Men of Men

He threw the knife onto the table and at the same time dropped the shirt to cover himself.

"Jordie!"

He turned swiftly, breathing in sharp little gasps, and Ralph came towards him from the kitchen door. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts, and there were goose-bumps on the smooth bare skin of his chest from the pre-dawn chill.

"What were you doing?" he repeated.

"Nothing. I wasn't doing anything." Jordan shook his head wildly.

"You were whacking your old winker, weren't you?" Ralph accused and grinned. "You dirty little bugger."

Jordan let out a choking sob and fled past him to the door, and Ralph chuckled and shook his head.

Then he picked up the stag-handled knife and cut a thick slab of mutton off the joint, dipped the blade into the stone pot and smeared a gob of yellow mustard over the meat, and munched it as he went about building up the fire in the stove and setting the coffee water to boil.

The following Sunday afternoon on the white sand of the fighting arena, Inkosikazi, the spider, died an agonizing death in the ghastly embrace of a smaller more agile adversary.

Bazo mourned her as he would a lover, and Kamuza sang the dirge with him just as sadly, for the Matabele syndicate had lost twenty sovereigns with her passing.

The return from Market Square to Zouga's camp resembled Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, headed by Ralph and Bazo bearing between them the basket and its sorry contents.

Opposite Diamond Lil's canteen, Ralph halted the cortege for a moment and wistfully contemplated the painted windows across the street, and listened for a moment to the sounds of laughter from beyond the green door, imagining that he could distinguish Lil's tinkling chimes.

When they reached the thatched beehive communal hut, Kamuza passed Ralph the clay pot of bubbling millet beer.

"How much did you lose, Henshaw?"

"Everything," Ralph replied tragically. "The very reason for living." He took a long swallow of the thick gruellike beer.

"That is bad; only a foolish man keeps all his cows in the same kraal."

"Kamuza, your words are always a great solace," Ralph told him bitterly. "But I am unworthy of such wisdom.

Keep those treasures for yourself alone."

Kamusa looked smug and turned to Bazo. "Now you know why I would not lay fifty gold queens, as you bid me."

Bazo shot a glance at Ralph, and they acted together.

Ralph draped a seemingly brotherly arm over Kamuza's shoulders, but it was a steely yoke that held him helpless, and with the other hand he pulled open the front of Kamuza's loincloth, and Bazo scooped the soft furry carcass of the great spider out of the basket and dropped it into the opening.

As Ralph released him, Kamuza went up into the air, rearing like an unbroken stallion feeling the saddle and spur for the first time, whinnying wildly with horror, beating at his own loins with both hands.

If Ralph had not caught him, Bazo, in a shaking paralysis of mirth, might have fallen into the fire in the centre of the hut.

Kamuza had been gone almost three years.

When Bazo and the other Matabele had signed their contracts for a third period, Kamuza alone had asked Bakela to "Bala Isitupa", to write off the contract as complete, and he had taken the road north back to Matabeleland.

Bazo had missed him deeply. He had missed the spiked tongue and shrewd acerbic counsel. He had missed Kamuza's intuitive understanding of the white man's ways of thinking, ways which Bazo still found unfathomable.

Even though Henshaw was his friend, had worked at Bazo's shoulder for all those long years, though they had hawked and hunted together, dipped into the same baking of maize porridge and drunk from the lip of the same beer-pot, though Henshaw spoke his language so easily that sitting in the darkness when the fire had burned down to embers it might have been a young Matabele buck talking, so faithfully did Henshaw echo the deep cadence of the north, so complete was his command of the colloquial, so poetic the imagery he used yet Henshaw would never be Matabele as Kamuza was Matabele, could never be brother as Kamuza was, had never shared the initiation rites with Bazo as Kamuza had, had never formed the "horns of the bull" with him as the impi closed for the kill, and had never driven the assegai deep and seen the bright blood fly as Kamuza had.

Thus Bazo was filled with joy when he heard the word.

"Kamuza is amongst us again."

Bazo heard it first whispered by another Matabele as they formed a line at the gate of the security compound.

"Kamuza comes as the king's man," they whispered around the watch-fires, and there was respect, even fear, in their voices. "Kamuza wears the headring now."

Many young Matabele had come to work at Umgodi Kakulu, "The Big Hole", these last few years, and each month more came down the long and weary road from the north, small bands of ten or twenty, sometimes only in pairs, or threes and occasionally even a man travelling alone.

How many had reached Kimberley? There was nobody to keep a tally, a thousand certainly, two thousand perhaps, and each of them had been given the road southwards by the great black elephant, each of them had the king's permission to journey beyond the borders of Matabeleland, for without it they would have been speared to death by the bright assegais of the impis that guarded every road to and from the king's great kraal at Thabas Indunas, the Hills of the Chiefs.

Even in exile these young Matabele formed a closeknit tribal association. Each newcomer from the north carried tidings, long messages from fathers and indunas, repeated verbatim with every nuance of the original. just as every Matabele who left the diamond fields, whether he had worked out his three-year contract or was bored and homesick or had fallen foul of the white man's complicated and senseless laws and was deserting, carried back with him messages and instructions that he had committed to the phenomenal memory of a people who did not have the written word.

Now the word passed swiftly from Matabele to Matabele.

"Kamusa is here."

Kamuza had never warranted such attention before. He had been one amongst a thousand; but now he had returned as the king's man, and they lowered their voices when they spoke his name.

Bazo looked for him each day, searching the faces on the high stagings and on the running skips. He lay sleepless on his mat beside the cooling watch-fire, listening for Kamuza's whisper in the darkness.

He waited for many days and many nights, and then suddenly Kamuza was there, stooping through the low entrance and greeting Bazo.

"I see you, Bazo, son of Gandang., Bazo stifled his joy and replied calmly.

"I see you also, Kamuza."

And they made a place for Kamuza in the circle, not pressing him too closely, giving him space, for now Kamuza wore the simple black tiara upon his close-cropped pate, the badge of the Councillor, the induna of the king of Matabeleland.

They called him "Baba", a term of great respect, and even Bazo clapped his hands softly in greeting and passed him the beer pot.

only after Kamuza had refreshed himself could Bazo begin to ask the questions of home, disguising his eagerness behind measured tones and an expression of calm dignity.

Kamuza was no longer a youth, neither of them were; the years had sped away and they were both in the full flowering of their manhood. Kamuza's features were sharper than the true Matabele of Zanzi blood, the old blood from Zululand, for his was mixed with Tswana, the less warlike but shrewd and cunning peoples of King Khama.

Kamuza's grandmother had been captured as a maiden, still short of puberty, by one of King Mzilikazi's raiding impis, and taken to wife by the induna who commanded her captors. From her Kamuza had inherited his mulberry black skin and the Egyptian slant of his eyes, the row nostrils and the thin and knowing twist of his nar lips.

There were very few Matabele who could still trace their bloodline back to the pure Zanzi, to the line of Chaka and Dingaan, the Zulus, the Sons of Heaven, and Bazo was one of those. Yet it was Kamuza who wore the ring of the induna on his head now.

in the time of Mzilikazi, a man would have the hoar frost of wisdom and age powdering his hair, and the cowtails bound about his elbows and knees would proclaim his deeds in battle to the world before the king ordered him to take the isicoco. Then his wives would plait and twist the headring into his own hair and cement it permanently into place with gum and clay and ox blood, a permanent halo of honour that entitled the wearer to his seat on the Council of the Matabele nation.

However, the old times were changing. More cunning than fierce, Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, looked for cunning in those about him. Mzilikazi had been a warrior and lived by the white flash of the assegai. Lobengula, though he had blooded his spear, had never been a warrior, and he scorned the warriors" simpleness of thought and directness of action. As his father's greybeards faltered, he replaced them with men who thought as swiftly as the old ones had stabbed.

He had no patience with the old men's preoccupation with a world that was passing, and he sought out the young ones with clear fresh eyes, men who could see with him the dark clouds gathering on the southern borders like the soaring thunderheads of high summer.

Men who could sense the change and terrible events which his wizards and his own divinations warned him would soon rush down upon him like the fires that sweep the papyrus beds of the Zambezi swamps at the end of the dry season.

Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, whose very tread shakes the earth's foundations, and whose voice splits the skies, was choosing young men with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Thus Kamuza now wore the isicoco of the induna and, as he spoke over the fire in his dry whisper, his slanted eyes black and bright as those of a mamba in the firelight, men listened, and listened with great attention.

It was a measure of the gravity of the news he carried from the north that Kamusa began the council, the indaba, with a recital of the history of the Matabele nation. Each of them had heard it first with their mother's breast in their mouths, had drunk it in with her milk, but they listened now as avidly as then, reinforcing their memories so that when the time came they would be able to repeat it perfectly in each detail to their own children, that the story might never be lost.

The history began with Mzilikazi, war chief of the impis of Zulu, warrior without peer, beloved comrade and trusted intimate of King Chaka himself. it told of the black sickness of King Chaka, driven mad with grief at the death of his mother Nandi, the Sweet One. Chaka ordering the year of mourning in which no man might sow seed, on pain of death; in which the milk from the cows must be thrown upon the earth, on pain of death; in which no man might lie with his woman, on pain of death.

Mad Chaka brooded in his great hut and looked for cause to strike down all around him, even the most trusted, even the most beloved.

So it was that Chaka's messengers came to Mzilikazi, the young war chieftain. They found him in the field with. his impis about him, five thousand of Zululand's bravest and finest, all of them still hot from battle, driving before them the spoils they had taken, the captured herds, the young and comely girls roped neck to neck.

The king's messengers wore the long tail feathers of the stately blue cranes in their headdress, token of their solemn mission.

"The king accuses the induna Mzilikazi," began the first messenger, and looking into his arrogant face Mzilikazi knew that he looked upon the face of death. "The king accuses Mzilikazi of stealing the king's share of the spoils of war."

Then the second messenger spoke, and his words were an echo of the king's black madness, so that the words of King Chaka stood in the air above Mzilikazi's impis the way that the vultures circle above the battlefields on wide and motionless pinions.

if the sentence of death had been upon him alone, Mzilikazi might have gone to his king and met it with courage and dignity. But his five thousand fighting men were doomed also, and Mzilikazi called them his children.

So Mzilikazi reached out and seized the king's messengers, and for a moment the earth seemed to lurch in its courses, for to touch these who wore the blue crane feathers was to touch the person of the king himself. With the razor edge of his assegai, Mzilikazi slashed the blue feathers from their heads, and threw them into the faces of the grovelling messengers.

"That is my reply to Chaka., who is no longer my king.

Thus began the great exodus towards the north and, seated over the watch-fire, Kamuza, the king's man, related it all again.

He told the battle honours of Mzilikazi, the renegade.

He told how Chaka sent his most famous impis after the fleeing five thousand, and how Mzilikazi met them in the classic battle tactics of the Nguni, how he waited for them in the bad ground.

Kamuza told how Mzilikazi threw the "horns of the bull" around the impis of Chaka, and how his young men shouted "Ngi Ala! I have eaten!"

as they drove in the steel; and the listeners in the dark hut murmured and moved restlessly, and their eyes shone and their spear hands twitched.

When it was over, the survivors of Chaka's shattered impi came to Mzilikazi and, on their knees, swore allegiance to him, to Mzilikazi who was no longer a renegade, but a little king.

Kamusa told how the little king marched north with his swollen impi, and how he defeated other little kings and became a great king.

Kamusa told how after Chaka was murdered by his brothers, Dingaan, the new leader of the Zulu nation, did not dare to send out more impis to pursue Mzilikazi.

So Mzilikazi flourished, and like a ravaging lion he ate up the tribes. Their warriors swelled his fighting impis, and his Zanzi, the pure-blooded Zulu, bred upon the bellies of the captured maidens and the Matabele became a nation and Mzilikazi became a black emperor whose domain overshadowed even that of Chaka.

The men about the fire listened and felt their hearts swell with pride.

Then Kamusa told how the buni, the strange white men, crossed the river in their little wagons and outspanned upon the land that Mzilikazi had won with the assegai. Then Mzilikazi paraded his impis, and they danced with their war plumes aflutter, and their long shields clashing as they passed before him.

After he had reviewed the might of his nation, Mzilikazi took the little ceremonial spear of his kingship, and he poised before his impis and then hurled the toy-like weapon towards the banks of the Gariep river on which the white men had outspanned their wagons.

They took them in the hour before dawn, at the time of the horns, when the horns of the cattle can first be seen against the lightening sky. The front ranks of racing black warriors received the first volley of the long muzzle-loading guns, absorbing it as though it were a handful of pebbles thrown into a stormy black sea.

Then they stabbed the bearded men as they worked frantically with powderhom and ramrod. They stabbed the white women as they ran from the wagons in their rughtdresses, trying to carry the second gun to their men.

They snatched the infants from their cradles on the wagonbed, and dashed out their brains against the tall steel-shod wheels of the wagons.

Oh, it was a rare feast that they set for Mzilikazi's chickens, the grotesque naked-headed vultures. They believed it was an ending, but it was only a beginning, for the Matabele were about to learn of the persistence and the dour courage of these strange pale people.

The next wave of white men came out of the south, and when they found the abandoned wagons and the jackal-chewed bones on the banks of the Gariep, theirs was a fury such as the Matabele had never encountered in all their wars.

So the buni met the impis on the open ground, refusing to be drawn into the ravines and thorn scrub. They came in pitifully small squadrons on shaggy ponies to dismount and discharge their volleys in a thunder of blue powder smoke. Then they went up into the saddle to wheel away from under the wall of charging rawhide shields and reload and circle back to let loose the thunder again into the mass of half-naked bodies glistening with oil and sweat.

The buni built fortresses on the open plain, fortresses with their wagons" bodies which they lashed wheel to wheel; and they let the impis come to die upon the wooden walls of the fortress, while their womenfolk stood close behind them to take the gun while the barrel was still hot and pass up the second gun, charged and primed.

Then when the impis drew back, mauled and shaken, the wagons uncoiled from their circle, like a slow but deadly puffadder, and crawled forward towards the kraal of Mzilikazi. And the dreadful horsemen galloped ahead of them, firing and circling, firing and circling.

Sadly Mzilikazi counted his dead and the price was too high, the red mud through which the iron-shod wheels churned was puddled with the blood of Zanzi, the blood of Heaven.

So he called his nation, and the herd boys brought in the herds, and the women rolled the sleeping-mats, and the little girls balanced the clay cooking-pots upon their heads, and Mzilikazi put fire into his kraals and led the Matabele nation away. A vast throng of people and animals were guarded by the depleted impis, while the white men on their sturdy ponies drove them and pointed them the way the sheepdog works the flock.

Mzilikazi led them northwards until they crossed the great river into a new land.

"Now the white birds are gathering again," Kamuza told the young men about the watch fire. "Each day they come up the road to Thabas Indunas, and they bring their dry gifts and the little green bottles of madness.

Their words are sweet as honey on the tongue, but they catch in the throat of those who try to swallow them as though they were the green bile of the crocodile."

"What is it they seek from the king?" Bazo asked the question for all those who listened, and Kamuza shrugged.

"This one asks for the right to hunt elephant and take the teeth, this one asks for the young girls to be sent to his wagon, another wants to tell the nation of a strange white god that has three heads, another wishes to dig a hole and look for the yellow iron, yet another wishes to buy cattle. One says he wants only this, and another only that, but they want it all. These people are consumed by a hunger that can never be appeased, they burn with a thirst that can never be assuaged. They want thing they see, and even that is never enough for them. They take the very earth, but that is not enough, so they tear it open like a man tearing a child from the mother's womb. They take the rivers, and that is not enough, so they build walls across them and turn them into lakes. They ride after the elephant herds and shoot them down, not just one or two, not just the big bulls, but all of them, the breeding cows and the calves with ivory no longer than your finger. Everything they see they take; and they see everything, for they are always moving and searching and looking."

"Lobengula must eat them up,"Bazo said. "He must eat them up as Mzilikazi his father would have eaten them."

"Hau!"Kamuza smiled his thin twisted smile. "Such wisdom from my brother. He recalls how Mzilikazi ate the white men on the banks of the Gariep, and lost a land. Listen to Bazo, my children. He counsels the King Lobengula to throw the war spear and loose his impis as Cetewayo the King of Zulu did at the Hill of the Little Hand. How many Englishmen did Cetewayo slay? There was no counting, for their red jackets lay one upon the other like the snows of the Dragon Mountains when the sunset turns them to fire, and their blood fed the land so that the grass still grows greener and thicker and sweeter upon the slopes of the Little Hand to this day. Oh a fine killing, my children, a great and beautiful stabbing , and afterwards Cetewayo paid for it with the spear of his kingship. He paid for it with his royal herds, he paid for it with the liver and heart of his young men, with the grassy hills of Zululand. For after the avengers had made the great slaughter at Ulundi they took it all, and they placed chains of iron upon Cetewayo's wrists and ankles and they chained his indunas and his war captains and led them away. Now Bazo, the wise, would have you know what a good bargain King Cetewayo made, and he urges Lobengula to make the same bargain with these white men."

Bazo's expression remained grave and dignified while Kamuza chided and mocked him but he twisted the snuff-horn between his fingers and once he glanced to the dark corner of the thatched hut where the long war shields and the broad assegai were stacked.

But when Kamuza finished, Bazo shook his head. "No one here dares counsel the king; we are his dogs only.

No one here doubts the might and resolve of the white men, we who live each day with their strange and wonderful ways. All we ask is this: what is the king's word?

Tell us what Lobengula wishes, for to hear is to obey."

Kamusa nodded. "Hear then the king's voice, for the king has travelled with all his senior indunas, Babiaan and Somabula and Gandang, all the indunas of the house of Kurnalo, they have gone into the hills of "Matopos to the place of the Umlimo A superstitious tremor shook the group, a little shiver as though the name of the wizard of the Matopos had crawled upon their skins like the sickle-winged tsetse fly.

"The Umlimo has given the oracle," Kamuza told them, and then was silent, the pause theatrical, to pique their attention, to dramatize the effect of his next words.

"On the first day the Umlimo repeated the ancient prophecy, the words that have come down from the time of Monomatapa. On the first day the Umlimo spoke thus: "The. stone falcons will fly afar. There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Marnbos or the Monornatapas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.

They had all of them heard the prophecy before, but now it had a new and sinister impact.

"The king has pondered the ancient prophecy, and he says thus: "The white birds are gathering. Eagle and vulture, all of them white, they roost already upon the roof of my kraal."

" rwhat is the meaning of the stone falcons?" one of his listeners asked.

"The stone falcons are the bird gods that the ancient ones left at the burial place of the old kings, Zimbabwe."

"How will stone birds fly?"

"One has flown already,"Bazo answered this time. "One of the stone falcons stands close by us now. It stands under the roof of Bakela, the Fist. It was he who took the falcon, and carried it away."

"When the other birds fly, then war will sweep over Matabeleland," Kamuza -affirmed. "But listen now to the oracle of the Umlimo." And their questions were stilled.

"On the second day the Umlimo prophesied thus: "When the midnight sky turns to noon, and the stars shine on the hills, then the fist will hold the blade to the throat of the black bull."

"This was the prophecy of the second day."

Again they were silent as they pondered the words then, mystified, they looked to Kamuza for the meaning of the prophecy.

"Lobengula, the Black Elephant, alone understands the meaning of the prophecy of the second day. Is he not versed in the mysteries of the wizards? Did he not pass his childhood in the caves and secret places of the wizards? Thus says Lobengula. "This is not yet the time to explain the words of the Umlimo to my children, for they are momentous words indeed, and there will be a time for the nation to understand." Bazo nodded and passed his snuff-horn. Kamuza took it and drew the red powder up into his nostrils with two sharp inhalations of breath and, watching him, Bazo did not dare to voice his own suspicion that perhaps Lobengula, the mighty thunder of the skies, was as mystified by the prophecy of the second day as was the little group around the fire.

"Was this all the oracle?" Bazo asked instead, and Kamuza shook his head.

"On the third day the Umlimo prophesied for the last time: "Sting the mamba with his own venom, pull down the lion with his own claws, deceive the clever chacma baboon with his own trickery."

"This was the prophecy of the third and final day."

"Does the king intend that we, his humble cattle, should know the meaning of the prophecy of the third day?"

"Thus spoke Lobengula: "We the Matabele cannot prevail until we arm ourselves as our adversary is armed, until we gather to ourselves the strength that is found only in the yellow coins and shining stones.

For it is these things which have made the white man strong.,"," Nobody interrupted the silence that followed, for they all sensed that there was more to come.

"Thus the king summoned me to the royal kraal and bid me carry his word to all the Matabele who live beyond the borders of the king's domains. For thus spoke the king: "Bring me guns to answer the smoke of the white man's guns. Bring me diamonds and bring me the yellow coins that I may grow as strong as the white Queen who lives beyond the sea. For then her soldiers will not dare to come against me." Bazo replied for them all. "Let Lobengula know that what he requires of us he shall have. Guns he shall have, for it is part of our contract with the white man. Each of us will carry a gun when we return to Matabeleland, some of us who have worked out two Isitupa will carry two guns when we return. Some of us will bring three guns."

"That is known," Kamusa nodded.

"Lobengula will have gold coins, for we are paid in coin, and what we bring home to Thabas Indunas belongs to the king."

"That is right and proper."

"But diamonds?" Bazo asked. "The diamonds belong to the white man. They are fierce for them as a lioness is fierce for her cubs. How are we to bring diamonds to the king?"

"Listen to me," whispered Kamuza. "There will be no more "pick-ups". When one of you turns up the shine of a diamond in the yellow gravel, then that diamond belongs to Lobengula."

"It is against the law."

"Against the white man's law only, not against the law of Lobengula, who is your king."

"To hear is to obey," Bazo grunted, but he thought of Bakela, the Fist, who was his father, and Henshaw, the Hawk, who was his brother, and he did not relish stealing the stones for which they laboured as hard as Bazo did himself.

"Not only in the pit," Kamuza went on. "Each of you will watch for the chance on the sorting-tables, you, Donsela. -" He picked out a Matabele across the fire from him, a young man with a deep intelligent brow and strong jaw. "You have been chosen to work in the new grease house."

"The tables are guarded," Donsela. replied. "They are covered with a steel screen."

They had all of them heard Donsela. speak of the marvel of the new grease house.

Once again the ingenuity of the white men had put the diamond's unique qualities to his own advantage.

The diamond was unwetable, shedding moisture like the body feathers of a goose. So while wet gravel would roll across a steel table smeared with thick yellow grease, the dry diamond would stick fast.

The pipeline from the Vaal river had at last reached Kimberley, and this water supply was augmented by the subterranean water pumped up from the depths of the vast excavation. There was water enough now to wash the gravel, instead of laboriously dry-sorting it, water enough to wash the sieved gravel over the slanting grease tables. The diamonds stuck like fat little blisters, half embedded in the grease, ready to be scraped off with a steel spatula at the end of each shift.

"There is a steel screen over the tables," Donsela repeated, and Kamuza smiled and passed him a thin reed, cut from the riverbank. On the tip of the reed was a little lump of beeswax.

"The reed will pass through the mesh of the screen," Kamuza told him. "The diamond will stick more firmly to the wax than to the grease."

Donsela examined the reed cautiously. "Last week a Basuto was found with a stone. That same day he fell from the skip as they were bringing him out of the pit.

Men who steal stones have accidents. Those accidents always kill them."

"A warrior's duty is to die for his king," Kamusa told him drily.

"Do not let the overseer catch you, and pick out only the biggest and brightest stones."

In the three years between Kamusa's departure from Kimberley and his abrupt return, Ralph had reached his full growth. Only months short of his twenty-first birthday, he stood as tall as Zouga; but unlike his father, he was cleanshaven except for the thick dark moustache which he allowed to curl down at the corners of his mouth.

At rare intervals he was still able to gather together the ten gold sovereigns necessary to keep his surreptitious friendship with Diamond Lil alive. Then suddenly that was no longer relevant, for Ralph fell in love.

It happened in the street outside that exclusive institution, already the most famous in Africa south of the equator, membership of which conferred enormous prestige and a semi-mystical entre to the elite band of men who wielded the growing wealth and burgeoning power of the diamond fields.

Yet the Kimberley Club was merely a single-storeyed wood-and-iron building as drab as any on the diggings.

True it boasted a billiard room with a full-sized table, a picket fence of ornate cast iron and a stained-glass front door, but it was situated in the noisiest street just off Market Square, and it enjoyed its fair share of the flies and the all-pervading red dust.

It was midmorning and Ralph was bringing one of the gravel carts back from the blacksmith who had replaced the iron tyres on the wooden-spoked wheels.

There was a stir in the street ahead of him. He saw men run from the canteens and kopje-wallopers" offices, most of them bareheaded and in shirtsleeves.

A vehicle came bowling out of the Square, an extraordinary vehicle, light and fast, with high narrow wheels, so cunningly sprung that it seemed to float behind the pair that drew it. They were matched, a strange pale.

brazen colour, softer than the colour of honey, and their manes were white blond.

Both horses were martingaled to force them to arch their necks, and the long-combed platinum maines flew like the battle colours of a famous regiment.

The driver, either by chance, but more probably by skill, had them leading with their off fores in perfect unison, and their gait was an exaggerated trot in which they threw their forehooves so high that they seemed almost to touch the shining heads as they nodded to the rhythm of their run.

Ralph was stabbed by such a pang of envy that it was a physical pain. He had never seen anything so beautiful as those pale glistening animals and the vehicle that they drew, until he raised his eyes to the driver.

She wore a tricom hat of midnight blue, set at a jaunty angle over one eyebrow. Her eyebrows were jet black, narrow and exquisitely arched over huge drop-shaped eyes.

As she came up to the plodding gravel cart she barely lifted the gloved hand that held the reins, and the plunging pair of pale horses swerved neatly and the elegant vehicle flashed past so close that, had he dared, Ralph might have reached up and touched one of those slim ankles in its high-buttoned patent leather boot which just showed under the tailored skirt of moire taffeta.

Then she dropped her hand again, and the matched pair swung the carriage in neatly before the wrought-iron gate of the Kimberley Club and stopped, shaking out their manes fretfully and stamping their forefeet.

"Bazo, take them," Ralph called urgently. "Go on to the stagings.

I'll follow you."

Then he darted across the street and reached up to seize the head of the nearest thoroughbred.

He was only just in time, for half a dozen other loiterers had raced him to it. Ralph removed his cap and looked up at the woman on the buttoned leather seat of the carriage. She glanced down at him and fleetingly smiled her thanks, and Ralph saw that her eyes were the same midnight blue as the hat on her head. Those eyes touched him for only an instant and then went back to the stained-glass front door of the club, but Ralph felt a physical shock from her gaze like a blow in the chest, so that he could not catch his breath.

Ralph was aware of voices, men's voices, from the direction of the club, but he could not tear his eyes from that lovely face. He was absorbing each fine detail, the braid of her hair, the colour of freshly-washed coal, thick as the tail of a lioness, which dropped from under the hat over her shoulder and hung to her waist. The fine peppering of dark freckles high on her cheekbones seemed to emphasize the purity of the rest of her skin.

Her small pointed ears were set at an alert listening angle which gave a peculiar vivacity to her face. The dark !"of the widow's peak below the brim of her hat Pointed up the depth of forehead. Her nose was narrow and straight with elegantly flared nostrils that gave her expression an hauteur that was instantly belied when she smiled, as she was smiling now, but not at Ralph.

She was smiling at the group of men who came out onto the porch of the club, chatting animatedly as they adjusted their hats.

"A splendid lunch, sir." The only stranger to Ralph in the group thanked his host and then led them down the short walk to the street.

He was a tall, well-proportioned man. His dress was sober. The cut was not English but he wore it with a dash that made the dark colours appear flamboyant.

He wore a dark patch over one eye, and it gave him a piratical air. His beard was trimmed to a point, and touched with silver.

"He is at least forty years old," Ralph thought, bitterly, as he realized that the woman was smiling directly at this man.

At his right hand was a small neat figure, a man with an unremarkable face and thin receding hair, a small moustache of indeterminate colour, but eyes so intelligent and humorous that they altered the man's appearance, made it striking and interesting.

"Ah, Ralph," this man murmured, as he noticed the young man standing at the horse's head; but Ralph could not meet his eyes.

Doctor Leander Starr Jameson was an intimate friend of his father's, and privy to Ralph's shame and disgrace.

It was he who had administered the mercury tablets, and washed them down with a stern admonition to avoid in future the snares of harlotry. For a moment Ralph wondered if the doctor would impart his vile secret to the lovely lady on the seat of the carriage, and the thought burned his soul like hoar frost.

On the bearded man's other hand was mister Rhodes, big and serious, his dress untidy, the knot of his tie slipping and his breeches baggy, but with that sense of determination and certainty about him that always awed Ralph.

Behind them all followed the stooped scholarly figure of Alfred Beit, like mister Rhodes, shadow.

The four men paused in a group beside the carriage, and the tall stranger reached up and took the woman's hand.

He touched her fingers to his lips.

"Gentlemen, may I present my wife, missis Sint John. "The big man's accent was unmistakable, even Ralph recognized the soft drawl that emanated from the Southern States of America.

However, it was the title the man used and not the accent which struck like a fiery dart into Ralph's breast.

@- missis Sint John, my wife, missis Sint John."

While Ralph stood rigid at the horse's head, destroyed by his adoration which he now knew was hopeless, the group ignored him and the men made their bows.

"Louise, my dear, this is mister Rhodes of whom you have heard so much, " The formal phrases might have been spoken in a foreign language as far as Ralph was affected by them.

Her name was Louise, and she was married. That is all that he understood.

General Sint John climbed up beside his wife. He moved lithely for such a big man, and one so old, Ralph conceded reluctantly, and hated him anew for that. Sint John took the reins from Louise's gloved hand, lifted his hat to the three men and started the horses. Ralph had to jump back to avoid being knocked down, and Louise was talking animatedly to the General. Neither of them glanced at Ralph again, and the carriage whirled away, down the street.

Ralph stared after it wistfully.

Jordan decorated the borders of the menus with romanticized scenes of the diggings: the stagings soaring above the gaping pit, heroic figures working on the walls of yellow earth, a sorter at his table, and at the head of the sheet a man's cupped hands overflowing with uncut diamonds, and he coloured the illustrations with water paints.

"What's Veloute de la Nouvelle Ruee?" Ralph asked.

"Soup New Rush," Jordie told him without looking up from his artistic labours.

"What's going to be in it?

"Marrow bones and pearl barley."

"- And what's Quartier de Chevreuil Diamant Bleu?"

"Haunch of springbuck in the style of a blue diamond."

"I don't know why we can't just speak English," Ralph complained. "What's the style of a blue diamond, anyway?"

Tart with bacon fat, marinade it in olive oil and cognac with wild garlic, and then bake it in a pie crust."

Ralph swallowed his saliva. Jordan's culinary skills were always a source of delight to him.

"All right, I'll eat it."

Jordan licked his brush, leaving a streak of Prussian blue on his tongue, and then looked up at his brother.

"You are going to serve it, not eat it -" Jordan paused portentously, "mister Rhodes is coming to lunch," as though that explained it all.

"Well, if I'm not good enough to sit at the same table as your famous mister Rhodes, I'll be damned if I'll play waiter. You can get Donsela. For a shilling Donsela will spill soup on mister Rhodes, for a shilling Donsela would throw soup on King Lobengula himself. I'm going to bribe him."

However, in the end curiosity and Jordan's promise of the leftovers prevailed and Ralph dressed himself in the ridiculous monkey-jacket that Jordan had designed and tailored for him and carried the tray of Veloute out on the wide verandah of Zouga's camp, and there nearly dropped it.

"Madame, you remind me of the heroine from mister Longfellow's poem," Neville Pickering complimented Louise Sint John, and she smiled back at him from her seat at the centre of the luncheon table.

"Thank you, sir."

Her jacket was in pale creamy buckskin with tasselled sleeves, and the bodice was crusted with bright-coloured beads in bold geometrical patterns. Louise had parted her thick black hair in the centre, braided a blue ribbon into each of the thick tresses, bound them with a band about her forehead, and then let them hang onto her bosom.

The soft tanned buckskin was divided into ankle-length culottes, and her boots were also of soft beaded leather.

Louise was the only woman at the long trestle table on the open verandah of Zouga's camp. The men seated on each side of her were already emerging as the most influential subjects on this continent of an omnipotent queen. Like the men that another English queen had sent out to the corners of the earth, these were the new Elizabethans, most of them already rich, all of them restless and consumed with their lust for power, for wealth, for land. Each with a separate dream that he would follow relentlessly all his life, every one of them driving, ruthless men.

Ballantyne. Beit. Jameson. Rhodes. Robinson. The list of names read like a roll-call for a regiment of filibusters, and yet here they were listening to a discourse on women's fashion as though it were a company report on tonnage treated and cartage recovered.

Only Zouga Ballantyne was not smiling. The woman offended Zouga. Her beauty was too flamboyant, her colouring too vivid. Zouga preferred the pale gold blond hair and the complexion of sugared cream and strawberries. An Englishman's idea of beauty.

This woman's dress was outrageous, the styling of her hair pretentious. Her gaze was too direct, her eyes too blue, her conversation too easy and her style of address too familiar. Of course American women had the reputation of affecting masculine manners, but Zouga found himself wishing that Louise Sint John had kept those manners on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean where they belonged.

it was enough that she had galloped into his camp ahead of her husband, riding astride, and dismounted by freeing both of her narrow booted feet from the stirrups and vaulting lightly to the ground; but then she had come up onto the stoep with an assured stride and smile, her right hand out like a man, and without waiting for her husband to introduce them had said: "You must be Zouga Ballantyne. I'd recognize you anywhere by Mungo's description of you."

Her hand was narrow, the skin warm but dry, but the grip of her fingers was unfemininely firm, the grip of a skilled horsewoman.

These leisurely Sunday luncheons at Zouga's camp were his one extravagance, and they had become one of the traditions of Kimberley, when excellent fare and good liquor and the company of intelligent men made for memorable afternoons.

Women were very seldom invited to these gatherings, and Louise Sint John would not have been there if Zouga had been able to have her husband come alone, but Mungo Sint John had replied pointedly to the invitation, "General and missis Sint John have pleasure in accepting. The friendship between Sint John and Zouga had begun many years previously, and he was the kind of man whom Zouga could admire: a man like himself, hard and determined, one who lived by his own code without compromise. One who expected no preference nor favour, but whose triumphs were of his own engineering and whose disasters were met with fortitude, without plea or excuse, even when occasioned by cruel circumstances beyond his control.

In the late "fifties Sint John had built up a commercial empire, a fleet of trading vessels which had carried the black ivory of slaves from the African continent to that of North America. Legend was that in three voyages, in the course of a single period of twelve months, across the notorious middle passage of the Atlantic, he had transported almost two million dollars" worth of slaves, and with those profits he had acquired vast estates in Louisiana.

It was at this time that Zouga had first met him.

Zouga had travelled as a passenger on Sint John's magnificent clipper Huron out of the Port of Bristol in southern England to the Cape of Good Hope. The irony of that voyage had been that Zouga at the time had not been aware that Sint John was engaged in the trade, and Zouga had been accompanied on the voyage by his only sister, Robyn Ballantyne, a medical missionary whose declared goal in life was the extinction of the trade on the African continent.

When Robyn Ballantyne had discovered that Sint John was not sailing to Africa to barter beads and copper wire for ivory and ostrich feathers, for gumcopal and alluvial gold dust from the kingdom of Monomatapa, but was seeking richer, living black cargo, her hatred was rendered more implacable by her shame at having travelled in company with such a man.

It was Robyn Ballantyne who had called up the avenging spectre of the Royal Navy. She had been the chief instrument in delivering Sint John and his beautiful clipper Huron, with her cargo of five hundred prime slaves, to the gunboats of the British anti-slavery squadron.

Sint John, as was his right as an American captain, had resisted the British boarders, and in the savage action that followed, half his crew had been killed or maimed and his lovely ship so badly mauled that she had to be towed into Table Bay by her captors.

Though after imprisonment in Cape Town castle, the British governor had finally released Sint John and allowed him to sail away, still his cargo of slaves were seized and released from their chains, and the African coast was closed for ever to his ships.

It was then that Zouga had lost contact with him; but after Zouga's book A Hunter's Odyssey had been published, Sint John had written to him care of his London publishers, Messrs Rowland Ward, and since then they had corresponded at irregular intervals. Indeed it was Zouga's description of the diamond fields in one of these letters that was responsible for Sint John's presence here now.

Through the exchange of letters Zouga had been able to follow Sint John's career, and he learned how after his release from the Cape Town castle, Sint John had returned to Fairfields, his cotton and sugar estates near Baton Rouge, only weeks before the first cannon shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

Louisiana had voted for secession from the Union, and when the war began, Mungo raised his own force of irregular cavalry and led them in a brilliant series of hitand-run raids against the supply lines and rear bases of the Federal army. So successful were these depredations that the northeners christened him "Murdering Mungol, declared him an outlaw and placed a reward of fifty thousand dollars on his head. Promoted to major-general, he was later struck in the left eye by a red-hot splinter of shrapnel and dragged over a mile when his horse bolted.

By the time he was discharged from the hospital, Vicksburg had fallen. Recognizing this as a fatal stab in the heart of the Confederacy, he had limped back along the empty road to Fairfields.

The reek of fermenting sugar juices mingled with that of charred flesh was more revolting than any battlefield Mungo had ever smelled. Four colonnades stood above the ashes of his homestead, like monuments to all his dreams.

Now, all these years later, Sint John had come up the road from Good Hope, driving a pair of magnificent pale gold horses with flowing white manes that he called "Palaminos", a long black cigar between his white teeth, an eagle gleam in his single eye and this strangely disturbing woman on the seat of the phaeton beside him.

Sint John's first act in Kimberley had been to walk into the office of the Standard Bank on Market Square and present a letter of credit to the flabbergasted clerk. The letter of credit was on heavy, expensive paper, the printing embossed in rose and gold, the wax seal that of Messrs Coutts and Co. in the Strand, and the sum for which it was drawn was half a million of sterling.

Sint John had drawn a modest hundred pounds against that formidable total, and taken rooms for himself and his wife at the Craven Hotel, Kimberley's most fashionable and comfortable.

When he recovered from his shock, the bank-clerk had excitedly begun to spread the news. There was an American general on the fields who disposed of a half million Pounds in cash.

The following noon Sint John had casually accepted an invitation to lunch at the Kimberley Club and smiled indulgently as his name was proposed for membership by mister C. J. Rhodes and seconded by Dr Leander Starr Jameson. There were men, rich and influential men, who had tried in vain since the foundation of the Club to obtain membership.

Sint John was smiling that same indulgent smile now as he leaned back in his chair, twisting the stem of his champagne glass between his fingers and watching the other guests at the table fawning over his wife.

Even mister Rhodes, who was famous for his immunity to female wiles, and who usually bluntly terminated any frivolous conversation, was responding to her artless questions and chuckling at her sallies.

With an effort, Zouga tore his own attention from Louise and turned to Mungo Sint John. Quite pointedly he changed the discussion from the split skirts which allowed his wife to ride astride to Mungo's own doings since their last meeting.

The reason for the change of subject was not missed by Louise. She shot a sharp speculative glance at Zouga, but then smiled graciously and relapsed into dutiful silence while the conversation became at last serious and important.

Sint John had been in Canada and Australia, and without being specific they all understood that both journeys had been rewarding, for Sint John spoke of wheat and opals and wool and gold, and they listened avidly, shooting their questions like arrows and nodding to the deft replies, until at last Sint John ended: "Well, then I heard from my dear friend Zouga what you gentlemen have been doing here, and thought it was time to come and have a look."

Almost on cue Ralph came down the verandah carrying the scrubbed carving board with its cargo of roasted venison enclosed in a crisp brown envelope of pastry.

The company applauded with exclamations of delight and approbation.

Zouga stood up to carve the roast and while he stropped the hunting knife against steel, he glanced at Ralph who still lingered on the verandah.

"Are you feeling well?" he asked out of the side of his mouth, and Ralph roused himself, tearing his adoring gaze from Louise Sint John.

"Oh yes, Papa, I'm fine."

"You don't look fine. You look as if you have a belly ache. Better get Jan Cheroot to give you a dose of sulphur and treacle."

Jan Cheroot, dressed in his old regimental jacket with burnished buttons and his scarlet cap set at a rakish angle, brought in fresh bottles of champagne, the buckets packed with crushed white ice.

"Ice!" Louise clapped her hands with delight. "I never expected such sophistication here."

"Oh, we lack very little, madam," Rhodes assured her.

"My ice-making factory has been in operation for a year or more. In a year or so the railway line will reach Kimherley and then we shall become a city, a real City."

"And all this on woman's vanity." Louise shook her long black tresses in mock dismay. "A lady's baubles, a city built on engagement rings!"

Despite Zouga's best efforts, the focus of attention had shifted again. They were all hanging on her words with that slightly bemused expression which overcomes even the most sensible of men when he looks at a Beautiful woman." It was the first time Zouga had acknowledged that fact, even to himself, and for some reason it increased his resentment of her.

"Do you know, mister Rhodes," she leaned across the table confidentially, "I have been here for five days now, and although I have searched the sidewalks diligently, I have not seen a single diamond, and I was assured the streets of Kimberley were paved with diamonds."

They all laughed, more heartily than the witticism warranted, and Rhodes murmured a few words to Pickering before turning back to Louise.

We shall do what we can to remedy that, missis Sint John," and while he spoke Pickering scrawled a note and then summoned one of the Coloured grooms who was lolling and smoking in the shade of the camel-thorn tree.

"Major, may I borrow one of your champagne buckets?" Pickering asked, and when Zouga agreed, he handed the empty bucket and the note to the groom.

Zouga was carving seconds off the roast when the groom returned. He was followed by a nondescript white man with an uncertain seat on his placid steed. He came up on to the verandah carrying the bucket as though it were filled with mister Alfred Nobel's newfangled blasting gelatine.

He placed the bucket on the table in front of Rhodes with a timid flourish, and then seemed to disappear from sight. With his thin colourless hair and myopic eyes behind pebble-lens wire-rimmed spectacles, his dark jacket shiny with wear at elbows and cuffs, he blended like a chameleon with his background.

"Where is young Jordan?" Rhodes asked. "That boy loves diamonds as much as any of us do., Jordan came from the kitchen in his apron and with his colour high from the heat of his stove. He greeted Rhodes shyly.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, mister Jordan Ballantyne is not only the finest chef on the diggings, but he is also one of the best diamond sorters that we have." Rhodes was expansive as few of them had ever seen him. "Come and stand by me, Jordan, where you can have a good view., When Jordan was beside his chair, Rhodes tipped the bucket carefully and even Zouga heard himself gasp with shock, while Louise Sint John cried out aloud.

The bucket was filled to the brim with uncut diamonds, and now they cascaded onto the white tablecloth in a sullenly glowing pyramid from which random darts of light sped to astound the eye.

"All right, Jordan. Tell us something about them," Rhodes invited. And the boy stooped over the fabulous pile of treasure, his long tapered fingers flying lightly over the stones, spreading and sorting them into piles.

While he worked he talked, and his voice was as lovely as his face, low and melodious. Fluently he explained the shapes of the crystals, pointed out the flaws in one, placed two side by side to compare the colours, twisting one to the light to bring up its smouldering fires.

Zouga was puzzled. This little act was too theatrical to be Rhodes" usual style, and he would never go to such lengths to impress a woman, even a beautiful one; for by jumbling up a bucket of stones he had given his own sorters many days of extra work. Every one of those stones would have to be re-graded and appraised and returned to its own little white envelope.

"Here is a perfect stone," Jordan picked a diamond the size of a green pea. "Look at that colour, blue as a bolt of lightning and as full of fire."

Rhodes took it from him, considered it a moment, holding it between thumb and forefinger, then he leaned across the table and placed it before Louise Sint John.

"Madam, your first diamond. I sincerely hope not your last," said Rhodes.

"mister Rhodes, I cannot accept such a generous gift," said Louise, her eyes wide with delight, and she turned to Mungo Sint John. "Can I?"

"If I agreed with you, you would never forgive me," Mungo Sint John murmured, and Louise turned back to Rhodes.

"mister Rhodes, my husband insists, and I can find no words to express my gratitude."

Zouga watched the scene attentively; there was so much happening here, so many nuances, so many undercurrents.

it was on the surface merely a demonstration of the remarkable effect that these bright hard pebbles had upon a woman. That was their true value, perhaps their only value. When he looked at Louise Sint John's face he could see that it was not avarice that lit it so, but a mystical emotion not far removed from love, the love of a living thing, a child, a horse, a man, a warming thing to watch.

Quite suddenly Zouga found himself wishing that he had been the author of such joy. That it had been he and not Rhodes who had made the gift which had transformed her, and it took a moment for him to free himself of that desire, so that he almost missed the glance that Rhodes shot beyond the woman's face.

. Suddenly it was clear to Zouga. Rhodes was not baiting for the woman; he was fishing for the man. That display of treasure was for Mungo Sint John, the man with half a million sterling to dispose of.

Rhodes needed capital. When a man sets out to buy every single claim on the Kimberley field, and when he is in a desperate hurry to do it, he must always be starved of capital. Rhodes" ambition was no secret.

Zouga himself had been present at the long bar of the Kimberley Club when Rhodes had made the declaration of his intent.

"There is only one way to stabilize the price of the goods -" Rhodes" euphemism for diamonds, "and that is an orderly, centralized marketing policy. There is only one way to stop the stealing of goods by the I.D.B., and that is through the institution of a rigorous security screen; and there is only one way to achieve both these objects, and that is to have every claim on the fields owned by one company! Everyone listening to him had known who Rhodes intended that the head of that company should be.

That had been a year previously, and now the bucket of diamonds on Zouga's luncheon table was proof of how far Rhodes had made good his threat and had eaten up the field. Already he was more than halfway towards his goal, but he had been forced to take in partners and still he was short of capital, desperately short.

For the serious obstacle that stood between him and complete ownership of the field was Barney Barnato's company. He would need millions, literally millions of sterling, for that final step.

So the reason for the little charade was clear to Zouga now, and he was about to turn his head to study General Mungo Sint John's reaction to it when the tableau at the far end of the table struck him forcibly.

The untidily dressed young man, heavy in the shoulders, hunched forward in his chair, unruly curling hair spilling over onto the broad forehead above the florid meaty face, thick arms and square powerful hands enclosing a glittering mound of treasure. At his shoulder the slim and graceful figure of the boy with the bright and lovely face, and behind them both, towering above them, holding them both in its thrall, the graven statue of the falcon god.

Zouga shivered, touched for the first time in the presence of the falcon by a superstitious chill. For the first time he was aware of the sense of evil that the old Hottentot had immediately detected in the statue's stony eyes. For one horrifying instant Zouga was convinced that the bird was about to spread its sharp blade-shaped wings and hold them like a possessive canopy over the two human figures beneath it, and then the moment was past. The tableau broke up.

Rhodes was sweeping the gems back into the bucket, talking quietly to Jordan.

,"Are you still studying the book of mister Pitman's shorthand that I sent you, Jordan?"

"Yes, mister Rhodes."

"Good, you'll find it of great value one day."

The boy understood the dismissal and slipped away down the verandah to his kitchen, while Rhodes casually handed the bucket of diamonds to his clerk and addressed General Sint John directly.

"In the section of the workings that we own we are recovering an average of ten carats to each ton of gravel that we process, to that we must add at least another two carats a ton which is being stolen by the labourers between the pit floor and the grading room. As our security system becomes more efficient and as we have better laws to control the I.D.B. we can expect to eliminate that wastage -" Rhodes was talking in that high-pitched voice so incongruous in such a big man, gesturing with strong square hands, persuasive and articulate. Reeling off figures for production costs and anticipated recovery, the expectations of profits on tonnage worked, returns on capital outlaid, he was addressing himself to one man only, the erect bearded figure with the black eye-patch, yet his manner was so persuasive that every one of them was listening with full attention, even Louise Sint John.

Zouga glanced at her and saw that she was concentrating on the confusing jumble of figures, and that she seemed to be able to absorb them. She proved that immediately.

"mister Rhodes, you said earlier that working costs on the number 9 Section were ten shillings and sixpence; now you use a new figure, twelve shillings?" She challenged unexpectedly, and Rhodes paused, gave a little nod of recognition for her perception before he replied.

"At the deeper levels the costs rise. Ten and six is our present cost, twelve shillings our projected cost for twelve months hence."

His voice had a new note of respect. "I am flattered that you have followed my discourse so closely, madam." Then he turned back to Sint John. "From this you will see, General, that the returns on capital invested are about the best you will find anywhere: ten percent is certain, fifteen percent is possible."

Sint John had been holding an unlit cigar between his teeth; now he removed it and stared hard at Rhodes with his single eye.

"So far, mister Rhodes, you have not mentioned the blue."

"The blue." Every single one of them at the long table froze.

"The blue." it was as if Sint John had spoken a gross obscenity, shocking them all into silence.

"The blue" was the main reason why Rhodes was hungry for capital.

"The blue" was the reason why the banks were calling on all diggers who had borrowed against the collateral of their claims to reduce their overdrafts by fifty percent; and Rhodes had borrowed a million pounds to finance his attempt to acquire every single claim on the New Rush field. As he had acquired each block, Rhodes had immediately used it as security to borrow money to buy the next block, pyramiding loan upon loan, debt upon debt.

Zouga was one of the few who so far had resisted Rhodes" advances, resisted with pain and heart-searching an offer of 5,000 pounds for his claims on the Devil's Own.

The offer had been made six months before, before those dreaded words "the blue" were whispered in the inner sanctum of the long bar of the Kimberley Club.

Nobody would offer ZOUGA 5,000 pounds for his claims now.

On the contrary, a week after he first heard those two dreaded words, the manager of the Standard Bank had sent a note asking him to call.

"Major Ballantyne, in view of recent developments, the bank has been forced to review the value of collateral securing our clients" overdrafts. We have calculated the present market value of your claims as five hundred pounds each."

"That's ridiculous, sir."

"Major, the blue has shown on the claims of the orphen Company."

The bank manager did not have to elaborate. The Orphen block was only separated from the Devil's Own by a dozen intervening claims. "I don't enjoy doing this, Major, but I must ask you to reduce our overdraft to one thousand pounds."

"The blue" was the reason why many of the town's merchants were running down their stocks, preparing themselves to pull out.

"The blue" was the reason why many of the transport riders were re-routing their wagons to the new goldfields at Pilgrims" Rest.

"What is the blue?" asked Louise Sint John, and when none of the others spoke, Zouga's duty as host placed the burden of reply upon him.

"The blue is the diggers, name for a type of rock formation, missis Sint John. A volcanic conglomerate, dark blue in colour and very hard, too hard to work easily." Zouga picked up his champagne glass, sipped the yellow wine and then studied the rising pinpricks of bubbles.

"Is that all?" Louise asked quietly.

"It has zircons in it, small zircons the size of sugar grains, but there is no market for zircons," Zouga went on grudgingly.

"What is the significance of this, blue?" Louise persisted.

Zouga paused to pick his words with care.

"The diamondiferous earth is a friable yellow gravel friable means crumbling., "Thank you," Louise smiled without rancour. "I do know the word."

"Well, then, on some of the deeper claims in the northern section the yellow gravel has pinched out, and we have come up short against this hard blue floor, hard as marble and just as sterile."

"That hasn't been proved," Rhodes cut in sharply, and Zouga inclined his head in acceptance.

"No, it hasn't been proved, but that is what we all fear.

That we have come to the end. That the fields are worked out., They were all silent then, contemplating that terrifying eventuality.

"When will you know for certain?" Mungo Sint John asked. "When will you know that this blue ground underlies the entire field, and that there are no diamonds in it?"

"It will be many months still before the shallower claims can be worked down to the level of those that have run into the blue," Rhodes answered. "Then if we do find it covers the whole field, we will have to drive pot-holes through it to make sure that it is not a thin layer, and that the yellow gravel does not recur below it., "I see," Sint John nodded. "It seems that I was fortunate to delay my visit to Kimberley until after this blue ground was encountered, or I might have found myself the owner of a mountain of blue marble and no diamonds."

"You have always been a fortunate man, Mungo."

Louise flashed a smile at him, and he replied to it gravely.

"You, my dear, are the greatest of all my good fortunes."

With obvious relief the company abandoned the subject of the dreaded blue ground and turned to lighter topics. Only Rhodes did not join them, but sat silent and brooding at the head of the long table.

Though Zouga smiled and nodded at the repartee, he also was distracted by the talk of lurking disaster, and his thoughts were a barrier between him and the company, so that Louise Sint John had to repeat his name to gain his attention.

"Is that possible, Major Ballantyne?"

Zouga roused himself and turned to her. "Forgive me, missis Sint John.

Will you repeat the question?"

Louise was not accustomed to having a man's thoughts wander when she was talking to him. This cold and correct Englishman was truly beginning to irritate her, and she found herself wanting to shock some natural reaction out of him. She had thought of including a man's word, one of Mungo's soldier's words, in her conversation, but good sense warned her that he would merely raise an eyebrow at such gaucherie. She had thought of ignoring him, but intuition warned her that he would probably welcome that treatment. The best course open to her was to direct her queries at him and force him to recognize her existence, and let it nettle him.

"I was led to understand that you were the Chairman of the Kimberley Sporting Club?"

"I have that honour," Zouga agreed.

"I have heard also that your steeplechases or pointto-point races, I am never quite sure of your British terminology, are the most popular diversions on the diamond fields."

Zouga shook his head and smiled. "I'm not sure of the terminology myself. They certainly are not steeplechases, we are critically short of steeples out here, and they are not point-to-point exactly, for we throw in a little rifle drill. So, we prefer to call them rough rides.

A fairly accurate description, I think."

"i thought to enter one of my horses, in a rough ride," Louise said.

"We would welcome your participation," Zouga agreed.

"I could prepare a list of our better riders from which you could choose."

"I prefer to ride myself," Louise shook her head.

"I am afraid that would not be possible, missis Sint John., "Why now "Because you are a woman., Her expression gave Zouga his first truly satisfying moments in her company. She had turned waxen pale so that the freckles stood out boldly on her cheeks and her eyes glowed a lighter, brighter, angry blue.

Zouga waited for her retort, but she sensed his anticipation and, with a huge effort, denied him the satisfaction. Instead she turned to her husband.

"It's after three o'clock. It has been a very pleasant luncheon, but I should like to return to the hotel now."

She stood up quickly, and Mungo Sint John shrugged resignedly and stood up beside her.

"Please do not let us break up this delightful gathering., his smile and his tone asked their indulgence for a womanly whim.

The groom brought her horse to her and she caressed its pale silken muzzle. Then she gathered the reins, looked up at the group of men on the stoep, held Zouga's eye for a moment, before deliberately turning away.

She placed one neat gloved hand on the stallion's withers where the long white mane rose into the crest of the shoulders, and then in the next instant she was seated on the broad and powerful back, her small feet thrust deeply into the silver-starred Mexican-type stirrups.

Zouga was astounded. He had never seen a woman vault to the saddle. Usually it took a groom to hold the head and another to form a bridge of linked fingers to boost her to the height of the horse's back.

Louise Sint John had gone up so lightly and easily that she might have flown, and the movement of her left hand that made the stallion rear was only apparent to someone looking for it.

The huge horse went up on its hind legs, walking backwards in a circle, cutting at the air with its forehooves, until it faced the five-foot barbed-wire fence that marked the division between Zouga's camp and the public road.

Then Louise moved her hand again and the stallion dropped into a dead run, straight at the fence.

The watching men exclaimed in alarm for the stallion had a bare twenty strides to build up momentum for the jump, yet he flew at it with his pink nostrils flaring and the serpentine veins beneath the burnished skin of his cheeks swelling with the pumping of the great heart.

Louise's thick black braids were flung out behind her head by the power of the stallion's acceleration, and then she lifted him into the jump with her knees and her hands.

For an instant of time the horse and the tiny figure upon its back seemed to hang suspended against the pale blue of the sky, the horse with its forefeet drawn up beneath its noble head and the woman rising in the saddle to cushion the shock of take-off and landing, and then they were over.

The stallion landed neatly, with his rider in perfect balance, and the golden body flowed smoothly into the continuation of his run.

There was a soft involuntary sigh from the group on the verandah, and Zouga felt a surge of relief as powerful as the driving leap of the stallion. He had had a mental image of the woman caught up in the bloody strands of barbed wire, like a wild bird in the trapper's net, with torn body and broken wings.

Zouga stood on top of the central stagings. He was as high above the level of the plain as a three-storey building, and from his vantage point he could see as far north as the Vaal river. The dark-green stain of the lusher scrub and grass along its course looked like cloud shadow upon the dust-pale earth, but there were no clouds in the high vault of the sky, and the brutal sun threw stark shadows below the high stagings, geometrical patterns that parodied in two-dimensional plan the intricate structure of timber and iron and steel wire. The stagings clung perilously to the sheer precipice that fell into the depths.

It was as though a gigantic meteor had ploughed into the yellow earth, gouging this bowl-shaped dish through the earth's crust. In the deepest sections it was almost two hundred feet deep already, and each spadeful of gravel had been dug out by hand, lifted to the surface and laboriously picked over before being discarded in the mountainous waste dumps. It was a monument to the persistence of those antlike creatures that swarmed down there on the pit floor.

Zouga wiped the black grease off his hands with a wad of cotton waste, and nodded to the Matabele winchman who threw in the gear lever of the steam winch.

Once again the numbing clatter hammered against Zouga's skull and the slender thread of shining steel cable slithered in over the drums. The winch and steam boiler had cost Zouga over a thousand pounds, the entire winnings of an unusually productive week's labour when Jordan had picked eleven good diamonds off the sortingtable. That week's recovery had been one of the false promises that the Devil's Own had whispered to him, like an unfaithful wife.

Zouga moved to the front of the stagings to escape the painful sound of the winch. He was on an unguarded wooden balcony with the drop sucking seductively at him, but he ignored it.

He had ten minutes to rest now, the time that it took the gravel skip to travel up from the claims to the surface. He could see it lifting off the floor below like a fat spider creeping up its individual silken thread towards him, still too deep for him to recognize for certain the human figure riding on the enormous steel bucket.

Zouga lit a cheroot, and it tasted of engine grease from his fingers. He looked down again, and decided that instead of an ant's nest the pit reminded him more of a beehive. Even at these deep levels the precise shape of each claim had been maintained, and the geometrical shapes were like the individual cells in a honeycomb.

if only mine would yield a little more honey," he thought.

The skip was close enough now for there to be no doubt of the tall young figure standing casually on the lip of the steel bucket, balancing easily with both hands on his hips as the drop grew steadily deeper under him.

it was a matter of pride amongst the younger diggers to ride the skip in the most casual or spectacular manner possible. Zouga had forbidden Ralph to dance on the skip, a fad that had been started by a young Scot who had once danced between the floor and the stagings, accompanying himself on the bagpipes.

Ralph drew steadily closer, rising up through the glistening web of steel cables that hung over the pit like a silver cloud. Hundreds of cables, one for each individual claim, every strand polished by the pulley wheels, by the friction over the winding drums, until they caught the sunlight and shimmered into a silver mist that hung like an aura over the pit, ethereal and lovely, hiding the harsh reality of that gouged raw earth, with its dangers and disappointments.

While he waited for the skip to reach him, Zouga cast his mind back to that first day when he had led the single oxen into the sprawling encampment with Aletta on the wagon box beside him, and they had looked up at the riddled and torn kopje.

So much earth had been moved since then, so many men had died in this terrible pit where that kopie had once stood and so many dreams had perished with them.

Zouga lifted the wide-brimmed hat. Carefully he mopped the beads of sweat from the smoother paler skin along his hairline, and then he inspected the damp red stain on the silk bandanna and grimaced with distaste.

It looked like blood.

He re-knotted the silk about his throat, still peering down into the depths, and his eyes clouded with disenchantment as he remembered the high hopes and bounding expectation that he had brought with him on that day, was it really ten years ago? It seemed like a day and an eternity.

He had found himself dreaming, the random events from those lost years replaying through his mind, the sorrows and the joys magnified by his imaginings and by the passage of time.

Then, after a few minutes, Zouga roused himself.

Dreaming was an old man's vice. The past was beyond regret; today was all that counted. He straightened his shoulders and looked down at Ralph in the swinging skip. Something jarred him, scattering the last of his dreams.

The skip was riding differently, it did not have the accustomed weight to it, he could not yet make out the heaped yellow gravel, which, despite his orders, Ralph usually over-loaded high above the steel sides of the skip.

It was empty, and Ralph was alone. He was coming up without the Matabele gang to help run the skip over the bars and up-end its burden of gravel into the chute, down which it would be carried to the waiting cart.

Zouga cupped his hands to his mouth to shout his enquiry, but the words stayed in his throat.

Ralph was close enough now for Zouga to see the expression on his face. It was tragic, stricken with some terrible emotion.

Zouga lowered his hands and stared at his son in anticipation. The skip hit the end bars with an iron clasp and the winchman threw out the gear lever, expertly, braking the steel skip against the bars.

Ralph jumped lightly across the narrow gap onto the platform, and stood there, still staring at Zouga.

"What is it, my boy?" Zouga asked quietly, fearfully and for answer Ralph turned away and glanced down int the empty body of the skip.

Zouga stepped up beside him, and followed his glance He saw that he had been mistaken, the skip was not empty.

"It has taken us all morning to hack that out of the east face," Ralph told him.

It looked like a roughly cut gravestone, before the inscription was chiselled in, as wide as the stretch of man's arms and imperfectly squared up, the marks of the steel wedges and pickaxe still fresh upon it.

"We broke three pick handles on it," Ralph went on grimly, "and we only got it out because there was natural fracture line that we could crack open with wedges."

Zouga stared at the ugly cube of stone, not wanting to believe what it was, trying to close his ears against his son's voice.

"Underneath it's the same, solid, hard as a whore heart, no faults, no cracks."

The lump of stone was a dull ugly mottled thing across which the steel tools had left paler weals and furrows.

"Sixteen of us," Ralph went on. "We worked on it all morning." He opened his hands, and showed them palms upwards. The horny yellow calluses had been torn open, the raw flesh beneath was mushy and caked with dust and earth. "All morning we broke our hearts and our picks on it, and that bloody little chip weighs less than half a ton."

Slowly Zouga stooped over the edge of the skip and touched the stone. it was as cold as his heart felt, and its colour was dark mottled blue.

"The blue," Ralph confirmed quietly. "We have hit the blue."

"Dynamite or blasting gelatine," Ralph said. "That's the only way we'll ever move it."

He was stripped to the waist, a polish of sweat on his arms, and little drops of it hanging like dew in the thick hair of his chest.

The tombstone of blue marble lay at his feet, and Ralph rested on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The blows he had swung at the rock had raised bursts of sparks and tiny puffs of white dust that stung their nostrils like pepper, but had not cracked the rock through.

"We cannot blast in the pit," Zouga said tiredly. "Can you imagine two hundred diggers firing away dynamite, every one doing it when and how he wanted?" He shook his head.

"There is no other way," Ralph said. "No other way to get it out."

"And if you do get it out? Jordan asked from the verandah where he had stood without speaking for the past hour.

"What do you mean?" Zouga demanded. He could hear the strain in his own voice, and knew how close, his anger and frustration were to the surface.

"What will you do with it when you do get it out?

Jordan persisted, and they all stared at the awful blue lump.

"There are no diamonds in that stuff." Jordan said it for them.

"How do we know that?" Ralph snapped at him, his voice rough and ugly with the same tension that gripped Zouga.

"I know it," Jordan said flatly. "I can sense it, just look at it. It's hard and bleak and bare."

Nobody replied to that, and Jordan shook his curls.regretfully. "Even if there were diamonds in it, how would you free them from the blue? You can't smash them out with sledgehammers. You'd end up with diamond dust."

"Ralph," Zouga turned away from Jordan, "this stuff, this blue, it's only on the east face, isn't it?"

"So far." Ralph nodded. "But, "

"I want you to cover up the east face," Zouga told him bluntly. "Shovel gravel over the exposed rock. Nobody else must see it. Nobody else must know."

Ralph nodded, and Zouga went on, "We will keep on raising the yellow gravel from the other sections as though nothing has happened; and nobody, not one of you, is to say a word about, about Us having struck the blue." He looked directly at Jordan. "Do you understand, not a word to anybody."

Zouga sat easily in the saddle, riding with the long stirrups of a Boer hunter or of a born colonial.

He knew that Rhodes was leaving in the next few weeks, to keep his term at Oxford University. Perhaps his imminent departure would make his judgement hasty.

"Let's hope so, anyway." And his mount flicked his ears back to listen to his voice.

Steady, old man." Zouga touched his withers, feeling a quick twist of guilt at his intentions. He knew he was going to try and sell faulty goods, and he steeled himself against his own conscience.

He touched his mount's flank with his knee and turned him off the rutted dusty track through the break in the milkwood fence and into Rhodes" camp.

Rhodes sat with his back to the mud wall of the shack, a mug in his hand, the big shaggy leonine head cocked to something that Pickering was saying.

The talk of the diggings was that he was already a multimillionaire, at least on paper, and Zouga had seen the champagne bucket of uncut diamonds poured out onto his lunch table. Yet here Rhodes was sitting on a soap box in the dusty yard, dressed in shabby ill-fitting clothes, drinking from a chipped enamel mug.

Zouga dropped his reins and his horse stopped obediently, and when he slipped off its back there was no need for him to tether it. It would stand as long as Zouga wanted it to.

He crossed the yard towards the small group of men, and Zouga smiled to himself. Rhodes mug might be chipped, but it contained a twenty-year-old cognac. Rhodes' seat might be a soapbox, but he sat it as though it were a throne, and the men that sat around him like courtiers or supplicants were all rich and powerful men, the new aristocracy of the diggings.

One of these rose now and came to meet Zouga, laughing lightly and brandishing a rolled newspaper.

"By god, Major, they say you need only speak of the devil." He clapped Zouga's shoulder. "I hope you are taking this assault on our masculine pride as seriously as we are, and have come to offer to champion our cause."

"I don't understand." Zouga's protest was lost in the laughter and friendly pummelling as they came to crowd around him. Only Rhodes had not left his seat against the wall, but even he was smiling.

"Let him read it for himself, Pickling," Rhodes suggested mildly, and Pickering handed Zouga the news sheet with a flourish.

It was a copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser, so newly printed that the ink smudged beneath Zouga's fingers.

"Front page," said Pickering gleefully. "The headline."

GAUNTLET THROWN DOWN LADY INSULTED SEEKS SATISFACTION This morning your editor was privileged to receive a visit from a beautiful and distinguished visitor to Kimberley. missis Louise Sint John is the wife of a hero of the American Civil War, and in her own right a noted equestrienne.

Her stallion "Shooting Star" is a remarkable example of the recently developed American breed known as Palqminumber He is a former Louisiana champion of breed, and quite one of the most magnificent animals ever to be seen on the Diamond Fields.

missis Sint John attempted to enter her mount in the regular point-to-point meetings organized by the Kimberley Sporting Club, but was informed by Major Ballantyne, the Club President, that she was barred from riding Zouga skipped quickly over the next few paragraphs: "Simply because I happen to be a woman... insufferable masculine arrogance."

He smiled and shook his head.

,"Challenge the good major to ride against me over any course of his choice for any purse he stipulates."

Now Zouga laughed delightedly, and tossed the paper back to Pickering.

"The lady has good bottom", he admitted, "in both senses of the word."

"I will lend you King Chaka,"Beit promised. He was a strong hunter, English and Arab blood, from one of the famous Cape studs. Beit had paid three hundred guineas for him.

Zouga shook his head and shot an affectionate glance at his own hunting horse standing across " the yard. "That won't be necessary, I shan't be riding."

There was a howl of jovial protest from them all.

"By God, Ballantyne, you can't let us down."

"This damned vixen will say you funked it, old man."

"My wife will crow for a week, you'll ruin my marriage."

Zouga held up his hands. "I'm sorry, gentlemen. This is merely a bit of female nonsense, and you can quote me.

You won't ride, then?"

"Certainly not." Zouga was smiling, but his voice had a brittle edge. "I have more serious matters to concern me.

"You are right, of course." Rhodes" piping voice stifled them all into respectful silence. "That pale brute is a flying devil and the lady rides like a witch, we have all seen that."

"The scar on Zouga's cheek turned pale pink, and there was a sudden green glint in his eye; but the smile stayed on his lips.

"That fancy high-stepper moves well on the flat, I grant you, but over the course I would choose she would be lucky to finish, let alone win., "You'll ride then?" They were clamouring again immediately.

"No, gentlemen. That's my final word."

Long after the others had left, the three of them sat on: Pickering, Rhodes and Zouga. The sun had set, and just the orange glow of the fire lit their faces. The first bottle of cognac was empty and Pickering had opene another. Now Rhodes was staring into his mug, and spoke without lifting his eyes.

"So, Major, at last you are ready to sell, and I ask myself a question, a simple little question, why?"

Zouga did not reply, and after a moment Rhodes lifte his head.

"Why, Major?"he repeated. "Why now suddenly?"

Zouga found that the lie he had prepared would not come to his lips.

He was dumb, but he held the gaze of those pale blue eyes, and it was Rhodes who broke the silence.

"I have trusted very few men in my life," and involu tarily his eyes flickered to Pickering and then back to Zouga, "but now, Major, you are one of them."

He picked up the cognac bottle and spilled a little of the honey-dark liquor into Zouga's mug.

"Once you were offered a hundred thousand pounds: illicit diamonds, and you couldn't bring yourself to take them." Rhodes was speaking so softly that Zouga had to lean forward to catch the words. "Yesterday your son brought up the first hunk of blue ground from the Devils Own, and still you could not bring yourself to lie."

"You knew!" Zouga whispered, and Rhodes nodded and then sighed.

"By God, I wish I knew more like you." He shook the big curling head and his voice was becoming brusque and businesslike. "Once I offered you five thousand poun for your claims. All right, I will make the same price, "and he lifted one meaty hand to still Zouga, "Wait! Listen to the rest of it, before you thank me. the"

bird goes with the claims."

"What?" For a moment Zouga did not understand.

"The stone bird, the statue. It becomes part of the deal "Damn it!"Zouga half rose from the log on which he was sitting.

"Wait!"Rhodes stopped him again. "Listen, before you refuse," and Zouga sank back. "You'll ride for it."

Zouga shook his head, not understanding.

You'll ride against this woman, Sint John, on her terms, and if you win you keep the claims and the bird and my five thousand., The silence stretched out for a full minute, and then Zouga asked with a harsh gravelly sound in the back of his throat: "And if I lose?"

"You yourself have said there is little chance of that," Rhodes reminded him.

"And if I lose?" Zouga persisted.

"Then you leave these fields as you came, with nothing."

Zouga looked away to the horse standing at the edge of the shadows. He had named him Tom, after a friend, the old hunter who had first told Zouga about the land to the north and how to reach it, Tom Harkness, now dead these many years.

The horse was part of Zouga's dream of the north, the mount that would carry him back to Zambezia. Zouga had selected him with more care than a man usually gives to choosing his wife, and beauty was the last thing he looked for.

Tom was a mixture of many bloodlines, the wide nostrils and big chest of the Arab for staying power, the sturdy legs and sure feet of the Basuto, the canny eye and hammer head of a wild Mustang, the heart and strength of an English hunter. However, Tom was a drab unrelieved dun-colour. His coat was long and thick, brushed but not curried, protection from the night frost and the noon sun, from flying pebbles thrown by frantic hooves of the quarry in a stem chase or from the zip of red-tipped "wait-a-bit" thorns.

Tom had proved that the intelligent gleam in his eye was no illusion. He learned swiftly and well. He learned to stand when the reins were dropped on his neck, giving his rider both hands for the rifle, and he remained stonestill while gunfire crashed about his head, only the twitching of his ears signalling his consternation.

When Zouga took him out into the open veld to continue his training Tom displayed nimble feet on the rocky slopes of the kopje and a buffalo skin through the thorn bush; he learned to hunt, and seemed to enjoy it the way a good polo pony revels in the crack of the bamboo root and the riotous chase.

He seemed instinctively to understand stalking, keeping his own body between Zouga and the game, angling off his approach, never heading directly at the quarry, and the herds of springbuck let the seemingly riderless horse walk up into easy rifle shot. Then Tom would carry the freshly killed carcass on his back, without shying and fussing about the blood.

Tom was ugly, with a Roman nose, ears a little too long, legs a little too short, and he ran with an awkward hump-backed gait, which he could keep up all day, over any ground.

He was an incorrigible thief. Jordan's vegetable garden had to be fenced, but still Tom left tufts of his drab hair on the spikes of the barbed wire. He had a trick of plucking the carrots out of the ground with a delicate grip between his square white teeth, and then knocking the earth off them against his forehooves.

He learned to push open the kitchen window and reach the fresh loaves of bread that were cooling on the marble sink, and once when Jan Cheroot left the door to the storeroom off the latch, Tom got in and ate half a bag of sugar, at twenty shillings a pound.

However, he would follow like a dog, and when ordered he would stand for hours, and Zouga, who was not sentimental about animals, had come to love him.

Zouga looked back from the horse to the young man across the log fire.

"Agreed," he said without emphasis. "Do we need to have further witnesses?"

"I don't think so, Major," said Rhodes. "Do you?"

"At the gun the competitor will ride out to the first flag-" Neville Pickering was the steward-in-chief, and his voice through the speaking trumpet carried to every member of the huge Sunday crowd that spilled out across the dry veld below the Magersfontein hills.

"At the first red flag they will fire upon the standing targets. When they have demolished all four targets to the satisfaction of the stewards, they will be free to round the second yellow flag, and thereafter to return to the finish line." He pointed to the twin poles each with its crown of coloured bunting. "The first rider to pass between them will be declared the winner."

Pickering paused and drew fresh breath before going on.

"Are there any questions?"

"Would you recite the rules, please, mister Pickering," Louise Sint John called. She looked like a child on the great glistening pale stallion's back. She was walking him in circles, leaning forward to pat his neck for the crowds had made him nervous. He was chewing the light snaffle and sweating in dark patches on the rippling muscled shoulders.

"There are no other rules, ma'am." Pickering answered her loudly enough for those at the back of the crowd to hear.

"No rules, barging and fouling?"

"There are no fouls, ma'am," Pickering replied. "Though if one of you deliberately shoots an opponent, he or she might have to face criminal charges, but not disqualification."

Louise turned her head towards the figure on the front seat of the high-wheeled phaeton which was parked beyond the course markers. Her face was pale, the freckles standing out on her cheeks; and her head was bared so that the thick dark braid of hair thumped against her shoulder.

Mungo Sint John smiled back at her over the heads of the crowd, and shrugged slightly, so that Louise was forced to turn back to Pickering.

"Very well, then," she agreed. "But the stake. We have not agreed the stake."

"Major Ballantyne," Pickering called to where Zouga stood at Tom's head. "You have laid out the course. Now will you be good enough to name the stake."

Then a strange thing happened. For the first time since Zouga had met her, Louise Sint John was uncertain of herself. Nobody else seemed to notice it, perhaps it was merely that Zouga had become highly receptive to every shade of her voice and expression. But he was certain that he saw something dark move in the blue depths of her eyes, like the shadow of a shark beneath the surface of the sea, and she took a pinch of her soft lower lip between her white teeth and again she glanced almost furtively at Mungo Sint John.

It was not Zouga's imagination. Mungo Sint John did not return Louise's glance with his usual amused indulgence.

He was looking at Zouga and under his calm was a small undercurrent of unease, like an eddy at highwater when the tide turns.

Zouga raised his voice so that it would carry to Sint John.

"Firstly, the loser will publish at his or her own expense upon the front page of the Advertiser in terms dictated by the winner, an acknowledgement of defeat."

"A composition I shall enjoy." Louise had swiftly recovered her poise. "And what else, Major?""A payment by the loser to a charity of the winner's choice of," Zouga paused, and both man and woman watched his face with outward calm, "of the sum of one shilling!"

"Done!"

There was a slightly jarring note in Louise's laugh, relief perhaps, and though Mungo Sint John's expression did not alter, the tension went out of his shoulders.

"missis Sint John. You are under starter's orders," Pickering called through his speaking trumpet. "Be so good as to bring your mount under control."

"He is under perfect control, sir," she called back, and Shooting Star put his head down and lashed out with both back hooves towards the crowd.

"If he is under control, Missus, then so is my motherin-law," called a wag, and there was a hoot of laughter.

"On the count of three then," Pickering intoned, his voice hollow and solemn through the trumpet. "One."

Shooting Star backed up against the crowd, and they scattered as he bucked.

"Two."

He went into a tortured high-stepping circle, so tight that his nose almost touched the toe of Louise's boot in the fancy silver stirrup.

"And three." Louise lifted her left hand. Shooting Star came smoothly out of the circle, for the first time facing the start line, beginning to pace towards it majestically, and the pistol shot was a brief blurt of sound which sent the stallion sweeping away with an irresistible rush that made the slight figure on his wide back seem vulnerable and childlike.

There was no horse on the diamond fields that could match that first blazing burst of speed, the gap between the two horses opened, but not so dramatically as the watchers had expected. Tom's awkward gallop took him over the ground at surprising speed, and he was not following directly in Shooting Star's tracks.

"She's going wide, Thomas," Zouga told him with satisfaction, and Tom cocked his ears back to listen. "They aren't going to chance the river. Well, we didn't really think they would, did we?"

Directly ahead of Zouga the river started a lazy series of loops, symmetrical hairpin turns, winding back upon itself like a dying python.

Zouga had placed the red flag so that the direct line would cross the river-bed twice, and like most southern African rivers the banks were sheer, dropping ten feet to the dry sand and isolated rocky pools strung along the course. Each crossing was a trap in which a horse could break a leg and a rider his neck.

The alternative to the crossings was to ride wide, taking a circuit out beyond the meandering river course; but that almost doubled the distance to run to the first flag.

Already Shooting Star was a distant flying shape far out on the right, showing at intervals through gaps in the thorn scrub, marked by a little pale feather of dust flung up by his hooves.

"Here we are," said Zouga, and under Tom's ugly Roman nose the ground opened abruptly.

Zouga gave him a slack rein, and Tom hardly checked on the brink of the steep day bank. He sat down, and skidded over the edge on his fat round haunches, his forelegs sticking out stiffly ahead of him, and they toboganed down into the river bed and hit the sand in a scrambling tangle; and then Tom was up and lunging for the far bank, going half up before the dried clay crumbled under his hooves and they slid back again, Tom stifflegged and trembling with exertion.

Zouga circled him once in the clinging white sand and then put him to the bank again, and he went up in a determined series of buck-jumps, shifting his weight before the clay could break under his hooves, and they flew out over the top and were running again, the next bend of the river a quarter of a mile ahead.

At the next crossings Tom had the knack of it and they went down the bank and out the other side without a check. Under Tom's hooves the grass exploded into a whirl of noisy wings, and, with a wild harsh cry that would have panicked another horse, a big black-bellied bustard shot up into the air. Tom rolled a disdainful eye at the bird, steadied and gathered himself on the river bank of the last crossing and went down into it in a slide of dust and rolling pebbles.

As they came up the far bank the red flag was two hundred paces dead ahead.

Zouga swivelled in the saddle and looked out on his right hand.

"Good for you, Tom," he called. "You'"We made a mile on them."

Far out across the plain, the golden horse was just swinging wide of the last bend of the river, and Louise was bent low on his neck, pushing him at reckless speed over the rough going.

"If she rides like that for a shilling, "Zouga broke off, and himself leaned into the rhythm of Tom's gallop. A mile was such a slim margin, and the stakes he was riding for were enormous. His fortune, his dream, nay his very existence, was at stake.

"Go, Thomas, go!"Zouga whispered grimly into the long furry ears, and Tom stabbed at the earth with his awkward hump-backed gait.

Zouga did not look back again; he knew the stallion was bearing down on them, fast, too fast, but Zouga dismissed them from his attention and slid the carbine from the leather boot at his knee and opened the breech, checking the load.

The targets were white china soup plates, the range two hundred yards, extreme range after a gallop like this.

The stewards were waving their hats to guide him up to the firing line.

"This way, Major."

Zouga dropped the reins as he reached the low barrier of thorn branches that marked the firing line, and Tom came up short. He swung up the carbine, and fired as the butt slapped into his shoulder. One of the far-off specks of white burst and vanished. He cranked another round into the chamber, and glanced over his shoulder.

The stallion was still half a mile away, but coming on with a war drum of hooves.

Zouga fired again, but Tom was blowing between his knees, heaving with the effort of the wild gallop.

"Damn it to hell."

Haste would be fatal now, but his fingers fumbled the reload and a shiny brass cartridge slipped and struck his boot before it fell into the sand. He thrust another into the breech, took a long slow breath, and judged Tom's movements beneath him.

The rifle jumped against his shoulder, and the acrid plume of gunsmoke blew into his face. The second target exploded.

"Two down, Major," one of the stewards shouted, and then as he fired again, "Three down, one to go!" Then beside Zouga the golden stallion came plunging to a halt, coming back low on glossy bunched quarters.

Louise vaulted from his back in a swirl of beaded buckskin skirts.

There was a flash of the silky skin of her upper calf above the boot, and the back of a dimpled knee. Even in the press of the moment, he found the pale beautiful flesh disturbing enough to spoil his aim and he swore as his next shot flew wide.

Louise was shooting the latest model of the legendary 173 Winchester repeater, the original polished brass frame replaced by blued steel, and Zouga. knew that the modern centre-fire ammunition drove the heavy lead bullet with amazing power and accuracy.

She threw the stallion's rein over her left shoulder, and braced herself to fire from a standing position, leaning forward to absorb the recoil of the Winchester, and let her first shot fly.

She shot in the American style, throwing the rifle to her shoulder and firing in the same movement, not holding her aim nor giving the barrel time to wander. It was fine shooting.

"One hit to missis Sint John," yelled the steward. But the crash of the shot had startled Shooting Star and he reared wildly and backed off on his hind legs, heaving at the reins that were looped over Louise's shoulder, jerking her over backwards so that her second shot flew in a long spurt of powder smoke towards the sky; and then she was down on her back, being dragged away, her skirts tangled about her legs, and the Winchester rifle was flung from her hand.

The stallion came down on his forelegs again. One hoof, sharp as a woodman's axe, grazed the tender spot at the nape of Louise's neck, just below the thick plait of dark hair, leaving an angry pink blaze on the pale skin but not breaking it.

Zouga felt the sweat on his throat turn so cold that he could not swallow. He swung Tom around to head off the stallion.

For unholy seconds Louise's body was hidden by flying dust and trampling hooves; Zouga tried to shout to her ,to let the horse go, but his voice had choked, and then abruptly Louise was on her knees.

She was facing Shooting Star, clinging stubbornly to his reins with both hands, and when he reared again she used his strength to let him boost her to her feet.

"Steady!" she called to him. "Steady, I tell you., She was dusty and a tendril of dark hair had escaped the plait and hung into her eyes, but she was safe and very angry. Her voice crackled like breaking ice. Zouga's relief was immediate, but he mocked her as he swung Tom back to the firing line for his last target.

"I advise you to have that animal properly trained, madam."

"To hell with you, Major Ballantyne!"she told him in the same tone as she had quelled her mount. Somehow the oath on her lips was not shocking at all, but strangely titillating.

Zouga gave Tom a few seconds to settle and regulate his breathing, and then swung up the rifle, held a full bead on the distant white speck and touched off the shot.

"Four hits, you are free to ride on, Major," shouted the steward.

Louise was dragging Shooting Star by the reins to a wild plum tree, a tree with low and sturdy branches.

Swiftly she lashed the stallion's reins to a branch, and now she was running back holding her skirts up to just below the knee, and the stewards gawked at her ankles in the tight-fitting buttoned boots.

She snatched the Winchester from a clump of sansevieria and ran up towards the firing line, reloading as she came. Zouga could see that there were little blisters of perspiration across her forehead, and knew that she was badly shaken, for when she threw up the rifle she held the shot and the heavy weapon wavered unsteadily.

She lowered it, and her shoulders were trembling. She took two long deep breaths and then lifted the Winchester again, firing on the toss up.

"Hit!" yelled the steward.

Louise's lower lip was quivering and she bit down on it fiercely, and shot again.

Zouga slid the carbine back into its leather scabbard, touched the brim of his helmet to Louise in a cavalier salute. "Good shooting, ma'am."

He turned Tom's head away from the firing line.

As they reached the wild plum, Zouga leaned out from the saddle. Louise had tied Shooting Star's reins to the branch with a slippery fisherman, it was a sailor's knot, a quick-release knot for a fast getaway.

Zouga twitched the loose end and the knot fell apart, then he slapped Shooting Star across the cheek with his open hand. "Go on," he said. "Get out of it!" The stallion jerked his head, found that he was free and kicked his heels high.

Zouga looked back as he reached the next low fold in the plain.

The stallion was grazing head down, but even at that distance it was apparent that he was keeping a wary eye on the lonely figure that ran after him in hampering skirts. As soon as Louise came within arm's length of his bridle, he tossed up his head and trotted away to the next clump of grass, leaving her blundering behind.

"Come, Tom." He turned away, trying not to let his conscience trouble him. There were no rules, any rules was acceptable, but it still felt bad, until he reminded himself of the stakes. A shilling against all he owned and he set Tom to run in earnest.

Another mile and he glanced back, just in time to see Shooting Star and his rider come over the rise. They seemed to fly clear of the earth, borne along by the floating carpet of their own dust.

"Run! Tom! Run!" Zouga swept the hat off his head and slapped it against Tom's neck, goading him to his best speed.

Within another half mile Tom's shoulders were hot and slick with salt sweat. Ropes of saliva spilled from the corners of his lips and splattered onto Zouga's boots , but the yellow flag was in sight.

"Not far," Zouga called to him anxiously. "We must beat them to the flag."

He looked back. He could not believe they were so close.

The stallion's head was driving like a hammer to each stride, and his neck and shoulders were black with sweat. She had pushed him fearfully. Louise was driving him with her arms and the rhythmic force of her body.

Her hair was a wild tangle about her face, and her eyes were a blaze of blue.

Yet as she came up to them she straightened in the saddle, her chin lifted high, and she looked at Zouga coldly, expressionlessly, the way a queen might glance at an urchin running at the wheel of her coach.

Zouga lifted his right hand to salute her achievement.

it had been a tremendous run, to make up so much ground. He was turned slightly towards her, and her expression of cold disinterest lulled him for the vital instant that it took her to bring Shooting Star level with Tom's shoulder.

Zouga never saw the command, probably the toe of her boot on the far side of Shooting Star's heaving chest; he had certainly not expected a show horse to have learned the low tricks of a polo pony. Shooting Star's huge sweat-streaked shoulder crashed into Tom, taking him in the short ribs with a force that drove the air out of him in a belching grunt, and as he was spun aside Tom chopped desperately to keep from falling, twisting and dropping to his knees, his nose on the ground, too tired and taken too unawares to meet the power of that ferocious barge.

Zouga lost a stirrup and was thrown onto Tom's neck.

He clung desperately, feeling the saddle shift under the unequal transfer of weight; then Tom heaved again and Zouga went over, landing on his shoulders and the back of his neck.

He seemed to strike solid rock and blackness crushed down from the dome of his skull. When it cleared, he was standing again, swaying like a drunk, blinking uncertainly after the pounding stallion as he pulled away towards the last flag.

Zouga pulled Tom to his feet, and checked swiftly for strained sinew or broken bone, then threw himself back into the saddle.

"We're not beat yet," he told Tom "There are still the thorns."

Far ahead Shooting Star was making the turn around the last flag. From there Louise was free to make her way back to the finish line any way she wanted, but there were still the thorns.

Tom was winded, his chest shuddering with the effort of each laboured breath, and they reached the flag in an awkward jarring trot and made the turn. Ahead of them the thorns stretched in a solid green barrier. This was the last obstacle, and beyond it was a clear run to the finish.

A rider had a choice: go through the thorn, or ride wide.

"Which way did she go?" Zouga shouted at the stewards below the flag as he went past.

"She's gone for the gap," one of them yelled back, and then Zouga saw the little feather of dust a mile or more out on the right subsiding only slowly as the stallion sped away.

The thorn barrier petered out on the rocky slopes of the Magersfontein hills, and there was an open gap below the steep ironstone cliffs, that was where the stallion was aimed.

Grimly Zouga swung Tom around the flag and pointed him directly at the thorns. This route was almost two miles shorter, but he would need every inch of it. Yet he stopped Tom when they reached the edge of the thorns and let him breathe as he untied the heavy greatcoat from the pommel of his saddle and shrugged into it. He buttoned it high at the throat and felt the sweat burst out on his forehead as he pulled on the leather gauntlets to protect his hands.

"Let's go," he whispered, and lay flat on Tom's neck, as they crashed into the thorn.

The red-tipped hooked points of the thorns skidded over Zouga's thick felt hat with a rasping tearing sound, and tugged at the shoulders and skirts of the greatcoat.

The brush grew as high as a mounted man's head, the sturdy trunks just far enough apart to let a horse pass, but the barbed branches intertwined and exacted a cruel toll. However, Tom kept going, swinging and chopping from side to side; he dodged between the white barked trunks, ducking his head under the branches, his ears flat against his skull and his eyes closed to slits, maintaining just the right amount of momentum to snap the thorns off their triangular bases and showering both himself and Zouga with a confetti of feathery green leaves.

Every few seconds he snorted at the sting of thorn that had penetrated his tough shaggy hide.

Shooting Star's burnished skin was so thin and finely bred that the network of veins and arteries showed through it. The thorns would have ripped it to bloody tatters.

Zouga felt blood trickling down his own neck from where a thorn had nicked his ear, but he crouched lower and let Tom pick his own way through. "Poor Tom," he encouraged him. "Poor brave Tom." The horse whickered with the pain of the stinging red needles, but did not check his stride. Yet his breathing was easier now, the slower gait had helped him; and the sweat was drying in salty white crystals on his shoulders.

Then abruptly they burst out of the thorn onto the open plain. Zouga tore off the leather gauntlets and threw them away. He ripped at the buttons of the greatcoat and let it fly away, flapping like a great black crow in the wind of Tom's gallop, and then he stood high in the stirrups and shaded his eyes with the brim of his hat.

Swiftly he searched the open ground, but it was empty as far as he could see. the tiny specks of colour in the distance: women's dresses and the gay bunting that marked the finish. His heart bounded with relief, and under him Tom lunged into a clumsy gallop.

Still standing in the stirrups, Zouga looked towards the line of hills out on his right hand, and he saw them.

The stallion had turned the far end of the thorn barrier where it ran into the hills and was coming down the rocky slope towards the level ground in a dangerous scramble.

The tiny figure on his back was being thrown about brutally. One instant she seemed to be on his neck, the next she was flung back onto his haunches, as Shooting Star plunged and heaved to keep his balance.

"We have them now, Tom. There it is. There is the line, right under your nose." Zouga pointed his head.

"They cannot catch us now. Go, old man, go!" Tom's hooves cracked on the hard earth like the beat of a joyous drummer. The crossing of the thorns had been cruel work, but it had rested him and he was pushing hard now.

"Waie hole!" Zouga called to him, and Tom flicked his ears reproachfully. He had seen it before Zouga had, and he jinked around the burrow neatly, while the heads of the curious little ground squirrels bobbed out of the earth as they passed.

The ground was rotten with their warrens, but Tom barely checked his gallop, swinging to avoid the mounds of freshly-turned earth, or occasionally stretching out to step over an entrance hole.

The ground squirrels were almost indistinguishable from their northern cousins, except for the stripe down their furry backs and their terrestrial habit. They stood on their hind legs, like small groups of spectators at the entrance of each warren, their expressions comically astonished and their long bushy tails curled over their backs as Tom pounded past them.

Zouga looked over his shoulder. Shooting Star was off the steep slope of the hills, down onto the open plain, and it was apparent that he was burning the last reserves of his great strength, coming on in a blazing run, driving with his forelegs, and then bunching up his sweat drenched hindquarters to hurl himself into the next stride. Louise was pushing him with her arms, like a washerwoman working over the scrubbing board, but she was too far behind for Zouga to see the expression on her face.

Much too far behind, half a mile behind, and there was less than a mile to run to the line of gaily coloured bunting that marked the finish.

Zouga could clearly see the crowds on each side of the posts, thick as bees at the entrance to the hive, and others were running for the wagons to join them.

He could hear the faint pop of gunfire, see the little spurts of gunsmoke jumping up above the heads of the crowd as his supporters fired into the air in jubilation.

Soon he would hear their voices, catch the sound of their cheers, even above the beat of Tom's hooves.

It was all over. He had won. He had won back his claims, the cherished image of the falcon god, and the five thousand pounds with which he could take his family away to a new life. He had taken on the gods of chance and won.

He had only one regret, that the courage of the horse and rider behind him had been in vain. Careful not to unbalance Tom's heavy unlovely gallop, he looked back under his own arm.

By God, she had not yet accepted defeat. She was driving with all her strength and all her heart, pushing the horse as hard as she pushed herself, coming on so swiftly that Zouga glanced uneasily over Tom's pricked ears to reassure himself as to the proximity of the finish line. No, there was no chance, even at that tremendous speed, Shooting Star could never catch them.

Already he could hear the voices of the crowd, make out their individual faces, even recognize Pickering, the chief steward, on his seat on the wagon, and beside him Rhodes" unmistakable bulk and the mop of unruly hair.

With him to witness it, Zouga's triumph was complete.

He turned for the last time to look back at Shooting Star, just in time to see him fall. It had been much too fast, too uncontrolled, that wild gallop across ground rotten with squirrel warrens. Shooting Star's front legs went from under him. Zouga imagined he could hear the bone break, like the crack of a pistol shot, and the huge horse went down from full gallop, shoulder first, neck twisted around in an agonized contortion'like that of a dying flamingo; dust flew up in a cloud, blanketing them, and above it the stallion's hooves kicked spasmodically, convulsively, and then sagged.

The pale beige dust cloud drifted aside, revealing the tragic tangle of horse and rider. Shooting Star lay on his side and, as Zouga reined in and swung Tom's nose back the way he had come, the great stallion made a feeble effort to lift his head off the ground and then let it fall back weakly.

Louise's body had been flung clear. She lay curled like a sleeping child on the bare earth, very still, very small.

"Ha, Tom, ha!"Zouga urged him to greater speed. He was shocked at the sense of utter desolation that assailed him as he galloped back to where she lay. There was something so final, so terribly chilling in her stillness, in the complete relaxation, the lifelessness of that tiny crumpled body.

"Please God," Zouga spoke aloud, his throat seared by dust and thirst and dread. "Please don't let it be."

He imagined the lovely delicate neck twisted at an impossible angle against the shattered vertebrae. He imagined the awful bloodless depression in the delicate dome of her skull; he imagined those huge dark eyes, open and staring, the inner glow fading, he imagined, oh God, he imagined, Then he was kicking his feet clear of the stirrups and jumping down even while Tom was at full gallop, stumbling to keep his balance and then running to where she lay.

Louise uncurled her body and rolled lightly to her feet.

"Come, darling, up darling," she called to Shooting Star, as she ran to him. The stallion lunged once, twice and then he was standing, head up.

"What a clever darling," Louise laughed, but with the huskiness of excitement and the tremor of heart-breaking exertion in the sound of it.

She did not have the strength left to vault for the saddle, and for a moment she hopped with one foot in the stirrup before she could find the energy to swing her other leg up over Shooting Star's back, while Zouga stood and gaped at her.

From the saddle she looked down at Zouga. "Playing dead is an old Blackfoot Indian's trick, Major."

Louise swung the stallion's head towards the finish line.

"Let's see you run the last lap on equal terms," she challenged, and Shooting Star jumped away at full gallop.

For a moment Zouga could not bring himself to believe that she had taught the stallion to fall so convincingly, and to lie so still. Then suddenly his concern for her safety, the desolate feeling of believing her dead or maimed turned to fury and outrage.

As he ran back to where Tom stood, he yelled after her.

"Madam, you are a cheat, may God forgive you for that."

She turned in the saddle and waved gaily. "Sir, you are gullible, but I will forgive you for that."

And Shooting Star bore her away towards the finish at a pace that poor Tom could never match.

Zouga Ballantyne was drunk. It was the first time in the twenty-two years they had been together that Jan Cheroot had seen him so.

He sat very erect on the high-backed deal chair, and his face above the beard had a strange waxen look to it.

His eyes were glazed over with the same soapy sheen of uncut diamonds, The third bottle of Cape Brandy stood on the green baize of the table between them, and as Zouga fumbled for it, he knocked it over. The spirit glugged loudly from the mouth, and soaked into the cloth.

Jan Cheroot snatched it upright, with a shocked oath.

"Man, if you want to lose the Devil's Own, I don't mind, but, when you spill the brandy, that's another thing."

Jan Cheroot stumbled a little over the words; they had been drinking since an hour before sundown.

"What am I going to tell the boys?" mumbled Zouga.

"Tell them that they are on holiday, for the first time in ten years. We are all on holiday."

Jan Cheroot poured brandy into Zouga's mug, and pushed it closer to his hand. Then he poured a good dram into his own, thought about it for a moment, and added as much again.

"I have lost everything Old Jan."

"Ja," Jan Cheroot said cheerfully. "And that was not very much, was it."

"I have lost the claims."

"Good." jan Cheroot nodded. "For ten years those double-damned squares of dirt ate our souls away, and starved us while they were doing it."

"I have lost the bird."

"Good again!" Jan Cheroot swigged his brandy, and smacked his lips with appreciation. "Let mister Rhodes have his share of bad luck now.

That bird will finish him, as it nearly finished us. Send it to him as soon as you can, and thank God to be rid of it."

Slowly Zouga lowered his face into his hands, covering his eyes and his mouth, so that his voice was muffled.

"Jan Cheroot. It's all over. For me the road to the north is closed. My dream is finished. It's all been for nothing."

The bibulous grin faded slowly and Jan Cheroot's yellow face puckered with deep compassion.

"it is not finished, you are still young and strong with two strong sons."

"We shall lose them too, soon, very soon."

"Then you will have me, old friend, like it has always been."

Zouga lifted his head out of his hands and stared at the little Hottentot.

"What are we going to do, Jan Cheroot?"

"We are going to finish this bottle and then open another," Jan Cheroot told him firmly.

In the morning they loaded the soapstone idol into the gravel cart, and laid it on a bed of straw; then Zouga spread a stained and tattered tarpaulin over it and Jordan helped him rope it down.

Neither of them spoke, until they were finished, and then Jordan whispered so softly that Zouga barely caught the words.

"You can't let it go, Papa." And Zouga turned to look at his younger son, truly seeing him for the first time in many years.

With a small shock he realized that Jordan was a man.

In imitation of Ralph perhaps, he also had grown a moustache. It was a dense coppery gold, and accentuated the gentle line of his mouth, yet, if anything, the man was more beautiful than the child had been.

"Is there no way we can keep it?" Jordan persisted, with a thin edge of desperation in his voice, and Zouga went on staring at him. How old was he now? Over nineteen years, and yesterday he had been a baby, little Jordie.

Everything was changed.

Zouga turned away from him, and placed his hand on the tarpaulin-wrapped burden in the bottom of the cart.

"No, Jordan. It was a wager, a matter of honour."

"But, Mama -" Jordan started and then broke off abruptly as Zouga looked back at him sharply.

"What about Mama?" he demanded, and Jordan looked away and flushed, bringing up the colour under the velvety skin of his cheeks.

"Nothing," he said quickly, and went to the head of the lead mule.

"I will take the bird to mister Rhodes," he volunteered, and Zouga nodded immediately, relieved that he would be spared this painful duty.

"Ask him when he will be free to sign the transfer of the claims."

Zouga touched the wrapped statue again as though in farewell and then he pulled his hand away, went up the steps onto the verandah and into the bungalow without looking back.

Jordan led the mules out into the rutted road and swung them towards the settlement. He walked bareheaded in the sunlight. He was tall and slim and he moved with a peculiar grace, stepping lightly and lithely in the soft red dust. His chin was up, his eyes focused far ahead, with the dreaming, yet all-seeing, gaze of a poet.

Men and women, especially women, looked after him as he passed and their expressions softened, but Jordan walked on as though he were alone on a deserted street.

Though his lips never moved, the words of the invocation to the goddess Panes kept running through his mind.

"- Why did you run away? You would have been better with us -" So many times he had called to the goddess, the words were part of his very existence. "Will you not come back to us, great Panes?"

The goddess was going, and Jordan did not believe he could support the agony of it. Statue, goddess and mother were all one in his mind, his last link with Aletta. Aletta who had become Panes.

He felt desolate, bereaved as though of his dearest love, and when he reached the milkwood fence of Rhodes' camp, he stopped and wild fancies seized him. He would take the goddess, run with her into the wilderness, hide her in some distant cave. His heart bounded. No, he would take her back to the ancient ruined city from which she had come, that far place in the north from which his father had stolen her, where she would be safe.

Then with a plunge of his spirits and a slide of despair in his guts he knew that these were childish dreamings and that he was no longer a child.

With a light touch on the lead mule's bridle, he guided her into the camp, and Rhodes was standing at the front door of his bungalow, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves. He was talking quietly, urgently to a man below the stoep.

Jordan recognized him as one of the Central Diamond Company overseers.

When Rhodes looked up and saw Jordan, he dismissed the overseer with a curt word and a nod.

jordan," Rhodes" greeting was grave, perhaps he sensed the mood of the young man before him, "you have brought it?"

When Jordan nodded, he turned back to the waiting overseer.

"Bring four of your best men," he ordered. "I want this cart unloaded, and carefully. It's a valuable work of art."

He watched keenly as they untied the ropes that held the tarpaulin in place, but cocked the large curly head when Jordan spoke.

"If we have to lose it, then I'm glad it's you that it goes to, mister Rhodes."

"The bird means something to you also, Jordan?"

"Everything," Jordan said simply, and then caught himself; that sounded ridiculous. mister Rhodes would think him strange. "I mean, it has been in my family since before I was born. I don't really know what it will be like without that goddess. I don't really want to think about losing it."

"You don't have to lose it, Jordan."

Jordan looked at him, unable to bring himself to ask the meaning.

"You can follow the goddess, Jordan."

"Please don't tease me, mister Rhodes."

1you are bright and willing, you have studied Pitman's shorthand, and you have an excellent pen," Rhodes said.

"I need a secretary, somebody who knows and loves diamonds as I do. Somebody whom I feel easy with.

Somebody I know and whom I like. Somebody I can trust. Jordan felt a vast soaring rush of joy, something sharper, brighter and more poignant than he had ever known before. He could not speak; he stood rooted and stared into the pale blue and beautiful eyes of the man whom he had worshipped for so many years.

"Well, Jordan, I am offering you the position. Do you want it?"

"Yes," Jordan said softly. "More than anything on earth, mister Rhodes."

"Good, then your first task is to find a place to set up the bird."

The white overseer had pulled the tarpaulin aside to expose the statue, and the sheet hung down over the side of the cart.

"Easy now," he shouted at the gang of black labourers.

"Get a rope on it. Don't drop it. Watch that end, damn YOU.

They swarmed over the statue, too many of them for the job, getting in one another's way, and Jordan's heady joy at Rhodes" offer was submerged in a quick stab of concern for the safety of the bird.

He started forward to set the ropes himself, but at that moment there was the clatter of hooves and Neville Pickering rode into the yard. He was astride his mare, a highly bred and finely mettled bay, and he reined her down to a walk.

He shot a glance at Jordan, and his face clouded for an instant, a quick show of irritation, or of something else.

With a sudden intuitive flash Jordan realized that Pickering resented his presence here.

Then as quickly as it had come the shadow passed from Pickering's handsome features and he smiled that sunny charming smile of his and looked down at the statue in the cart.

"What have we here?" His tone was gay, his manner carefree and relaxed. As always he was elegantly dressed, the drape of broadcloth showing off his broad shoulders, the tooled leather belt emphasizing his narrow waist, as the polished half boots did the length and shape of his legs. The low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat was cocked forward over one eye, and he was smiling.

"Oh, the bird." He looked up at Rhodes on the stoep of the bungalow. "So you have it at last, as you said you would. I should congratulate you."

The day had been still and too hot, it would change soon. The wind would-come out of the south and the temperature would plunge, but until then the only movements of air were the sudden little dust devils that sprang out of nowhere, small but violent whirlwinds that lifted a high churning vortex of dust and dry grass and dead leaves a hundred or more feet into the still sky as they sped in a wildly erratic course across the plain, and then just as suddenly collapsed and disintegrated into nothingness again.

One of these dust devils rose now, on the open ground beyond the milkwood hedge. It tore a dense red cloud of spinning dust off the surface of the road, then swerved abruptly and raced into the yard of Rhodes" camp. Jordan felt his heart gripped in a cold vice of superstitious dread.

"Panes!" The cry was silent in his head. "Great Panes!"

He knew what that wind was " he knew the presence of the goddess, for how many times had she come to his invocation? Suddenly the whole yard was filled with the swirling torrents of dust, and the wind battered them. It flew into Jordan's face, so that he must slit his eyes against it. It flung his soft shiny curls into his face, and it flattened his shirt against his chest and his lean flat belly.

The broad-brimmed hat sailed from Pickering's head, the tails of his coat flogged into the small of his back and he lifted one hand to protect his face from the stinging sand and sharp pieces of twig and grass.

Then the wind got under the ragged old tarpaulin, and filled it with a crack like a ship's mainsail gybing onto the ovvosite tack.

The harsh canvas lashed the bay mare's head, and she reared up on her back legs, whinnying shrilly with panic.

So high she went that Jordan thought she would go over on her back, and through the red raging curtain of dust, he jumped to catch her head; but he was an instant too late. Pickering had one hand to his face, and the mare's leap took him off balance; he went over backwards out of the saddle, and he hit hard earth with the back of his neck and one shoulder.

The rushing sound of the whirlwind, the grunt of air driven from Pickering's lungs and the meaty thump of his fall almost covered the tiny snapping sound of bone breaking somewhere deep in his body.

Then the mare came down from her high prancing dance, and she flattened immediately into full gallop.

She flew at the gateway in the milkwood hedge, and Pickering was dragged after her, his ankle trapped in the steel of the stirrup, his body slithering and bouncing loosely across the earth.

As the mare swerved to take the gap in the hedge, Pickering was flung into the hedge, and the white thorns, each as long as a man's forefinger, were driven into his flesh like needles.

Then he was plucked away, out into the open ground, sledging over rocky earth, striking and flattening the small wiry bushes as the mare jumped them, his body totally relaxed and his arms flung out behind him.

One moment the back of his head was slapping against the earth, and the next his ankle had twisted in the stirrup and he was face down, the skin being smeared from his cheeks and forehead by the harsh abrasive earth.

Jordan found himself racing after him, his breath sobbing with horror, calling to the mare.

"Whoa, girl! Steady, girl!"

But she was maddened, firstly terrified by the wind and the flirt of canvas into her face, and now by the unfamiliar weight that dragged and slithered at her heels.

She reached the slope of the trailing dumps and swerved again, and this time, mercifully, the stirrup leather parted with a twang. Freed of her burden, the mare galloped away down the pathway between the dumps.

Jordan dropped on his knees beside Pickering's inert crumpled body. He lay face down; the expensive broadcloth was ripped and dusty, the boots scuffed through to white leather beneath.

Gently, supporting his head in cupped hands, Jordan rolled him onto his back, turning his face out of the dust so that he could breathe. Pickering's face was a bloodied mask, caked with dust, a flap of white skin hanging off his cheek, but his eyes were wide open.

Despite the complete deathlike relaxation of his arms and body, Pickering was fully conscious. His eyes swivelled to Jordan's face, and his lips moved.

Jordie," he whispered. "I can't feel anything, nothing at all. Numb, my hands, my feet, my whole body numb."

They carried him back in a blanket, a man at each corner, and laid him gently on the narrow iron-framed cot in the bedroom next door to Rhodes" own room.

Doctor Jameson came within the hour, and he nodded when he saw how Jordan had bathed and dressed his injuries and the arrangements he had made for his comfort.

"Good. Who taught you?" But he did not wait for an answer. "Here!" he said. "I'll need your help." And he handed Jordan his bag, shrugged out of his jacket and rolled his sleeves.

"Get out," he said to Rhodes. "You'll be in the way here."

It took Jameson only minutes to make certain that the paralysis below the neck was complete, and then he looked up at Jordan, making sure that he was out of sight of Pickering's alert, fever-bright eyes, and he shook his head curtly.

"I'll be a minute," he said. "I must speak with mister Rhodes."

"Jordie," Pickering whispered painfully, the moment Jameson left the room, and Jordan stooped to his lips.

"It's my neck, it's broken."

"No."

"Be quiet. Listen." Pickering frowned at the interruption. "I think I always knew, that it would be you. One way or the other, it would be you He broke off, fresh sweat blistered on his forehead, but he made another terrible effort to speak. "I thought I hated you. But not any more, not now. There is not enough time left for hate."

He did not speak again, not that night, nor the following day. But at dusk when the heat in the tiny ironwalled room abated a little, he opened his eyes again and looked up at Rhodes. It was frightening to see how low he had sunk. The fine bones of forehead and cheeks seemed to gleam through the translucent skin, and his eyes had receded into dark bruised cavities.

Rhodes leaned his great shaggy head over him until his ear touched Pickering's dry white lips. The whisper was so light, like a dead leaf blown softly across a roof at midnight, and Jordan could not hear the words, but Rhodes clenched his lids closed over his pale blue eyes as though in mortal anguish.

"Yes," he answered, almost as softly as the dying man.

"Yes, I know, Pickling."

When Rhodes opened his eyes again they were flooded with bright tears, and his colour was a frightening mottled purple.

"He's dead, Jordan," he choked, and put one hand on his own chest, pressing hard as though to calm the beat of his swollen heart.

Then quite slowly, deliberately, he lowered his head again, and kissed the broken, torn lips of the man on the iron-framed cot.

Zouga thought the voice was part of his dream, so sweet, so low, and yet tremulous and filled with some dreadful appeal. Then he was awake, and the voice was still calling, and now there was a light tap on the window above the head of his bed.

"I'm coming," Zouga answered, as low as he was called.

He did not have to ask who it was.

He dressed swiftly, in total darkness, instinct warning him not to light a candle, and he carried his boots in his hand as he stepped out onto the stoep of the cottage.

The height of the moon told him that it was after midnight, but he barely glanced at it before turning to the figure that leaned against the wall beside the door.

"Are you alone?" he demanded softly. There was something in the way the figure slumped that frightened him.

"Yes." The distress, the pain, were clear in her voice now that they were so close.

"You should not have come here, not alone, missis Sint John."

"There was nobody else to turn to."

"Where is Mungo. Where is your husband?"

"He is in trouble, terrible, terrible, trouble."

"Where is he?"

"I left him out beyond the Cape crossroad."

For a moment her voice choked on her, and then it came out with a forceful rush.

He's hurt. Wounded, badly wounded."

"Her voice had risen, so that she might rouse Jan Cheroot and the boys. Zouga took her arm to calm and quieten her, and immediately she fell against him. The feel of her body shocked him, but he could not pull away.

"I'm afraid, Zouga. I'm afraid he might die." It was the first time she had used his given name.

"What happened?"

"Oh God!" She was weeping now, clinging to him, and he realized how hard-pressed she was. He slipped his arm around her waist and led her down the verandah.

In the kitchen he seated her on one of the hard deal chairs, and then lit the candle. He was shocked again when he saw her face. She was pale and shaking, her hair in wild disorder a smear of dirt on one cheek and her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot.

He poured coffee from the blue enamel pot at the back of the stove. It was thick as molasses. He added a dram of brandy to it.

"Drink it."

She shuddered and gasped at the potent black brew, but it seemed to steady her a little.

"I didn't want him to go. I tried to stop him. I was sick of it.

I told him I couldn't take it any more, the cheating and lying. The shame and the running, "

"You aren't making sense," he told her brusquely, and she took a deep breath and started again.

"Mungo went to meet a man tonight. The man was going to bring him a parcel of diamonds, a parcel of diamonds worth one hundred thousand pounds. And Mungo was going to buy them for two thousand."

Zouga's face set grimly, and he sat down opposite her and stared at her. His expression intimidated her.

"Oh God, Zouga. I know. I hated it too. I have lived with it so long, but he promised me that this would be the last time."

"Go on," Zouga commanded.

"But he didn't have two thousand, Zouga. We are almost broke, a few pounds is all that we have left."

This time Zouga could not contain himself and he broke in.

"The letter of credit, half a million pounds "Forged," she said quietly.

"Go on."

"He didn't have the money to pay for the diamonds and I knew what he was going to do. I tried to stop him, I swear it to you."

"I believe you."

"He arranged to meet this man tonight, at a place out on the Cape road."

"Do you know the man's name?"

"I'm not sure. I think so." She passed her hand over her eyes. "He is a coloured man, a Griqua, Henry, no, Hendrick Somebody "Hendrick Naaiman?"

right! Naaiman, that's it."

"He's an I.D.B. trap."

"Police?"

"Yes, police."

"Oh sweet God, it's even worse than I thought."

"What happened?" Zouga insisted.

"Mungo made me wait for him at the crossroads and he went to the rendezvous alone. He said he needed to protect himself, he took his pistol. He went on my horse, on Shooting Star, and then I heard the gunfire."

She took another gulp of the coffee and coughed at the burn of it.

"He came back. He had been shot, and so had Shooting Star. They couldn't go any further, neither of them. They were both hard hit, Zouga. I hid them near the road and I came to you."

Zouga's voice was harsh. "Did Mungo kill him?"

"I don't know, Zouga. Mungo says the other man fired first and he only tried to protect himself."

"Mungo tried to hold him up and take the diamonds, without paying for them," Zouga guessed. "But Naaiman is a dangerous man."

"There were four empty cartridges in Mungo's pistol, but I don't know what happened to the policeman. I only know that Mungo escaped, but he is hurt very badly."

"Now keep quiet and rest for a while." He stood up and paced up and down the kitchen, his bare feet making no sound, his hands clasped at the small of the back.

Louise Sint John watched him anxiously, almost fearfully, until he stopped abruptly and turned to her.

"We both know what I should do. Your husband is I.D.B. he is a thief and by now he is probably a murderer."

"He is also your friend," she said simply. "And he is very badly wounded."

He resumed his pacing but now he was muttering to himself, troubled and scowling, and Louise twisted her fingers in her lap.

"Very well," he said at last. "I'll help you to get him away."

"Oh, Major Ballantyne, Zouga He silenced her with a frown. "Don't waste time talking. We'll need bandages, laudanum, food, "He was ticking off a list on his fingers. "You can't go like that.

They'll be watching for a woman. Jordan's cast-off clothes will fit you well enough, breeches, cap and coat, " Zouga walked at the flank of the mule, and the gravel cart was loaded with bales of thatching grass.

Louise lay silently in the hollow between two bales, with another ready to pull over herself if the cart was stopped.

The iron-shod wheels crunched in the sand, but the night dew had damped down the dust. The lantern on the tailboard of the cart swung and jiggled to the motion.

They had just passed the last house on the Cape road, and were drawing level with the cemetery when there was the dust-muffled beat of hooves from behind them and Louise only just had time to drop down and cover herself before a small group of riders swept out of the darkness and overtook them.

As they galloped through the arc of lantern light, Zouga saw they were all armed. He stooped and lowered his chin into the collar of his greatcoat and the woollen cap was pulled low over his eyes. One of the riders pulled up his horse and shouted to Zouga.

"Hey, you! Have you seen anybody on this road tonight?"

"Niemand me! Nobody!" Zouga answered in the taal, and the sound of the guttural dialect reassured the man.

He wheeled his horse and galloped on after his companions.

When the sound of hooves had died away Zouga spoke quietly.

"That means that Naaiman got away to spread the word. Unless he dies of his wounds later, it's not murder."

"Please God," Louise whispered.

"It also means that you cannot try to get out on either the Cape road or the road to the Transvaal. They will be watched."

"Which way can we go?"

if I were you I would take the track north, it goes to Kuruman. There is a mission station there, it's run by my grandfather. His name is Doctor Moffat. He will give you shelter, and Mungo will need a doctor. Then when Mungo is strong enough, you can try to reach German or Portuguese territory and get out through Mideritz Bay or Lourenqo Marques."

Neither of them spoke for a long time as Zouga trudged on beside the mule, and Louise crawled out to sit on the bench of the cart, it was she who broke the silence.

"I am so tired of running. We seem to have run out of lands, America, Canada, Australia, we cannot go back to any of them."

"You could go home to France," Zouga said, "to your sons."

Louise's head jerked up. "Why do you say that?"

"When Mungo and I first met he told me about you, his wife, that you were of a noble French family. He told me that you and he had three sons."

Louise's chin sank onto her chest and Jordan's cloth cap covered her eyes.

"I have no sons," she said. "But oh how I pray that one day I may have. I belong to a noble family, Yes, but not French. My grandmother was the daughter of Hawk Flies Lightly, the Blackfoot War Chief."

"I don't understand, Mungo told me "He told you about the woman who is his wife, Madame Solange de Montijo Sint John., Louise was silent again, and Zouga had to ask: "She is dead?"

"Their marriage was unhappy. No, she is not dead. She returned with their three sons to France at the beginning of the Civil War. He has not seen her since."

"Then she and Mungo are," Zouga hesitated over the unsavoury word, "divorced?"

"She is a Catholic," Louise replied simply; and it was fully five minutes before either of them spoke again.

"Yes," Louise said. "What you are thinking is correct.

Mungo and I are not married; we could not be."

"It's not my business," Zouga murmured, and yet what she had said did not shock him. He felt instead a strange lightness of spirit, a kind of glowing joy.

"It's a relief to speak completely honestly," she explained. "After all the lies. Somehow it had to be you, Zouga. I could never have admitted all this to anybody else."

"Do you love him?" Zouga's voice was rough-edged, brusque.

"Once I loved him completely, without restraint, wildly, madly."

"And now?"

"I do not know, there have been so many lies, so much shame, so much to hide."

"Why do you stay with him, Louise?"

"Because now he needs me."

I understand that." His voice was gentler. He did understand, he truly did. "Duty is a harsh and unforgiving master. And yet you have a duty to yourself also."

The mules plodded on in the darkness, and the swinging lantern did not light the face of the woman on the bench, but once she sighed, and it was a sound to twist Zouga's heart.

"Louise," he spoke at last. "I am not doing this for Mungo, even a friendship cannot condone deliberate robbery and premeditated murder."

She did not reply.

"Many times you must have seen the way I have looked at you, for, God knows, I could not help myself."

Still she was silent.

"You did know," he insisted. "You, as a woman, must know how I feel."

"Yes," she said at last.

"When I thought you were married to a friend, it was hopeless. Now, at least, I can tell you how I feel."

"Zouga, please don't."

"I would do anything you asked me to, even protect a murderer, that is how I feel for you."

"Zouga "I have never known anybody so beautiful and bright and brave "I am not any of those things "I could put you and Mungo on the road to Kuruman and then go back to Kimberley and tell the diamond police where to find you. They would take Mungo, and then you would be free."

"You could," she agreed. "But you never would. Both of us are tied, Zouga, by our own peculiar sense of duty and of honour., "Louise, "

"We have arrived," she said, with patent relief. "The crossroads. Turn off the road here."

From the bench she guided him as he threaded the cart through the scattered bush and the high wheels bumped over rock and rough ground. A quarter of a mile from the road there stood a massive camel-thorn tree, silver and high as a hill in the moonlight. Beneath its spread branches the moon shadow was black and impenetrable.

From the darkness a hoarse voice challenged.

"Stand where you are! Don't come any closer."

"Mungo, it's me and Zouga is with me."

Louise jumped down from the cart, lifted the lantern off its bracket and went forward, stooping under the branches. Zouga tethered the mules and then followed her. Louise was kneeling beside Mungo Sint John. He lay on a saddle blanket, propped on the silver ornamented Mexican saddle.

"Thank you for coming," he greeted Zouga, and his voice was ragged with pain.

"How badly are you hit?"

"Badly enough," he admitted. "Do you have a cheroot?"

Zouga lit one from the lantern and handed it to him.

Louise was unwrapping the torn strips of shirt and petticoat that were bound about his chest.

"Shotgun?" Zouga asked tersely.

"No, thank God," Mungo said. "Pistol."

"You are lucky," Zouga grunted. "Naaiman's usual style is a sawed-off shotgun. He would have blown you in half."

"You know him, Naaiman?"

"He's a police trap."

"Police," Mungo whispered. "Oh God."

"Yes," Zouga nodded. "You are in trouble."

"I didn't know."

"Does it really matter?" Zouga asked. "You planned an I.D.B. switch, and you knew you might have to kill a man."

"Don't preach to me, Zouga."

"All right." Zouga squatted next to Louise as she exposed the wound in Mungo's back. "And it looks as though it missed the bloody lymph, set in a livid spread of bruise."

Between them they lifted Mungo into a sitting position.

"Through and through," Zouga murmured, as he saw the exit wound in Mungo's back. "And it looks as though it missed the lung. You are luckier than you'll ever know."

"One stayed in," Mungo Sint John contradicted him, and reached down to his own leg. His breeches had been split down the leg, and now he pulled the bloodstained cloth aside to reveal a strip of pale thigh in the centre of which was another vicious little round opening from which fluid wept like blackcurrant juice.

"The bullet is still in," Mungo repeated.

"Bone?" Zouga asked.

"No." Sint John shook his head. "I don't think so. I was still able to walk on it."

"There is no chance of trying to cut the bullet out.

Louise knows where she can find a doctor, and I have told her how to get there."

"Louise?" Mungo asked with a sardonic twist of his lips.

She did not look up, concentrating on the task of painting the skin around the wounds with iodine. Mungo was staring at Zouga, his single eye gleaming, and Zouga felt the scar on his cheek throb and he did not trouble to hide his anger.

"You don't think I am doing this for you," he demanded. "I hate I.D.B. as much as any digger on the workings, and I'm not that complacent about deliberate robbery and murder." And he took the pistol from the blanket where it lay at Mungo's side.

He checked the load as he walked to where Shooting Star stood, head down in the moonlight beyond the camel-thorn tree.

The stallion lifted his head, and blew a fluttery breath through his nostrils as Zouga approached; then he shifted his weight awkwardly and painfully on three legs.

"There, boy. Easy, boy." Zouga ran his hands down the animal's flank. it was sticky with drying blood, and Shooting Star whickered as he touched the wound.

Behind the ribs, bullet hole, and Zouga sniffed at it quickly. The bullet had pierced the bowel or the intestines, he could smell it.

Zouga went down on one knee and gently felt the foreleg that the stallion was favouring. He found the damage, another bullet wound. It had struck a few inches above the fetlock and the bone was shattered. Yet the horse had carried Mungo, a big heavy man, and it had brought him many miles. The agony must have been dreadful, but the stallion's great heart had carried them through.

Zouga. shrugged off his greatcoat and wrapped it around the pistol in his right hand. A shot could alert the searching bands on the not too distant road.

"There, boy," Zouga whispered, and touched the muzzle to the forehead between the horse's eyes.

The cloth muffled the shot. It was a dull blurt of sound, and the stallion dropped heavily on his side and never even kicked.

Louise was still bowed over Mungo, tying the knots in the bandage, but Zouga saw that her eyes were bright with tears in the moonlight.

"Thank you," she whispered. "I couldn't have done it myself."

Zouga helped her lift Mungo to the cart. Mungo's breath whistled in his chest and the sweat of agony drenched his shir t and smelled rancid and gamey.

They settled him into the nest of thatching grass and spread a screen of it over him. Then Zouga led the mules on over the veld until they struck the track that led nor thwards towards the Vaal river, and beyond it Kuruman and the vast Kalahari Desert.

"Travel at night, and hobble the mules to graze during the day," Zouga told her. "There is more than enough meal and biltong; but you will have to spare the coffee and sugar."

"Words cannot thank you enough," she whispered.

"Don't attempt the main drift of the Vaal."

"Somehow I know that this is not goodbye." She seemed not to have heard the advice. "And when we meet again," she broke off.

"Go on," he said, but she shook her head and took the reins from his hand and led the mules onto the track.

The cart seemed to merge into the night, and the heels made no sound in the thick pale sand. Zouga stood staring after them, long after they had disappeared , and then Louise came back.

She came silent as a wraith, running with a kind of terrible desperation, the long tresses of hair had fallen out from under the cap and were streaming down her back. Her face was pale and stricken in the moonlight.

The grip of her arms about his neck was fierce, almost painful, and her mouth was shockingly hot and wet as it spread over his. But the taste of it he would never forget, and her sharp white teeth crushed his lips.

For seconds only they clung to each other, while Zouga thought his heart would burst; then she tore herself from his arms, and with neither a word nor a backward glance, she flew into the night, and was gone.

Ten days after Neville Pickering's funeral, Zouga signed the transfer deeds to the Devil's Own claims, and watched while one of Rhodes" secretaries registered them in favour of the Central Diamond Company. Then he walked out into the cold.

For the first time in living memory it was snowing over the diamond fields. Big soft flakes came twisting down like feathers from a shimmering white egret struck by birdshot.

The snowflakes vanished as they touched the earth, but the cold was a vindictive presence and Zouga's breath steamed in the air and condensed on his beard as he trudged up to the workings to watch the shift come off the Devil's Own claims for the last time. As he walked he tried to compose the words to tell Ralph that this was the last shift.

They were coming up in the skip. Zouga could make out Ralph, for he was the only man who wore a coat.

The other men with him were almost naked.

Once again Zouga wondered idly that the men had not rebelled against the harsh measures of the new Diamond Trade Act, enforced by Colonel John Fry of the recently recruited Diamond Police, and aimed at stamping out I.D.B. on the fields.

Nowadays the black workers were compounded behind barbed wire; there were new curfew regulations to keep them in the compounds after nightfall; and there were spot searches and checks of the compounds, of men on the streets even during daylight, and body searches of each shift coming out of the pit.

Even the diggers, or at least a few of them, had protested at the most draconian of John Fry's new regurations. All black workers had been forced to go into the pit stark naked, so that they would not be able to hide stones in their clothing.

John Fry had been amazed when Zouga and a dozen other diggers had demanded to see him.

"Good Lord, Ballantyne, but they are a bunch of naked savages anyway. Modesty, forsooth!"

in the end, with the cooperation of Rhodes, they had forced him to compromise.

Grudgingly Fry had allowed every worker a strip of seamless cotton "limbo" to cover himself.

Thus Bazo and his Matabele wore only a strip of loincloth each as they rode up beside Ralph in the skip. The wind threw an icy noose about them, and Bazo shivered as goose-bumps rose upon the smooth dark skin of his chest and upper arms.

Above him stood Ralph Ballantyne, balancing easily on the rim of the steel skip, ignoring the wind and the deadly drop below him.

Ralph glanced down at Bazo crouching below the side of the steel bucket, and on impulse slipped the scrap of stained canvas off his own shoulders. Under it Ralph wore an old tweed jacket and dusty cardigan.

He dropped the canvas over Bazo's neck.

"It's against the white man's law," Bazo demurred, and made as if to shrug it off.

"There are no police in this skip," Ralph grunted, and Bazo hesitated a moment and then crouched lower and gratefully pulled the canvas over his head and shoulders.

Ralph took the butt of a half-smoked cheroot from his breast pocket, and carefully reshaped it between his fingers; the dead ash flaked away on the wind and wafted down into the yawning depths below. He lit the butt and drew the smoke down deeply, exhaled and drew again, held the smoke and passed the butt to Bazo.

"You are not only cold, but you are unhappy," Ralph said, and Bazo did not answer. He cupped the stubby cheroot in both hands and drew carefully upon it.

"Is it Donsela?" Ralph asked. "He knew the law, Bazo.

He knows what the law says of those who steal the stones."

"It was a small stone," murmured Bazo, the words and blue smoke mingled on his lips. "And fifteen years is a long time."

"He is alive," Ralph pointed out and took the cheroot that Bazo passed back to him. "In the old days before the Diamond Trade Act, he would be dead by now."

"He might as well be dead," Bazo whispered bitterly.

"They say that men work like animals, chained like monkeys, on the breakwater wall at Cape Town harbour., He drew again on the cheroot and it burned down with a fierce little glow that scorched his fingers. He crushed it out on the workhardened calluses of his palm and let the shreds of tobacco blow away.

"And you, Henshaw, are you then so happy?" he asked quietly, and Ralph shrugged.

"Happy? Who is happy?"

"Is not this pit", with a gesture Bazo took in the mighty excavation over which they dangled, "is not this your prison, does it not hold you as surely as the chains that hold Donsela as he places the rocks on the breakwater over the sea?"

They had almost reached the high stagings and Bazo slipped off his canvas covering before he could be spotted by one of the black constables who patrolled the area inside the new security fences.

"You ask me if I am unhappy." Bazo stood up, and did not look at Ralph's face. "I was thinking of the land in which I am a prince of the House of Kumalo. In that land the calves I tended as a boy have grown into bulls and have bred calves which I have never seen. Once I knew every beast in my father's herds, fifteen thousand head of prime cattle, and I knew each of them, the season of its birth, the twist of its horns and the markings of its hide."

Bazo sighed and came to stand beside Ralph on the rim of the skip.

They were of a height, two tall young n, well formed, and each, in the manner of his race, becomely.

"Ten times I have not been with my impi when it danced the Festival of Fresh Fruits, ten times I did not witness my king throw the war-spear and send us out on the red road."

Bazo's sombre mood deepened, and his voice sank lower.

"Boys have grown to men since I left, and some Of them wear the cowtails of valour on their legs and arms."

Bazo glanced down at his own naked body with its single dirty rag at the waist. "Little girls have grown into maidens, with ripe bellies, ready to be claimed by the warriors who have won the honour on the red road of war." And both of them thought of the lonely nights when the phantoms came to haunt them. Then Bazo folded his arms across his wide chest and went on.

"i think of my father, and I wonder if the snows of age have yet settled upon his head. Every man of my tribe that comes down the road from the north brings me the words of Juba, the Dove, who is my mother.

She has twelve sons, but I am the first and the eldest of them."

"Why have you stayed so long?" Ralph asked harshly.

"Why have you stayed so long Henshaw?" The young Matabele challenged him quietly, and Ralph had no answer.

"Have you found fame and riches in this hole?" Again they both glanced down into the pit, and from this height the off-shift waiting to come up in the skips were like columns of safari ants.

"Do you have a woman with hair as long and pale as the winter grass to give you comfort in the night, Henshaw? Do you have the music of your sons" laughter to cheer you, Henshaw? What keeps you here?"

Ralph lifted his eyes and stared at Bazo, but before he could find an answer the skip came level with the platform on the first ramp of the stagings. The jerk brought Ralph back to reality and he waved to his father on the platform above them.

The roar of the steam winch subsided. The skip slowed and Bazo led the party of Matabele workers onto the ramp. Ralph saw them all clear before he jumped across the narrow gap to the wooden platform and felt it tremble under the combined weight of twenty men.

Ralph signalled again. Then the winch growled, and the steel cable squealed in its sheaves. The heavy-laden skip ran on until it hit the striker blocks. Ralph and Bazo drove the jumper bars under it, and threw their full weight on them. The skip tipped over, and the load of gravel went roaring down the chute into the waiting cart.

Ralph looked up to see his father's encouraging smile and to hear his shouted congratulations.

"Well done, boy! Two hundred tons today!"

But the staging was deserted. Zouga had gone.

Zouga had packed a single chest, the chest that had belonged to Aletta and which had come up with her from the Cape. Now it was going back, and it was almost all that was going back.

Zouga put Aletta's Bible in the bottom of the chest, and with it her diary and the trinket box which contained the remaining pieces of her jewellery. The more valuable pieces had long ago been sold, to support the dying dream.

over these few mementoes he packed his own diaries and maps, and his books. When he came to the bundled pile of his unfinished manuscript, he paused to weigh it in his hand.

"Perhaps I shall find time to finish it now," he murmured, and laid it gently in the chest.

On top of that went his clothing, and there was so little of that, four shirts, a spare pair of boots, barely an armful.

The chest was only half-full, and he carried it easily down the steps into the yard. That was all that he was taking, the rest of it, the meagre furnishings of the bungalow he had sold to one of the auctioneers in Market Square. Ten pounds the lot. As Rhodes had predicted, he was leaving as he had come.

"Where is Ralph?" he demanded of Jan Cheroot, and the little Hotten tot paused in chaining the cooking-pot and black iron kettle onto the tailboard of the cart.

"Perhaps he stopped at Diamond Lil's. The boy has got a right to his thirst, he worked hard enough for it."

Zouga let it pass, and instead ran an appraising eye over the cart. It was the newest and strongest of the three vehicles he owned. One cart had gone with Louise Sint John, and she had taken the best mules, but this rig would get them back to Cape Town, even under the additional burden that he was planning to put into it.

Jan Cheroot ambled across to Zouga and took the other handle of the chest, ready to boost it up into the body of the cart.

"Wait," Zouga told him. "That first." And he pointed to the roughly-hewn block of blue mottled rock that lay below the camel-thorn tree.

"My mother -" Jan Cheroot gaped. "This I don't believe.

In twenty-two years I've seen you do some stupid crazy things Zouga strode across to the block of blue ground that Ralph had brought up from the Devil's Own and put his foot on it. "We'll hoist it up with the block and tackle."

He glanced at the sturdy branch above his head from which the sheave block and manila rope hung. "And we'll back the cart up under it."

"That's it!" Jan Cheroot sat down on the chest and folded his arms. "This time I refuse. Once before I broke my back for you, but that was when I was young and stupid."

"Come on, Jan Cheroot, you are wasting time."

"What do you want with that, piece of ugly bloody stone? With another piece of thundering nonsense."

"I have lost the bird, I need a household god."

"I have heard of someone putting up a monument to a brave man, or a great battle, but to put up a stone to stupidity," Jan Cheroot mourried.

"Back the cart up."

"I refuse, this time I refuse. I won't do it. Not for anything. Not for any price."

"When we get it loaded, you can have a bottle of smoke all to yourself to celebrate."

Jan Cheroot sighed, and stood up. "That's my price."

He shook his head and came across to stand beside Zouga. He glared at the block of blue stone venomously.

"But don't expect me to like it."

Zouga chuckled, for the first time in weeks, and in an unusual display of affection he put one arm around Jan Cheroot's shoulders.

"Now that you have something to hate again, just think how happy it will make you," he said.

"You have been drinking," Zouga said, and Ralph tossed his hat into the corner and agreed.

"Yes, I have had a beer or two." He went to the black iron stove and warmed his hands. "I would have had more, if I had had the money."

"i have been waiting for you," Zouga went on, and Ralph turned back to him truculently.

"i give you every hour of my day, Papa, let me have a little time at the end of it."

"i have something of great importance to tell you," Zouga nodded to the deal chair facing him. "Sit down, Ralph."

Zouga rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb as he collected his words. He had tried so often in the last days to find an easy way to tell Ralph that it was over, that they were destitute, that all that toil and heartbreak had been in vain, but there was no easy way. There were only the stark hard words of reality.

He dropped his hand, and looked at his son, and then slowly and carefully he told him, and when he had finished he waited for Ralph to speak. Ralph had not moved during the long recital, and now he stared at Zouga stonily.

Zouga was forced to speak again. "We shall leave in the morning. Jan Cheroot and I have loaded the number 2 wagon and we shall need all the mules, double team it's a long haul."

Again he waited, but there was still no reaction.

"You will be wondering where we are going and what we shall do. Well, once we get back to the Cape we still have the Harkness cottage."

"You gambled it all." Ralph spoke at last. "Without telling me. You, you, who are always preaching to me about gambling, and honesty."

"Ralph!"

"It wasn't yours, it belonged to all of us."

"You are drunk," Zouga said flatly.

"All these years I have listened to your promises. We shall go north, Ralph." He mimicked Zouga with a sudden savagery in his tone. "It's for all of us, Ralph. It's yours to share. There is a land waiting for us, Ralph. It will be yours as well as mine, Ralph., "It's not over, I still have the concession. When we get back to Cape Town-, "You, not me." Ralph's voice was flat, angry. "You go back to Cape Town. Go dream your old man's dreams. I am sick of them., "You dare to use that tone to me?"

"Yes, I dare. And by God, I'll dare more than that. I'll dare what you are too weak or afraid to dare"

"You insolent and stupid puppy!"

"You toothless old dog!"

Zouga threw himself half across the table, and his right arm lashed out. He caught Ralph open-handed across the face, and the crack of palm on flesh was stunning as a pistol shot.

Ralph's head snapped back, and then slowly he brought it upright again. "That," he said, "is the last time you will strike me, ever."

He stood up and strode towards the door, and there he turned. "Go dream your dreams I will go live mine out."

"Go then," said Zouga, and the scar on his cheek was glassy and white as ice. "Go and be damned to you., "Remember I took nothing with me, Papa, not even your blessing," said Ralph, and stepped out into the night.

Bazo woke instantly at the touch on his cheek, and reached for the assegai at his side, his eyes wide in the faint glow of the ashes. A hand closed on his wrist, holding his spear hand from the weapon, and a voice spoke softly above him.

"Do you remember the road to Matabeleland, O Prince of Kurnalo?"

It took Bazo a moment to gather his wits from where sleep had scattered them.

"I remember every running ford and every green hill, every sweet watering place along the way," he whispered back, "as clearly as I remember my father's voice and my Mother's laughter."

"Roll up your sleeping-mat, Bazo, the Axe, and show me the road," said Ralph.

Diamond Lil did not smile so readily these days, not since the tooth that held the diamond had turned a dingy grey as the root died, and began to ache until Lil wept with the little explosion of agony against the top of her skull. The travelling dentist from the Cape had pulled the tooth and drained the virulent abscess beneath it.

Relief had been immediate, but it left a black gap in her smile.

She had put on flesh also, the consequence of good food and those little nips of gin which bolstered her day.

Her breasts, always generous, had lost their individual definition and the cleavage that showed above the richly embroidered bodice was no longer a deeply sculptured crevasse but a thin line where abundant flesh packed against flesh.

The hand that held the bone china teacup was pudgy and dimpled over the knuckles, the rings that adorned each plump little finger had sunk into the flesh, but the diamonds and rubies and emeralds sparkled in a royal show of Lil's wealth.

Her hair was still lustrous gold, and crimped into long dangling ringlets with the hot-iron. Her skin was still smooth and rich as Devon cream, except around the eyes where it was just beginning to crack into little spider webs of lines.

She sat at the corner of the verandah, on the second floor above the street, where the eaves of the roof were of intricate white wrought-iron mouldings, pretty as Madeira lace. Although there were other double-storeyed buildings in Kimberley these days, not even the offices of the Central Diamond Company across the wide unpaved street boasted such affluent adornment.

Lil's chair was high-backed, and magnificently carved in dark red teak by oriental craftsmen, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory and carried across the eastern oceans by the tall ships of the now long departed Dutch East India Company. It had cost her two hundred pounds, but from this throne she could watch every movement on the main thoroughfares that fed into Market Square, could sense the pulse of the diamond city, could check each coming and going, the scurry of a buyer with a good scent in his nostrils, the swagger of a digger who had turned up a bright one. She could watch the front of the four canteens around the square, all of which she now owned, and judge the volume of trade going through their doors.

Similarly, she could glance to her left, down De Beers Road to the red-brick cottage behind its white picket fence and discreet sign, "French Dressmakers. Haute Couture. Six Continental Seamstresses. Specialities for individual tastes." Business was always brisk there from noon to midnight. Her girls seldom lasted the pace for more than six months or so, before taking the coach southward again, exhausted but considerably richer.

Lil herself worked her old trade only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a week with a favoured "regular", just for old times" sake, and because it got her blood going and made her sleep better at night. There was too much else that required her constant attention.

Now she poured fresh tea from the rococo silver pot into the pretty bone china cups, hand-painted with pink roses and golden butterflies.

"How many spoons?" she asked.

Ralph sat on the cane-back chair opposite her. He smelled of shaving soap and cheap eau-de-Cologne. His chin shone with a burnish given it by the cut-throat razor, his shirt was so crisply ironed and starched that it and crackled at each movement.

Lil studied him speculatively over the rim of her tea cup.

"Does the good major know your plans?" she asked quietly, and Ralph shook his head. Lil thought on that a while and it gave her a ripple of pleasure to have the son of a foundation member of the Kimberley Club sitting on her verandah. Son of one of the Kimberley gentlemen who would not greet her on the street, who had returned her donation towards the new hospital, who had not even replied to her invitation to attend the stone-laying ceremony of her new building, oh, the list of humiliations was too long to recite now.

"Why did you not go to your father?" she asked instead.

"My father is not a rich man." Ralph would not say any more, too loyal to explain that Zouga was destitute, that he would soon leave Kimberley with a cartload of his meagre possessions. He did not want Lil to know that he and his father had turned from each other with harsh words.

Lil studied his face for a moment, then picked up the handwritten sheet of cheap notepaper from the tea tray and glanced down the list and the figures.

"Nine hundred pounds for oxen?"

"A full span of the biggest and best animals," Ralph explained. "The road to the Shashi river is sand veld, heavy going. I want to be able to haul a full load, eight thousand pounds weight."

"Trade goods, fifteen thousand." She looked up at him again.

"Guns, powder, brandy, beads and limbo cloth."

"What type of guns?"

"Tower muskets. Five pounds ten shillings each."

Lil shook her head. "They have seen the breech-loaders. Your muskets won't have much pull."

"I can't afford breech-loaders, and I wouldn't know where to find a load."

"Ralph dearie, I could hire a bunch of Whitechapel hags to run my dressmakers" shop and I could get them cheap.

But I don't. I pick them young and fresh and pretty. If you think small, your profits are small. Don't be cheap, Ralph darling, never be cheap." She poured a little gin from the silver flask into the empty teacup before she went on. "I can get Martini-Henry rifles but they will cost us fifteen hundred more." Lil reached across and dipped her pen in the ink-well, then scratched out and re-wrote the figure.

"Brandy?"

"Cape Smoke in twenty-gallon casks."

"I have heard that Lobengula likes Courvoisier cognac, and his sister Ningi drinks only Piper-Heidsieck champagne."

"Another five hundred pounds, at least," Ralph mourned.

"Three hundred," Lil corrected the list. "I can get it at wholesale prices. Now, ammunition, ten thousand rounds?"

"I'll need at least a thousand for my own account, and the rest to trade with the rifles."

"If Lobengula gives you permission to hunt elephant," Lil corrected.

"My grandfather is one of his oldest friends; my Aunty Robyn and her husband have been at Kharni River Mission for almost twenty years."

"Yes, I know that you have friends at court, Lil pursed her lips approvingly. "But I have heard that the elephant have been shot out across the whole of Matabeleland., "The herds have been driven into the fly belt on the Zambezi."

"You cannot take horses into the fly and hunting elephant on foot in the fly is not work for a white man."

"My father hunted on foot, and anyway I cannot afford a horse."

"All right," she agreed reluctantly, and made a tick on the sheet.

They worked on for an hour longer, going down the list item by item, and then starting again at the head and going over it all once more, Lil ticking and scratching with the pen, fining it down by ten pounds here and a hundred there, until at last she tossed the pen onto the tea tray, and then poured a little more gin into her tea cup and sipped it with a genteel flourish, her little finger raised, the spirit slurping softly through the gap in the front of her teeth.

All right," she said again.

"Does that mean you will lend me the money?"

"Yes."

"I don't know what to say." He leaned towards her, young and glowing and eager. "Lil, I just don't,"

"Then don't say anything until you have heard my terms." She smiled thinly, without lifting her upper lip.

"Twenty percent per annum. interest on the loan."

"Twenty percent!" he gasped. "In God's name, that's usury, Lily!"

"Exactly," she told him primly. "But let me finish.

Twenty percent interest and half the profits."

"And half, Lil, that's not usury, that's highway robbery."

"Right again," she agreed. "At least you are bright enough to recognize it."

"Can't we just -" he started desperately.

"No, we cannot. Those are my terms." And Ralph remembered Scipio, his falcon, with her beautiful pouting breast and fierce cold eyes.

"I accept," he said, and though she did not smile with her lips, her eyes were suddenly soft and merry.

"Partners," she murmured, and placed her plump white hand on his forearm. His muscles were lean and sinewy, the skin brick-coloured from the sun. She stroked it slowly, sensually.

It only remains to seal our bargain," she told Ralph.

"Come!" She slid her hand down his arm and twined her fingers into his.

She led him through the stained-glass doors, and when she drew the velvet corded curtains it was cool and dark in the room. She turned back to him and reached up to unbutton his shirt at the throat. He stood still while she worked her way down slowly to his belt buckle, and then she placed one hand, palm down, upon his naked right breast.

"Ralph," her voice was a husky tremor. "I want you to do something for me."

"What is it?" he asked, and she stood on her tiptoes, placed her lips against his ear and told him in a whisper.

She felt him begin to pull back from under her hand.

"Partners?" she asked, and he hesitated a moment longer and then stooped and picked her up, one arm behind her knees, and carried her to the wide brass bed with the patchwork quilt.

"You will find it less arduous than hunting elephant on foot in the fly," she told him, and it was dark enough in the room for her not to worry about the missing tooth.

She lifted her arms above her head, opened her mouth and chuckled in delicious anticipation.

"The good thing about life, dearie, is that you can have whatever you want, just as long as you are willing to pay the price," she told him, still chuckling.

"These are not bullocks," Bazo told Ralph. "Each one is the son of a snake mated with the ghost of a Mashona dog."

They were all strong oxen, big-boned, heavy in the shoulder, with wide straight horns for strength and even yellow teeth, hand-picked by Bazo, who was a Matabele and loved cattle, had lived with the great herds since he was old enough to toddle after the calves.

However, Bazo was not a trek man. He had never worked an eighteen-foot wagon, with an eight-thousand pound "load aboard. He had never tried to put twentyfour trek oxen into the traces.

The entire Matabele nation owned only a pair of wheeled vehicles, and those belonged to King Lobengula. To Bazo cattle were a store of wealth, a source of meat and milk, they were not draught animals. The closest that either he or Ralph had ever come to putting a team into the traces was working the little two-wheel gravel carts.

Ralph had assumed that the oxen he had purchased were trained and amiable, but within minutes of his and Bazo's first attempt to get them into span, the animals sensed their incompetence and became as spooky and wild as hunted buffalo.

it took two hours of wild chasing across the bleak grasslands beyond the town limits, two hours of running and cursing and whip-cracking to bring the bullocks together and get the yokes upon their necks. Half of them were badly winded by then and promptly lay down, and the others backed out and turned their great homed heads towards the load, tangling the trek chain and plunging the entire span into chaos.

The excitement had brought out most of the loafers and idlers from the canteens on Market Square, though they had enough forethought to bring their bottles with them. They formed an appreciative and jovial audience, greeting each new effort by Bazo and Ralph with delighted guffaws and facetious advice.

Bazo wiped the sweat from his face and chest, and looked broodingly down the dusty road to town.

"Soon Bakela will hear of this and come to see our disgrace," he said.

Ralph had not seen his father since that stormy night, but he had visited Jordan in his tiny office next door to mister Rhodes in the magnificent new Central Diamond Company building on De Beers Street.

Perhaps Zouga Ballantyne had not yet recovered from the shock of being deserted by both his sons, but Jordan said that he had not yet left for Cape Town.

The thought of his father witnessing this humiliating scene brought dark blood to Ralph's face, and he fired the long trek whip, at least that was one trick he had learned, and bellowed at the span.

"Nkosana!" There was a salutation at the level of Ralph's elbow, the mild tone belied by the mocking title.

"Nkosi'was a chief, and'nkosana was the condescending diminutive, usually reserved for a little white boy, an untried child.

Ralph turned and glared at the speaker, who went on to explain in the same condescending tone. "Only one beast in ten will pull in front." He pointed out one of the oxen. "That one there is a lead ox.

Any man who knows oxen can see that with both his eyes closed."

He was a little black gnome, not as tall as Ralph's shoulder. His face was wrinkled and lined like that of a very old man, his eyes were mere slits in the merry smiling folds, but his cap of woolly hair and his little goatee beard were unmarred by a single strand of grey, and his teeth were even and white, the teeth of a man in his full flowering.

On his head was the polished black ring of the induna, and about his waist was a kilt of wild cat tails. Over that he wore a threadbare military-type tunic from which all insignia and buttons had been stripped, leaving small punctures in the fabric, some of which had enlarged into rents from which the lining peaked coyly. In the pierced lobe of one ear, he carried an ivory snuff-box, and in the other lobe a snuff spoon of the same material and a toothpick of porcupine quill. The language he used was lose to Matabele, but it preserved the ancient intonvery classic word structures of Zululand.

an So when Ralph asked Zulu?" the question was redundant, and the littl man shot a contemptuous glance at Bazo "Pure Zulu, not the treacherous house of Kumalo, of the traitor Mzilikazi who denied a king and whose blood is now so watered by Venda and Tswana and Mashona that they can no longer tell you if an ox grows horns on its head or on its testicles."

Bazo bridled instantly. "Hark!" He cocked his head. "Do I hear a small baboon barking his boasts from the top of the kopies?"

The little Zulu grinned at him mirthlessly, and took the stock whip from Ralph's sweaty hands. Then he walked to the tangled span with a jaunty step.

He touched the big black ox on the neck. "Hau, Sathan!" he greeted him, and at the same time baptized him "Devil".

The great ox rolled one eye at him, seemed to recognize his assurance and immediately quietened. The little Zulu loosed him and took him forward, talking to him easily in a bizarre mixture of Zulu, English and the Cape Dutch taal, and chained him into the lead position.

He went back quickly and pulled the red ox out of the tangle by the rein about his horns.

"Dutchman he named him, for no good reason.

"Come, you red thunder!"

And he put him into the lead file beside Sathan and called to them quietly.

"Donsa, Sathan, pull. Pakamisa, Dutchman, pick up the chain!"

Obediently the pair of bullocks straightened their forelegs and leaned forward against the yoke, and a miracle happened. The long heavy silver chain from the disselboom came up straight and hard as an iron bar, and those animals on the ground were forced to lunge up onto their feet, those that had backed out were pulled into the span, horns and heads pointing forward. In that moment Ralph learned the single most important rule of the open road, keep the chain straight and true, and all else is possible.

Now the little Zulu moved with a deceptively casual air along the double rank of bullocks, touching and talking and wheedling.

"Hey! Fransman, I can see by your wise and beautiful eyes that you were born to the wheel!" And the sturdy black and white beast was led back to his position at the off-wheel.

It took ten minutes, and then the Zulu put the long lash into the air. It hissed like a black mamba and then snaked forward over the ears of the team, not touching a single hair as it fired explosively. The heavy wagon jolted, the white canvas tent that covered the rear half of the long body shook like the unfurling mainsail of a tall ship and then it was rolling away smoothly.

The Zulu crinkled his eyes at Ralph and called a question. "Yapi?

Where? Which way?"

"Yakatol" Northr Ralph shouted back joyously, and despite himself Bazo snatched up his war shield and assegai and whirled into a frenzied challenge dance, leaping and stabbing at a host of imaginary enemies, shouting defiance and ecstasy to all the world.

The road to the Vaal river was the first leg of the journey, and the ruts were axle deep, and red soil raw as a fresh wound, the dust a fog in the windless air through which it was just possible to make out the horns of the two wheeler bullocks. The dust hid from Ralph his parting view of the sprawling town, and its high stagings above the gaping hole which had been his home and his prison for so many years, and by the time that the other traffic on the road had thinned sufficiently for the dust cloud to settle, they had made five miles and the stagings might have been merely a distant line of dead thorn trees silhouetted against the sunset.

The little Zulu called to his boy who led the front oxen, and the child swung them off the road, and the high rear wheels bumped out of the ruts and then crunched through crisp winter grass as the wagon rolled towards a spreading umbrella-shaped acacia which would "We their shelter and firewood for the night.

Walking at the front wheel Ralph pondered the two unexpected additions to his company.

The child had come out of the curtain of red dust, naked except for the little flap of his mutsha in front, cooking-pot and with the roll of sleeping-mat balanced upon his head.

He had placed these meagre possessions on the tailboard of the wagon and then, at a nod and a word from the Zulu, had taken the lead rein and plodded solemnly ahead of the span, his bare feet sinking ankle-deep in the powder dust.

Ralph wondered how old he was, and decided he could not be more than ten years of age.

What is his name?" he asked the Zulu.

"A name?" The little man shrugged. "It is not important. Call him Umfaan, the Boy."

And what is your name?" Ralph went on, but the little driver suddenly had urgent business at the head of the span and perhaps the dust had clogged his ears for he did not seem to hear the question.

Ralph had to ask the question again, after the outspan, when the Zulu was squatting beside the cooking fire watching Urnfaan stir the maize-meal in the black pot.

"What is your name?" And the Zulu smiled as though at a secret thought, and then he said: "A name can be dangerous, it can hover over a man like a vulture and mark him for death. Before the soldiers came to the royal kraal at Ulundi, I was called one thing-' Ralph stirred uncomfortably at the reference to the battle that had ended the Zulu War. The tattered tunic that the Zulu wore had once been the same dark blue as that of the Natal police uniform and one of those rents in the faded cloth might have been made by the stabbing blade. Lord Chelmsford had sent the Zulu king and most of his indunas in chains to the island of Sint Helena, where another emperor had died in captivity. However, some of his fighting chiefs had escaped from Zululand and now wandered homeless exiles across the vast continent. The driver wore the head-ring of an induna.

It was a name which men once spoke carefully, but I have not heard it for so long now that I have forgotten it," the Zulu went on, and again Ralph wondered if there was a legend still alive amongst the defeated Zulu of a little induna, smaller than the tall warriors he commanded and wizened far beyond his years, who had led them in that terrible charge into the English camp below the Hill of the Little Hand.

In the firelight Ralph studied the Zulu's tunic again, and he told himself that it was unlikely that it had been taken from the corpse of an Englishman on that grisly field; yet he shivered briefly although the night was warm.

"Now you have forgotten that name?" he encouraged, and the Zulu crinkled his eyes again.

"Now I am called Isazi, the Wise One, for reasons that should be clear even to a Matabele."

Across the fire Bazo snorted disdainfully, then stood and walked out of the firelight, into the darkness where the jackals piped plaintively.

"My name is Henshaw," Ralph told him. "Will you stay with me and drive my wagon all the way?

"Why not, Little Hawk?"

"You do not ask where I am going."

"i need a road." Isazi shrugged. "The one to the north is no longer or harder than the road to the south."

The jackal yipped again, but much closer this time, and Bazo paused, changed the assegai to his right hand, and answered the cry, cupping his palm over his mouth to give resonance to the sound; and then he moved on to where a small stone kopje shone in the moonlight like a pile of silver bullion.

"Bazo!" The greeting was a whisper, soft as the night wind in the pale grass, and a shadow stepped from amongst the moon shadows at the base of the kopje.

"Kamuza, my brother." Bazo went to him and embraced him, open hands upon his shoulders.

"i have a stone in my belly, heavy with sorrow at this parting."

"We will share the road again, one day, we will drink from the beer pot and fight with our shoulders touching-" Kamusa answered him quietly. "But now we are both upon the king's business."

Kamuza slipped the thongs that held his kilt in place, and it sagged heavily to his knees, leaving him naked.

"Hurry," he said. "I must return before the curfew bell."

Since the Diamond Trade Act, blacks were not allowed on the streets of Kimberley once the curfew bell had rung.

"You were not marked by the police?" Bazo asked, as he removed his own kilt and changed it with Kamuza.

"They are everywhere, like pepper ticks in the new spring grass," Kamuza grunted. "But I was not followed."

Bazo weighed the fur kilt in both hands while Kamuza swiftly belted the replacement about his own waist.

"Show me," Bazo said, and Kamuza took the kilt back from his hands and spread it on one of the flat moonwashed boulders.

He picked at the knotted thong that doubled the waistband, and as it came undone he opened the secret pouch of soft tanned leather, crusted with ceramic trade beads.

The pouch ran the full length of the wide waistband, the opening concealed by the decorative beadwork, and the interior of the long pouch was divided into cells, like a wasp's nest.

In each stitched leather cell nestled a large pebble that glistened with a slick soapy sheen in the moonlight.

"Count them," Kamuza instructed. "Let us agree on the number, and let Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, count the same number into his mighty hands when you lay the belt before him at the kraal of Gubulawayo, the place of killing., Bazo touched each diamond with his fingertip, his lips moving silently. "Amashurni amatatu!"

"Thirty," Kamuza repeated. "It is agreed."

And they were all large clean stones, the smallest the size of the first joint of a man's little finger.

Bazo tied the kilt about his waist, the fleecy tails of the bat-eared fox dangling to his knees.

"It looks well upon you" Kamuza nodded, and then went on. "Tell Lobengula, the Great Elephant, that I am his dog and I grovel in the dirt at his feet. Tell him that there will be more of the yellow coins and the bright stones. Tell him that his children labour each day in the pit, and there will be more, many more. Every man who takes the road north will bring him riches." Kamuza stepped forward and laid his right hand on Bazo's shoulder.

"Go in peace, Bazo the Axe."

"Stay in peace, my brother, and may the days disappear like raindrops into the desert sand until we smile upon each other once more.

Isazi put the span to its first real test in the drift of the Vaal river.

The grey waters were barely flowing, but they covered the hubs of the tall iron-shod rear wheels, and the bottom was broken waterwom rock that clanked and rolled under pressure, threatening to jam the wheels and denying purchase to the driving hooves of the span.

Yet they ran the wagon through under load, leaning into the yokes, noses down almost touching the surface of the river, and the wagon tent jolting and rocking behind them.

Until, under the steep cut up the far bank, the rear wheels stuck and the wagon bed tilted alarmingly. Then Isazi showed his expertise. He swung the team wide, giving them a run at it, and when he called to his leaders and burst the air asunder with the thirty-foot lash that tapered to the thickness of twine they went in stifflegged, jerked her clear, and took the load out of the river bed at a canter, while Isazi pranced and sang their praises and even Umfaan smiled.

Ralph ordered an early outspan under the tall trees on the far bank, for there was good grass and unlimited water, and the next leg of the road to his grandfather Moffat's mission station was a hundred and twenty miles, hard and dry going all the way.

"See, Little Hawk," Isazi was still rapturous over the performance of his span. "- See how clever they are. They pick a good patch of grass and eat it up; they do not wander from patch to patch, wasting their time and strength, as lesser beasts might do. Soon they will settle with the cud, and in the morning they will be strong and rested.

Each of them is a prince among cattle!"

"From tomorrow we begin night marches," Ralph ordered, and Isazi's smile faded and he looked severe.

"I had already made that decision," he said sternly, "but where did you ever hear of night marching, Little Hawk?

It is a trick of the wise ones."