Men of Men (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

This initial enthusiasm had swiftly waned, for there was neither logic nor system in the white man’s mind. The showiest stones were discarded contemptuously. Lovely shiny red and blue
pebbles, some of them shot through with different colours like ceramic beads, Bakela handed back to them with a grunt and a shake of the head. While occasionally, very occasionally, he would select
some dull and uninteresting little chip and hand the delighted finder a gold coin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Rush Diggers’ Committee was in public session. Ten minutes previously they had formed themselves into a Board of Enquiry into the cave-in of No. 6 Roadway.

A wagon had been dragged into the centre of Market Square to provide a platform for their deliberations, and around it was a solid packed crowd of diggers from the No. 6 Section. Since the
cave-in, they had not been able to get back into the diggings to work their claims and they had just come from the mass funeral of the six men that had been crushed to death by the treacherous
yellow gravel. Most of them had begun the wake for their mates and were carrying uncorked green bottles.

Mixed with the diggers were all the loafers of New Rush, the transport riders and merchants; even the kopje-wallopers had closed their offices for the meeting. This was something that affected
all their futures directly.

‘Let’s have a look at the little blighter,’ somebody yelled out at the back of the crowd, and there was a menacing growl of agreement.

‘Right, let’s see him.’

Zouga stood beside the tall back wheel of the wagon, hemmed in by the press of bodies, and he glanced at Ralph who stood at his shoulder. He no longer had to look down at his son, their eyes
were on a level.

‘I’ll go up and face them,’ Ralph whispered huskily. Under the dark tan, his skin was grey and his eyes dark green and worried. He knew as well as Zouga did how grave was his
position: he was to be tried by a mob that was angry and vindictive and mostly filled with cheap liquor.

The collapse of the roadway had destroyed the value of their claims. They could no longer get the gravel out; their claims were isolated, cut off from ground level, and they were spoiling to
place the blame and extract vengeance. That vengeance would be brutal.

Ralph put one hand on the spokes of the wagon wheel, ready to climb up onto the wagon body where the dozen members of the Committee were already waiting.

‘Ralph.’ Zouga stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Wait here.’

‘Papa—’ Ralph began to protest quietly, the fear still dark in his eyes.

‘Stay,’ Zouga repeated softly, and vaulted up onto the wagon body lightly.

He nodded briefly to the members of the Committee and then turned to face the mob. He was bare-headed, his beard catching the sunlight and jutting aggressively as he placed his clenched fists on
his hips and set his feet easily apart.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and his voice carried clearly to the last row of the crowd, ‘my son is only sixteen years old. I am here to answer for him.’

‘If he’s old enough to kill six men, then he’s old enough to face the music himself.’

‘He killed nobody,’ Zouga answered coldly. ‘If you look to place the blame, then put it on the rain. Go down to the pit, and you will see where it undercut the bank.’

‘He started fighting,’ the shaggy-headed accuser bellowed. ‘I saw him use his whip on Mark Sanderson.’

‘There is a fight on one of the causeways every hour of every day,’ Zouga shot at him. ‘I’ve seen you throwing punches out there, and getting your arse whipped at
that.’

There was a ripple of laughter, a lightening of the mood, and Zouga took his advantage.

‘In the name of all that’s holy, gentlemen, there is not one of us here who does not protect his rights. My son was doing that, against a man older and stronger than himself, and if
he’s guilty for that, then so are all of you.’

They liked that, liked being told they were tough and independent, proud of being hard fighters and hard livers.

‘Are you telling me that one boy with a trek whip brought down the No. 6 causeway all on his own? If so, then I’m proud that boy is my son.’

They laughed again, and on the wagon behind Zouga the tall blond untidily dressed man with the cleft chin and pale blue eyes smiled thoughtfully and murmured to the Committee member beside
him.

‘He’s good, Pickling,’ using Neville Pickering’s familiar nickname. ‘He talks as well as he writes, and that’s well enough.’

‘No, gentlemen,’ Zouga changed pace. ‘That causeway was a death-trap, ready to go off before the first gravel bucky went out on it Friday morning. The collapse was
nobody’s fault; we had just dug too deep, and there was too much rain.’

Heads were nodding now, their expressions concerned and grave as Zouga went on.

‘We are too deep on the New Rush, and unless we work out a new system of getting the stuff out of our claims, then there are going to be a lot more dead men for us to bury.’

Zouga glanced down as one of the diggers shouldered his way through the crowd and climbed up onto the disselboom of the wagon.

‘Now you pay attention, you bunch of dirt-hounds,’ he yelled.

‘The chair acknowledges Mister Sanderson,’ Neville Pickering murmured sarcastically.

‘Thanking you, Guv.’ The digger lifted his battered Derby hat, finery that he had donned especially for this meeting, then turned and scowled at the crowd. ‘This nipper of
Zouga Ballantyne’s is going to be a bad one to mess with, and a good one to have at your side when things get hard.’ Still scowling, he turned and called to Ralph. ‘You come up
here, young Ballantyne.’

Still pale and worried, Ralph hung back, but rough hands pushed him forward and hoisted him onto the wagon.

The digger had to reach up to put his arm around Ralph’s shoulder.

‘This boy could have let me drop into the pit like a rotten tomato, and squash the same way when I hit the bottom.’ He made a vaguely obscene squelching sound with his lips to
illustrate his own demise. ‘He could have run and left me, but he didn’t.’

‘That’s ’cause he’s young and stupid,’ someone called. ‘If he had any sense he’d have given you a shove, you miserable bastard.’

There was a hubbub of cheers and hooted derision.

‘I’m going to buy this boy a drink,’ announced Sanderson belligerently.

‘That will be some sort of record. You ain’t never bought nobody a drink yet.’

Sanderson ignored them haughtily. ‘Just as soon as he turns eighteen, I’m going to buy him a drink.’

The meeting started to break up in a storm of friendly catcalls and laughter, the diggers streaming away across the square to the canteens.

It was obvious to even the most bloody-minded of them that there wasn’t going to be a lynching, and hardly any of them bothered to wait for the Committee’s verdict. It was more
important to get a good place at the bar.

‘Which doesn’t mean we approve of your behaviour, young man,’ Pickering told Ralph severely. ‘This isn’t Bultfontein or Dutoitspan. Here on New Rush we try to set
an example to the other diggings. In future, do try and behave like a gentleman. I mean fists are one thing, but whips—’ He raised one eyebrow disdainfully and turned to Zouga.
‘If you have any ideas about how we are going to work the No. 6 area now that the causeway has gone, we’d like to hear them, Major Ballantyne.’

H
endrick Naaiman would have called himself a ‘Bastaard’, and would have used the term with a deep sense of pride. However, the British
Foreign Office had found the word awkward, possibly the double ‘A’ in the spelling offended the proper order of official correspondence and treaties, especially if one of those treaties
should ever be laid for signature before Queen Victoria. So the nation was now referred to as Griqua, and the land on which New Rush stood was renamed Griqualand West, a definition which made it
easier for Whitehall to champion old Nicholaas Waterboer, the Bastaard captain’s claim to the area, over that of the Boer presidents of the backveld republics which also claimed the area as
part of their dominions.

It was remarkable how before the discovery of the bright stones nobody, and especially not Great Britain, had shown the slightest interest in this desolate and arid plain, no matter what it was
called.

In Hendrick Naaiman’s veins flowed the rich intermingled blood of numerous peoples.

Its basis was that of the Hottentot, the sturdy golden-skinned, dark-eyed people who had met the first Portuguese circumnavigators of the globe when they stepped onto the gleaming white beach
sands of Good Hope.

Added to the Hottentot was the blood of the captured yellow bushman girls. Tiny doll-like creatures whose buttery yellow skins and dainty triangular faces with orientally slanted eyes and
flattened pug features were only part of their attraction. To a people who regarded a large female posterior as a mark of beauty, the buttocks of the bushmen girls were irresistible, a bountiful
double bulge that stood out behind them like the hump of a camel – and in the arid deserts of the Kalahari served the same purpose.

To this blood mixture was added the contribution of outcast Fingo and Pondo tribesmen, fugitives from the wiles of their own cruel chiefs and merciless witchdoctors, and Malayan slaves, escaped
from their Dutch burgher masters, who had found their way through the secret passes of the mountains that defended the Cape of Good Hope like the turreted walls of a great castle. They also joined
the bands of wandering Griquas on the vast plains of the interior.

This blood mixture was compounded with that of little English girls, orphaned survivors of shipwrecked East India men that had perished on the treacherous rocks scoured by the Agulhas current,
and taken to wife at puberty by their darker-skinned rescuers. And there was other northern blood, that of British seamen, pressed into the Royal Navy’s service in the time of
Napoleon’s wars and desperate to exchange that harsh duty even for the life of deserter in such a wild and desert land as Southern Africa. Others had fled into the same wilderness, escaped
convicts from the transport ships that had called at Good Hope to reprovision for the long eastern leg of the voyage to Australia and penal settlement of Botany Bay.