utter silence had fallen on the watchers as they strained to catch every nuance of this stylized dance of death, and then a lust-choked roar burst from them as Goliath sprang.

She exploded into flight, soaring with her talons fully extended, clearing the length of the arena without effort and landing precisely where Inkosikazi had stood a thousandth part of a second before. Inkosikazi had evaded that flashing leap with a bouncing side jump of her own, and now she faced the huge enraged creature and danced her defiance.

The dazzling agility of these great spiders was, the essential attraction that drew such a following of eager spectators. There was no preliminary bracing or crouchigo ing to herald one of those swallowlight bounds. The spiders fired themselves like bullets, suddenly and unerringly at their rival, and reacted as swiftly to the counterattack. Then between each onslaught that mesmeric and chilling dance resumed.

Jee! Jee!" The tightly drawn silence was interrupted by the chilling, killing cry of a Matabele warrior.

"Jee! Jee!"The deep hissing chorus that had carried a black wave of naked bodies across a continent, a wave crested by the plumes of the war bonnets and lit by the glitter of the bright silver assegais.

Bazo had not been able to skulk in the alley beyond the square. He had edged forward into the crowd until he reached the wagons, but as the conflict mounted, so had his warrior passions. He thrust forward through the packed ranks and now he was in the forefront, and he could not contain himself further.

Jee! Jee!"He hissed his battle cry, and Ralph found himself echoing it.

Inkosikazi was fighting instinctively, reacting mindlessly to the presence of another female in deadly sexual rivalry. It was the waving arms of the gigantic female across the cage which infuriated her, and it was mere coincidence that her first attacking leap was synchronized with the war chant.

Twice she launched herself, and twice Goliath gave her ground. and then on her third leap Inkosikazi vaulted too high and touched the glass roof of the arena. The impact broke the perfect parabola of her flight, and she fell short and out of balance, scrabbling frantically in the fine white sand as Goliath saw her chance and flew in for the kill.

The men howled with cruel glee, the women trilled with delicious horror as the two huge furry bodies came together chest to chest and entangled each other's limbs in a hideous octopus embrace.

The impetus of Goliath's leap sent them rolling across Igi the arena like an india-rubber ball, until they struck the far wall and wrestled in a flurry of serpentine limbs. Both their long hooked fangs were fully erect, and they slashed at each other with their hairy wolf mouths, the needle points of the fangs striking the impenetrable shiny armour of carapace and jointed legs, glancing off the polished surface and leaving minute dribbles of colourless honey-thick venom on each other's chests.

Instinctively they were holding their vulnerable abdomens clear, while straining to tear from the embrace for a chance to strike into the soft skin of the other. They came up on their hind legs and wrestled together, and immediately Goliath's weight began to take effect.

With a sharp crackling sound, like a walnut in the jaw of a silver nutcracker, one of Inkosikazi's legs was torn bodily from the joint of her carapace, and she jerked convulsively, contracting her soft belly in a dreadful spasm.

"Kill her! Rip her to pieces!" screamed the pretty blond girl, and tore at her perfumed silk handkerchief, shredding it between her fingers. Her face was swollen and inflamed and her eyes wild.

Goliath shifted the grip of her many legs, groping for a soft spot into which to plunge the jerking red fang.

"Jee! Jee!"sang Bazo, his eyes bloodshot with passion, and Inkosikazi strained with all her remaining legs to break the grip that was slowly smothering her under the huge hairy body. Again there was that grisly crackling, one of her front legs broke off in a little spurt of body juices, and instinctively Goliath lifted the severed limb to her mouth.

The distraction was sufficient, and Inkosikazi tore herself free and bounded halfway across the arena, landing in an unbalanced sprawl, her body fluids oozing from the leg stumps, but gathering herself swiftly. Goliath was still worrying the severed legs, the smell of her opponent's blood enrapturing her so that she mouthed the twitching limbs, striking at them with her fang, her full attention upon them, and Inkosikazi rebounded like a rubber ball thrown against a brick wall.

She dropped lightly onto Goliath's broad furry back, locked in with her remaining legs, and then plunged the long blood-red fang into Goliath's abdomen, her head pumping as she forced a steady gush of poison into the bloated body.

Goliath's body arched, her long jointed legs straightened into an agonized rictus, and the balloon of her belly spasmed and convulsed as the venom pulsed into her.

Crouched upon her back like some grotesque incubus, Inkosikazi squirted in the fatal fluid until the bigger creature's limbs wilted and crumpled under her and her belly sagged gradually to the white sand of the arena.

In the roaring consternation of disappointed punters and squeaks of women, both loathing and gloating at the same time, Ralph and Bazo rushed together and embraced with whoops of triumph. In the glassed arena Inkosikazi slowly withdrew the long curved hypodermic fang. Her venom not only paralysed and killed but also liquefied the body tissue of her prey. Her jaws opened and then locked into the jelly-soft passive body beneath her, and her own abdomen began to swell and subside as she sucked her vanquished adversary's fluids from her while she still lived.

Ralph broke from the embrace of Bazo's thickly muscled arms.

"Get her out of the cage," he told him. "I'll go and get the money."

Bazo bore the basket high on the return from the conflict. His bare-chested Matabele ran behind him, in that floating stylized gait, half dance, half trot, and they brandished their fighting sticks and sang the praise song which Kamuza had composed in Inkosikazi's honour: "See with your thousand eyes, Hold hard with many arms of steel, Kiss with your long red assegai, Taste the blood, is it not richer than the milk of Mzilikazi's herds?

Taste the blood, is it not sweeter than the wild honey in the comb?

Bayete! Bayete!

Royal greetings, Black Queen, Loyal greetings, Great Queen."

Ralph dearly wanted to run with them in that triumphant procession, but he knew what his father would say if he heard that his son had joined such a barbaric display through the dusty streets, past the very portals of the Kimberley Club where Zouga Ballantyne was almost certainly passing his Sunday afternoon.

Ralph followed them in a fashion that better suited Zouga's idea of how a young English gentleman should comport himself, but his cap was on the back of his head, his hands were thrust deeply into pockets jingling the gold coin, and there was a beatific grin on his face.

The smile broadened further as a familiar big-gutted figure rolled out through the doors of Diamond Lil's canteen.

"mister Ballantyne," bellowed Barry Lennox across the street. "mister Ballantyne, will you do me the very great honour of taking a glass with me?"

"Enchanted indeed, sir." Ralph felt cocky enough to reply facetiously, and Lennox guffawed and flung an arm around Ralph's shoulders and led him into the canteen.

Ralph looked about him quickly; it was the first time he had ever entered a place such as this. He hoped to see naked women dancing on the tables and gamblers in flowered waistcoats fanning open hands full of aces and kings and sweeping up pots of gold sovereigns.

The only partially nude figure was that of Charlie, the undertaker, snoring on the sawdust floor with his shirt open to his hairy belly button; and the gamblers were all familiar faces, men beside whom Ralph worked every day on the stagings or in the pit. They were dressed in their work clothes and the cards were dog-eared and greasy and the pot was a small pile of copper and worn silver.

"Ralph," said one of them, looking up. "Your daddy know where you are?"

"Does yours?" Ralph shot back, the cockiness unabated.

"And do you know who he is?"

There was a hoot of laughter from the others, and the man grinned good-naturedly. "Damn me, but the boy has a sharp enough tongue."

"Give my sporting friend a beer," Lennox told the barman, and he looked dubious.

"How old is your sporting friend?"

"He will be forty years old on one of his future birthdays. However, sir, I consider that question to be a direct slur on my sporting friend's honour. I have broken jaws that asked less impertinent questions."

"Two beers coming up, mister Lennox."

Barry Lennox and Ralph saluted each other with the schooners, and Lennox gave them a toast.

"To a lady of our mutual acquaintance, bless her bright eyes and all her lovely legs."

The beer was faintly warm and tasted like soap and quinine, but Ralph forced down a mouthful and smacked his lips appreciatively. He would have much preferred a cool green bottle of ginger beer with a pop up marble in the neck.

"Cigar?" Lennox opened his silver case, and Ralph hesitated only a moment, then selected one of the thick Havanas and bit off the end in a faithful imitation of Zouga Ballantyne.

He sucked from the Vesta that Lennox held for him, and cautiously held the smoke in his mouth. That was the last draw he took, and after that he used the cigar like a conductor's baton, waving it airily and creating about himself a cloud of perfumed blue without actually touching it to his lips again. Somehow he was able to impart the impression of swagger while standing at the rough-sawn bar counter.

I mean, anybody knows the classic Zulu battle tactics. They wait for bad ground and thick bush, there are few soldiers who use cover and defilade the way they do." Ralph sipped his beer and waved his cigar as he discussed Lord Chelmsford's current campaign against the Zulu King Cetewayo. The views he was expressing were those of Zouga Ballantyne, learned by heart and unadulterated; so though his listeners winked and nudged at his pretensions, they could not fault his logic. "The device of decoying Chelmsford's flying column out of the camp and then doubling back to destroy the base with its depleted defences is as old as Chaka Zulu himself.

Chelmsford was at fault, there, no doubt on it."

There was a gloomy shaking of heads, as there always was when anyone mentioned the catastrophic reversal of British arms that Chelmsford had been manoeuvred into at the Hill of the Little Hand, Isandhlwana, across the Buffalo River in Zululand.

The corpses of seven hundred British dead, militia and regular regiments, had already lain for six months on the bleak grassland below the little hill. Lord Chelmsford had abandoned the field, and his dead lay where they had fallen, their bellies ripped open by Zulu assegais to allow their souls to escape, the litter of wagons and broken equipment scattered about them, their flesh taken off the bone by vulture and jackal and hyena.

The thought of leaving British soldiers unburied on the battlefield seemed to threaten the very foundation of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

"Chelmsford must retake the field," said one of the men at the bar.

"No, sir," Ralph shook his head firmly. "That will be inviting another disaster for a sentimental gesture."

"What do you propose, mister Ballantyne?" the man asked sarcastically.

"A page from the Boer book." Ralph had an audience of grown men listening to him, perhaps not with respect, but at least with attention. This was heady stuff, even though the ideas were his father's, and Ralph threw in an oat. "By God! those boers know ow to fight the tribes. Mounted men as a screen around a column of wagons that can be thrown into laager within minutes.

Go for the heart of the Zulu nation, their cattle herds pull the impis into the open, make them come in across good shooting ground against the laagered wagons -" Ralph did not finish his plan of battle; abruptly he lost his sequence of ideas and began to stutter like an idiot, a blush darkening his tanned, handsome young face.

Barry Lennox followed the direction of Ralph's gaze, and then he grinned delightedly.

Diamond Lil had entered the canteen through the rear door. It was six o'clock in the evening and an hour before she had risen, stretching and yawning like a sleepy leopard, from the brass bed in the darkened room behind the canteen.

A servant had filled the enamelled hip bath with buckets of steaming water, and Lil had poured in a vial of perfume before stepping into the bath and settling luxuriously into the fragrant water, shouting for her canteen manager.

She listened attentively, a small frown cracking the perfect pale skin of her forehead, as he recited the figures of the previous night's take, his eyes averted from the white skin of her shoulders and the tight pink-tipped bosom that peeked through the hot suds. Then she had dismissed him with a wave of her hand and stepped naked from the bath, glowing pinkly from the hot water, her steam-damp hair dangling down the sleek white body. She poured a little gin into a coloured Venetian glass and sipped it neat as she started the powdering and the painting, rolling her eyes at herself in the mirror, practising her professional smile with the tiny diamond twinkling in the centre of the wide display of white teeth, then, at last, considering herself levelly and appraisingly.

She was twenty-three years old, and she had come a long hard way from the house in Mayfair where Madame Hortense had sold her maidenhood to an elderly Whig minister of state for one hundred guineas. She had been thirteen years old then, only ten years ago, but it seemed like a dozen lifetimes.

The house in Mayfair was truly the only home she had ever known, and she often thought back with nostalgia to those days. Madame Hortense had treated her more like a daughter than a house girl. There was always a pretty bonnet or a new dress on her birthday and at Christmas, and she had had special privileges. Lil would ever be grateful for what she learned about men and money and power from Hortense.

Then one Saturday evening a half dozen young officers from a famous cavalry regiment, celebrating their orders for foreign service, had visited the house in Mayfair.

Amongst them was a young captain, dashing, rich and beautiful; he saw Lil across the salon the moment he entered. Ten days later Lil had sailed with him for India on the Peninsular and Orient mailship, while Madame Hortense wept on the quay and waved until the ship cleared the pool of London and disappeared beyond the first bend of the river. Forty days later Lil found herself abandoned by her protector.

From an upper window of the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town she watched her cavalry captain's ship clear Table Bay for Calcutta, her sorrow at parting alleviated by the luxurious surroundings in which her protector had left her. Lil shrugged off her grief, drank a glass of igs gin, bathed and re-painted her face, then sent for the manager.

"i cannot pay my bill," she told him and, taking his hand " led him unprotestingly into the bedroom of her suite.

"Madame, may I give you some advice?" he asked a little later as he retied his Ascot and shrugged into his waistcoat.

"Good advice is always welcome, sir."

"There is a place called New Rush five hundred miles north of here and there are five thousand diggers there, each with a pocket full of diamonds."

Now Lil entered her canteen. It was still early for a Sunday. It was one of the things she had learned from Madame Hortense, always be there long before you are expected. It keeps clients satisfied and employees honest.

Quickly she checked her clientele. It was the usual Sunday afternoon crowd. It would be better soon. She stooped and counted the bottles under the bar counter, examining the wax seals to make certain they had not been tampered with.

"Never be greedy, darling," Hortense had taught her.

"Water the beer, they expect that, but keep good whisky."

She straightened and opened the huge ornate cash register with a chime of bells, making certain that it flagged the correct price, and then touched the line of gold sovereigns in their special slotted drawer. The metal had a marvellous feel under her fingertips, and she picked up a coin as though merely to feel the weight and take pleasure from it. Gold was the only thing in all the world she trusted. Her barman was watching her in the mirror as he swabbed the counter top; she pretended to replace the sovereign in its slot, letting it clink and then palmed it smoothly and closed the drawer of the register. The barman was new. It would be interesting to see if he covered the shortage or reported it, little things like that had made her rich at the age of twenty-three.

She glanced up into the mirror, once again appraising her own face and shoulders in the less flattering sunlight that streamed into the canteen. Her eyes were sharp as a stropped razor, but the skin around them was clear and fresh as rose petals without the first sign of wrinkling.

"You will wear well, my dear," Hortense had told her, "if you use the gin and don't let it use you." She had been right, Lil decided. She looked as she had when she was sixteen years old.

She shifted her gaze from her own face, and swept the canteen. The mirror was imperfect, and the silvering was beginning to go in dark spots, slightly distorting the young face that was watching her intently. Her gaze flicked over it, and then came back.

The boy was blushing as he studied her avidly, that was the only thing that had caught her attention. Now when she looked at him again she realized he was probably under-age, and she already had trouble with the Committee. He wore a boy's cloth cap on the back of his head and he was very obviously still growing, his Norfolk jacket straining around the sturdy arms and across the shoulders.

Too young and certainly penniless. She had to get him out fast, and she turned quickly, her fists on her hips, her blond head cocked aggressively.

"Good afternoon, Miss Lil." Ralph was stunned by his own audacity at addressing this heavenly presence directly. "I was about to buy my friends a round of drinks. We should be honoured if you would take a glass with us, ma'am." Ralph slapped the counter with a sovereign, and Lil uncocked her head and raised one hand from her hip to touch her hair.

"I like a big spending gent." She flashed the little diamond in her front tooth at him and nodded to the barman. He would pour from her special bottle labelled Booth's Gin but filled with rain water from the galvanized tank beside the backdoor.

Suddenly she realized that the boy was bonny, with a strong jaw and good white teeth. Now that his blush had subsided, his skin was clear and smooth as her own, and his eyes a penetrating emerald green. And the eagerness and freshness that he exuded was so different from that of the hairy diggers, caked with red dirt and smelling like goats, that formed her usual clientele.

Let the boy pay for his round of drinks, and there would be time to get rid of him after that. In the meantime his transparent adoration. was amusing and flattering.

"Lill, me darling." Barry Lennox leaned across the counter and she did not flinch from his breath. "Give me your pearl-like little ear."

Smiling her bright smile she held her ear to his lips, and cupped her hand in an exaggerated pantomime of secrecy.

"Are you working tonight, Lill? "I'm always ready for a quick rattle of the dice with YOU, my sweet. You want to go right now or finish your drink?"

"No, darling, not me. How would you like to be first to put the saddle on an unbroken colt?"

Her eyes flicked to Ralph's face again, and her hard bright smile softened thoughtfully. He was a lovely boy, and for the first time since her cavalryman had left her in Cape Town she felt the prickle of her loins and bitter sweet catch in her throat, so that she did not trust her voice entirely.

"It's still early, Lil, and business isn't good this time on Sunday, Lil dearie." Barry Lennox wheedled and chuckled beerily at the same time. "He is a pretty boy, and I should charge you for the pleasure, but I'll just let you make me a special price instead."

Lil's throat cleared instantly and the languid expression disappeared. Her reply was crisp.

"I'll not charge you school fees, Barry Lennox, just the usual ten guineas."

Lennox shook his head. "You are a hard one, Lil. I'll send him to you, love. But just one thing, make it good, make it something that he will remember if he lives a hundred years."

"I don't teach you to dig diamonds, Barry Lennox," she said, and without looking back swept from the canteen.

They heard the door of her bedroom bang, and Ralph stared after her in dismay, but Barry Lennox put an arm around his shoulders and as he talked quietly, punctuating each sentence with a throaty lewd chuckle, all the colour fled from Ralph's face.

"Come in." Her voice reminded Ralph of the gentle contented cooing that the plump wild pigeons made at sunset in the top branch of the camel-thorn tree above Zouga's camp.

With his hand on the brass doorknob, he lifted his feet one at a time and polished the toe-cap of his boots against the back of his trouser leg. He had doused his head under the tap of the rainwater tank and combed his hair while it was still wet, sleeking it away from his forehead, and the droplets had run down his neck, turning the dust on his darned shirt collar into damp red mud.

He glanced down at his hand on the doorknob, saw the black rinds under his finger nails and lifted it quickly to his mouth, trying desperately to pick out the dirt with his eye tooth.

"Come in!" The command was repeated; but this time there was no cooing of pigeons, but a sharp imperious command, and Ralph lunged for the door handle. There was no resistance, the door flew open, and Ralph went with it. He entered Diamond Lil's boudoir like a cavalry charge, tripped on the frayed edge of a cheap oriental carpet and sprawled headlong across the brass bed.

There was a Chinese lacquer screen across one corner of the small violently furnished room, and over the top of it rose Diamond Lil's magnificently sculptured blond coiffure.

"Oh," she said sweetly, the sharp slanted eyes widening with amusement. "Are you going to start without me then darling?"

Ralph scrambled untidily to his feet like a puppy with oversized paws and stood to attention in the middle of the floor, holding his cloth cap to his stomach with both hands.

From behind the screen came the most evocative sounds he had ever heard. The rustle of lace and cloth, the clink of china and the gurgle of water poured from a The lacquer screen was ornamented with oriental lug figures, women bathing in a willow-screened pool with a waterfall in the background. The women were all naked, and the artist had lingered on their physical charms. Ralph felt his ears and neck heating again, and hated himself for it.

He wished he had kept the cigar, as a proof of his manhood. He wished that he had worn a fresh shirt, he wished, but then there was no further time for wishing.

Lil stepped out from behind the screen. She was barefooted, and her toes were chubby and rosy pink like those of a little girl.

"I have seen you on the street, mister Ballantyne," Lil told him quietly. And I have admired your manly disposition. I am so glad we have had an opportunity to meet."

The words worked a miracle. Ralph felt himself growing in stature, the trembling in his legs stilled and they felt strong and sure under him.

"Do you like my robe?" Lil asked, and took the long skirts in her hands, turning to make them flare.

Ralph nodded dumbly, his new-found strength had not yet reached his tongue, but his eyes were wide and feverish.

She came to him and without her heels she stood only as high as his shoulder. "Let me help you with your coat."

And when he was in his shirtsleeves, she said, "Come and sit on the sofa." She took his hand and led him across the room.

"Do you like me, mister Ballantyne?"

At last he could speak, "Oh yes. Oh yes!"

"May I call you Ralph? I feel I know you so well."

Very early one January morning long ago she had left the Mayfair house, and reached the deserted park where it had snowed during the night. The snow lay white and smooth and unmarked. She left the gravelled path, and the snow crumbled like sugar under her feet. When she looked back her tiny footprints were strung out across the unblemished snow, as though she were the first and only woman in the world. It gave her an extraordinary feeling of her own importance. Now as she lay on the wide bedstead beside the lad, she experienced that same feeling.

He was not a lad, but she thought of him as that. His body was fully matured, but his innocence made him as vulnerable as an unweaned infant, and his body was like the snow which no other feet had trodden.

The sun had stained his throat in a deep V down onto his chest, but the skin of his chest and flat belly were the lustrous white of watered marble or of freshly fallen snow. She touched it with her lips and when his little dusty rose nipples puckered and started her own skin crawling deliciously, she took his hands. His palms were rough and callused from work on the stagings and in the pit. The fingernails were torn and cracked, with ingrained dirt beneath them. But it was honest dirt, and the hands were shapely, long and graceful. She had learned to judge men by the shape of their hands, and now she lifted Ralph's to her lips and kissed them lightly, watching his eyes as she did so.

Then slowly she took his hands down and cupped them over her own soft breasts. She felt the rough skin rasp her own nipples, and they popped out like full moons, pale pink and tense.

"You like that, Ralph?" She asked that same question five times, and the last time was when the room was almost dark and he was convulsed and shaking within the circle of her arms and her pliant thighs, drenched with his own sweet young sweat, and breathing in little choking sobs.

"You like that, Ralph?" And his reply was broken and ragged: "Oh yes. Oh yes, Miss. Suddenly she was sad. The snow was trodden, the magic was passing, just as the power she had wielded was transitory.

She had not cried in ten long hard years, not since that first evening in the Mayfair house, but now she was shocked to find the constriction in her throat and the burning behind her eyes.

"What is there to cry for?" she wondered desolately.

"It's far too late for tears."

She rolled Ralph expertly onto his back, his body limp and unresisting, and for a moment she stared at him hatefully. He had touched something in her which had hurt unbearably. Then the hating passed and there was only the sadness.

She kissed him once more, softly and regretfully.

"You must go now, Ralph," she said.

He lingered at the door, with his jacket over his arm and his cap in his hand.

"I will come and see you again, Lilly."

She formed a bow with her lips and painted them with quick deft strokes before she replied, but while she worked she was watching him in the mirror.

He was altered already, she saw. He stood four-square, his shoulders wide and his neat young head proud on the column of his sun-tanned neck. The sweet diffidence was gone, the appealing shyness evaporated. An hour before he would have said: "Please can I come and see you again, Miss Lill?"

She smiled at him in the mirror, that bright burnished smile, and the diamond in her tooth winked sardonically.

"You come any time, dearie, any time you have saved ten guineas."

It was only surprising that the full report of Ralph's foray into the lilac fields of Venus took so long to reach Zouga, for Barry Lennox had repeated the story with zest and embroidery to anyone who would listen, and the chaff and banter had flown like a Kalahari dust-storm every evening in Diamond Lil's canteen.

"Gentlemen, you are speaking about the eldest son of one of the pillars of Kimberley Society," Lil admonished them saucily. "Remember that Major Ballantyne is not only a member of the Kimberley Club, but a respected ornament of the Diggers" Committee." She knew that one of them would soon succumb to the temptation to take the story to Zouga Ballantyne. "I would love to hear what that cold-bellied, stuck-up prig will say when he hears," she told herself secretly. "Even the iced water in his veins will boil."

"Whores and whore masters," said Zouga. He stood on the wide verandah, in the shade of the thatched roof which had replaced the original tent of the first camp.

Ralph stood below him in the sunlight, blinking up at his father.

"Perhaps you have no respect for your family, for the name of Ballantyne, but do you have none for yourself and for your own body?"

Zouga was barring the front door to the cottage of raw unbaked brick. He was bare-headed, so that his thick dark gold hair shone like a war helmet and his neatlycropped beard emphasized the jut of his heavy jaw, and the long black tapered hippohide kurbash whip hung from his right hand, touching the floor at the toe of his riding boot.

"Do you have an answer?" Zouga's tone was quiet, and deadly cold.

Ralph was still dusty as a miller from the pit. The dust was thick and red in his hair, and outlined the curl of his nostrils and ran like tears from the corners of his eyes. He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve, an excuse to break the gaze of his father's eyes, and then examined the muddy smear with attention.

"Answer me," Zouga's voice did not alter. "Give me a reason, just one reason why I should not throw you out of this home, for ever."

Jordan could bear it no longer, the thought of losing Ralph overcame his terror of his father's wrath.

He ran down the length of the verandah, and seized the arm that held the whip.

"Papa! Please, Papa, don't send him away."

Without glancing at Jordan, Zouga lashed out and the blow caught Jordan across the chest and hurled him back against the verandah wall.

"Jordie did nothing," said Ralph, as quietly as his father had spoken.

"Oh, you do have a tongue?" Zouga asked.

"Get out of it, Jordie," Ralph ordered. "This is not your business."

"Stay where you are, Jordan." Zouga still did not look at him, his gaze was riveted on Ralph's face. "Stay here and learn about whores and the kind of men who lust after them."

Jordan was stricken, his face like last night's camp-fire ashes, his lips dry and white as bone. He knew what they were talking about, for he had listened while Bazo and Ralph wove their fantasies aloud, and with his interest piqued, he had questioned Jan Cheroot furtively and the replies had disgusted and terrified him.

"Not like animals, Jan Cheroot, surely not like dogs or goats."

Jordan's questions to Jan Cheroot had been generalized , men and women, not any person he knew or loved or respected. It had taken him days fully to appreciate Jan Cheroot's reply, and then the terrible realization had struck, all men and women, his father who epitomized for him all that was noble and strong and right, his mother, that sweet and gentle being who was already a fading wraithlike memory, not them, surely not them.

He had been physically sickened, vomiting and wracked by excruciating bowel cramps so that Zouga had dosed him with sulphur and treacle molasses.

Now they were talking about that thing, that thing so dreadful that he had tried to purge his memory of it.

Now the two most important people in his world were talking about it openly, using words he had only seen in print and which had even then shamed him. They were mouthing those words and the air was full of shame and hatred and revulsion.

"You have wallowed like a pig where a thousand other pigs have wallowed before you, in the foetid cesspool between that scarlet whore's thighs."

Jordan crept away along the wall, and reached the corner of the stoep. He could go no further.

"If you were not ashamed to muck in that trough, did you not give a thought to what those other rutting boars had left there for you?"

His father's words conjured up vivid images in Jordan's mind. His stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

"The sickness a harlot carries there is the curse of God upon venery and lust. If you could only see them in the pox hospital at Greenwich, raving idiots with their brains eaten half away by the disease, drooling from empty mouths, their teeth rotted out, their noses fallen into black festering holes, blind eyes rolling in their crazed skulls, " Jordan doubled over, and sicked up on his own rawhide boots.

"Stop it," said Ralph. "You have made Jordie sick."

"I have made him sick?" Zouga asked quietly. "It is you who would make any decent person sick."

Zouga came down the steps into the dusty yard, and he swung the whip, cutting the air with it, across and back and the lash fluted sharply.

Ralph stood his ground, and now his chin was up defiantly.

"If you take that whip to me, Papa, I shall defend myself."

"You challenge me," Zouga stopped.

"You only use a whip on an animal."

"Yes," Zouga nodded. "An animal, that's why I take it to you."

"Papa, I warn you."

Gravely Zouga inclined his head and considered the young man before him. "Very well. You claim to be a man, make good that claim."

Zouga tossed the hippohide whip casually onto the verandah, and then turned back to his son.

Ralph was prepared, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, although his hands were held low before him, they were balled into fists.

He never saw it. For a moment he thought that someone else had used a club on him from behind. The crack of it seemed to explode under the dome of his skull. He reeled backwards, his nose felt numb and at the same time swollen horribly. There was a tickling warmth on his upper lip and dumbly he licked it. It tasted of coppery salt, and he wiped at it with the back of his hand and then stared at the smear of blood on the back of his wrist.

His rage came on him with startling ferocity, as though a beast had pounced upon his back, a black beast that goaded him with its claws. He heard the beast growl in his ears, not recognizing his own voice, and then he rushed forward.

His father's face was in front of him, handsome, grave and cold, and he swung his fist at it with all his strength, wanting to feel the flesh crush under his knuckles, the gristle of that arrogant beaked nose break and crackle, the teeth snap out of that unforgiving mouth.

His fist spun through air, meeting no check, swinging high about the level of his own head, and the blow died there, the sinews of his shoulder wrenched by the unexpected travel of his arm.

Again that burst of sound in his skull, his teeth jarring, his head snapping back, his vision starring momentarily into pinpoints of light and areas of deep echoing black, and then clearing again so that his father's face floated back towards him.

Until that instant the only feelings he had ever had for Zouga were respect and fear and a weighty monumental love, but suddenly from some deep place in his soul rose a raging unholy hatred.

He hated him for a hundred humiliations and punishments, he hated him for the checks and frustrations with which he filled each precious day of Ralph's life, he hated him for the reverence and deep respect in which other men held him, for the example that he knew he would be expected to follow faithfully all his life and doubted that he could. He hated him for the enormous load of duty and devotion he owed him and which he knew he could never discharge. He hated him for the love he had stolen from him, the love his mother had given unstintingly to his father and which he wanted all for himself.

He hated him because his mother was dead, and his father had not prevented her going.

But most of all he hated him because he had taken something which had been wonderful and made it filthy, had taken a magical moment and made him ashamed of it, sick and dirty ashamed.

He rushed back at Zouga, swinging wildly with both fists meeting only air, and the blows that landed on his own head and face sounded as though somebody far away was chopping down a tree with a steel axe.

Zouga fell away neatly before each charge, swaying his head back or to the side, deflecting a blow with his arms, ducking carefully under a flying fist, and counter-punching only with his left hand, flicking it in with deceptive lightness, for at each shot Ralph's head snapped backwards sharply and the blood from his nose and his swollen lips slowly turned his face into a running red mess.

"Stop it, oh please stop it!"Jordan crouched against the verandah wall with the yellow vomit staining his shirt front. "Please stop it!"

He wanted to cover his face with his hands, to blot out the violence and the blood and the terrible black hatred, but he could not. He was locked in an awful fascination, watching every stinging cruel blow, every droplet of flung blood from his brother's face.

Like a corrida bull Ralph came up short at last, and stood with his feet wide apart, his knees giving like reeds overweighted with dew, trying feebly to shake the blackness from his head and the blood from his eyes, his fists bunched up still but too heavy and weak to lift above his waist, his chest heaving for air, swaying and catching his balance every few seconds with an uncontrolled stagger, peering blindly about him for his tormentor.

"Here," said Zouga quietly, and Ralph lurched towards the voice and Zouga used his right hand for the first time. He chopped him cleanly under the ear, a short measured blow, and Ralph flopped face forward into the dust and snored into it, blowing little red puffs with each breath.

Jordan flew down the steps and dropped to his knees beside his brother, turning his head to one side so he could breathe freely and dabbing ineffectually at the blood with his fingers.

"Jan Cheroot," Zouga called. He was breathing deeply but slowly; there was colour in his cheeks above his beard, and he touched a few beads of perspiration on his forehead with the kerchief from around his throat.

"Jan Cheroot!"he called again irritably, and this time the little Hottentot roused himself and hurried down the steps.

"Get a bucket of water," Zouga told him.

Jan Cheroot dashed the contents of a gallon bucket into Ralph's face, washing away the bloody mask, and Ralph gasped and snorted and tried to crawl to his knees.

Jan Cheroot dropped the bucket and grabbed his arm; Jordan stooped and got his head under Ralph's other armpit and between them they lifted him to his feet.

They were both much smaller than Ralph and he hung between them like a dirty blanket on a washline, with the mixture of water and blood dripping to form pale pink rosettes on his shirt front.

Zouga lit a cheroot, studied the ash to be sure it was drawing evenly, then replaced it between his teeth.

He stepped up to his eldest son. With his thumb he pulled down each lower eyelid in turn and peered into his pupils, then grunted with satisfaction. He studied the cut in Ralph's eyebrow, then took his nose between his fingers and moved it gently from side to side to check it for damage, then finally he pulled back Ralph's lip and inspected his teeth for chips or breakage and stepped back.

"Jan Cheroot, take him down to Jameson's surgery. Ask Doc to stitch that eye and give him a handful of mercury pills for the pox."

Jan Cheroot started to lead Ralph away but Zouga went on, "Then on your way back stop at Barnato's Gymnasium and sign him up for a course of boxing lessons.

He'll have to learn to fight a bit better than that or he's going to get his head beaten in even before he dies of the clap."

on the way back from Market Square Jan Cheroot and Ralph walked with their heads together, talking seriously.

"Why do you think they call him Bakela, the Fist?" Jan Cheroot asked, and Ralph grimaced painfully.

His face was lumpy and the colour was coming up in his bruises, deep plum and cloudy blue like summer thunderclouds. The horsehair stitches stuck up stiffly out of his eyebrow and lip, and the cuts were soft-scabbed like cranberry jam.

Jan Cheroot grinned and clucked with sympathy, and then asked the question that had burned his tongue since first he had learned the cause of Zouga's wrath.

"So how did you like your first taste of pink sugar?"

The question stopped Ralph in his tracks while he considered it seriously, then he answered without moving his damaged lip.

"It was bloody marvellous," he said.

Jan Cheroot giggled and hugged himself with delight.

"Now you listen to me, boy, and you listen good. I love your daddy, we been together so many years I can't count, and when he tells you something you can believe it, nearly every time. But me, I have never in my life assed up a chance for a slice of that warm stuff, never once, old or young or in between, ugly as a monkey or so pretty it would break your heart, whenever it was offered and lots of times when it wasn't, old Jan Cheroot grabbed it, boy."

"And it never killed you." Ralph supplied the summation.

"I guess I would have died without it."

Ralph started walking again. "I hope Bazo will fight his fancy again next Sunday. I'm going to need ten guineas pretty badly by then."

The moon was hpping the horizon, putting the stars to pale shame. It was still a few days short of full, but on the stoep of Zouga's cottage it was light enough to read the headlines of a crumpled copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser that lay beside Zouga's empty riempie chair.

The only sounds were the distant baying of a mooncrazy hound, and the flirt of bats" wings as they spun high parabolas in the moonlight or came fluttering in under the overhang of the verandah roof to pick a moth from the air. The front door was stopped wide open to allow the night's cool to penetrate the inner rooms of the cottage. Jordan crept through it timidly.

He was bare-footed, and the old flannel shirt he wore as a nightdress was one of Zouga's cast-offs. The tails flapped around his bare knees as he moved down the verandah and stopped before the tall falcon-headed carving that stood on its pedestal at the end of the covered stoep.

The slanting moonlight lit the graven bird image from the side, leaving half of it in black mysterious shadow.

Jordan stopped before the image. The clay floor was cold on his bare soles, and he shivered not entirely from the cold, and looked about him surreptitiously.

Zouga's camp slept, that deep pre-dawn sleep.

Jordan's curls, bushed wildly from the pillow, sparkled like a halo in the moonlight, and his eyes were in shadow, dark holes like those of a skull. All night he had lain rigid in his narrow bed and listened to his brother's heavy breathing through his swollen nose.

Lack of sleep made Jordan feel light-headed and fey.

He opened the little twist of newspaper which he had hidden under his pillow when he went to bed.

it contained half a handful of rice and a thin slice of cold roasted lamb. He laid it at the foot of the soapstone column, and stepped back.

Once more he looked about him to make sure that he was alone and unobserved. Then he sank down to his bare knees with the book held against his chest, and bowed his head.

The book was bound in blue leather with gold leaf titling on its spine: Religions of the American Indians.

"I greet you, Panes," Jordan whispered, his swollen eyelids tightly closed.

"The Indians of California, the Acagchemem tribe adore the great buzzard Panes." The book Jordan held to his breast had become far and away the most precious of all his possessions. He did not like to remember how he had obtained it. It was the only thing he had ever stolen in his life, but he had been forgiven for that sin.

He had prayed to the goddess and been forgiven.

"The Panes was a woman, a young and beautiful woman, who had run off into the mountains and been changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich."

Jordan knew with all his being whom this description depicted. His mother had been young and beautiful, and she had run away to the black mountain of Death without him.

Now he opened the book and bowed his head over it.

It was not light enough to read the fine print of the text, but Jordan knew the invocation to the goddess by heart.

"Why did you run away?" he whispered. "You would have been better with us. Are we not the ones who love you? "It was better that you stayed, for now you are Panes. If we make you a sacrifice of rice and meat, will you not come back to us? See the sacrifice we set for you, great Panes."

The morning wind stirred, and Jordan heard the branch of the camel-thorn scrape upon the roof before the wind touched him. It was a warm, soft wind, and it ruffled his hair.

Jordan clenched his eyes even tighter, and the little insects of awe crawled upon his skin. The goddess had many ways of showing her presence. This was the first time she had come as a soft warm wind.

"Oh great Panes, I don't want to wallow in filth like Ralph. I don't ever want to smell the trough where a thousand pigs have wallowed. I don't want to go mad, and have my teeth rot out of my mouth." He whispered softly but ardently, and then the tears began to squeeze out from between his lids.

"Please save me, great Panes." He poured out all his horror and disgust to the sacred bird-woman. "They were hitting each other. They were hating each other, and the blood, oh the blood At last he was silent, head bowed, shivering, and then he rose to his bare feet, and for the first time looked at the image.

The bird stared back at him stonily, but Jordan cocked his lovely golden head as though he were listening, and the moonlight silvered his skin.

He turned, still clutching the book, and crept back along the verandah. As he turned the far corner there was a furry rush of dark bodies out of the shadows, and the soft squeals of the bush rats as they squabbled over the sacrifice.

Jordan pushed open the door of the kitchen and it smelled of woodsmoke and curry powder and carbolic soap.

He stooped to the ashbox of the black iron stove, and when he blew lightly through the grating the ashes glowed.

He pushed a long wax taper through the bars and blew again and a little blue flame popped into life. He carried it carefully across the kitchen, sheltering it with his cupped hand, and transferred the flame to the stump of candle in the neck of the dark green champagne bottle.

Then he blew out the taper and placed the bottle on the scrubbed yellow deal table and stepped back.

For a few seconds longer he hesitated, then he took the skirts of the faded and patched nightshirt, lifted them as high as his shoulders and looked down at his body.

The puppy fat had disappeared from his belly and hips.

His navel was a dark eye in the flat clean plain of his trunk, and his legs were gracefully shaped. His buttocks lean and tight, like immature fruit.

His body was smooth and hairless except for the golden wisps at the juncture of his legs. It was not yet thick enough to curl, and was sparse and fine as silk thread freshly spun upon the cocoon.

From the centre of this cloudy web his penis hung down limply. It had grown alarmingly in the last few months, and in Jordan's horrified imagination, he foresaw the day when it would be thick and heavy as his arm, a huge shameful burden to carry through life.

At this moment it looked so soft and white and innocent, but when he woke in the mornings it was hard as bone, hot and throbbing with a sinfully pleasurable ache.

That was bad, but in these last weeks that terrible swelling and stiffening had come upon him at the most unexpected times: at the dinner table with his father seated opposite him, in the schoolroom when the new schoolmistress had leaned over him to correct his spelling, seated at the sorting-table beside Jan Cheroot, on the gelding's back when the friction of the saddle had triggered it, and that awful stiff thing had thrust out the front of his breeches.

He took it in his hand now and it seemed helpless and soft as a newborn kitten, but he was not deceived. He stroked it softly back and forth and instantly he felt it change shape between his fingers. He released it quickly.

The joint of mutton that the family had dined off the previous evening stood on the deal table, under a steel mesh fly-cover. Jordan lifted the cover, and the leg was hacked down to the bone.

His father's hunting knife lay beside the cold joint.

The handle was stag-horn and the blade was nine inches long, sweeping up to a dagger point, and the white mutton fat had congealed upon the blade.

Jordan picked up the knife in his right hand.

The previous evening he had watched his father flicking the edge of the blade across the long steel. It always fascinated him, because Zouga held the razor edge towards his own fingers as he worked.

The proof of his father's expertise with the steel was the way in which the heavy knife seemed to glide effortlessly through the meat of the joint. It was wickedly sharp.

Jordan looked down again at that long white thing that stuck out of his body. The loose skin at the tip was half retracted so that the pink acorn pushed out from beneath it.

He tucked the tail of his shirt under his chin to free both hands and seized himself at the root, enclosing within the circle of his fingers the wrinkled bag with its tender marbles of flesh, and he pulled it out, stretching it out like the neck of the condemned man upon the headsman's block, while with the other hand he brought the knife down and laid the blade against his own belly, just above the fine golden fluff of pubic hair.

The blade was so cold that he gasped, and the mutton fat left a little greasy smear on his belly. He took a long breath to steel himself, and then slowly began to draw the blade downwards, to free himself for ever of that shameful wormlike growth.

"Jordie, what are you doing?" The voice from the doorway behind him startled him so that he cried out aloud.