Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur - Страница 7

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She doesn't want to be disturbed, he warned, but Lothar De La Rey stepped past him, so closely that Shasa could smell the fish smell on his oilskins and see the small white fish scales stuck to his tanned skin.

You'd best knock, Shasa dropped his voice, but Lothar ignored him and flung the door of the office open so that it crashed back on its hinges. He stood in the open door and Shasa could see past him. His mother rose from the straight-backed chair by the window and faced the door.

She was slim as a girl, and the yellow crape-de-chine of her dress was draped over her small fashionably flattened breasts and was gathered in a narrow girdle low around her hips. Her narrow-brimmed cloche hat was pulled down, covering the dense dark bush of her hair, and her eyes were huge and almost black.

She looked very young, not much older than her son, until she raised her chin and showed the hard, determined line of her jaw and the corners of her eyes lifted also and those honey-coloured lights burned in their dark depths. Then she was formidable as any man Lothar had ever met.

They stared at each other, assessing the changes that the years had wrought since their last meeting.

How old is she? Lothar wondered, and then immediately remembered. She was born an hour after midnight on the first day of the century. She is as old as the twentieth century

that's why she was named Centaine. So she's thirty-one

years old, and she still looks nineteen, as young as the day

I found her, bleeding and dying in the desert with the

wounds of lion claws deep in her sweet young flesh.

He has aged, Centaine thought. Those silver streaks in

the blond, those lines around the mouth and eyes. He'll be over forty now, and he has suffered -- but not enough. I am glad I didn't kill him, I'm glad my bullet missed his heart. It would have been too quick. Now he is in my power and he'll begin to learn the true-

Suddenly, against her will and inclination, she remembered

the feel of his golden body over hers, naked and

smooth and hard, and her loins clenched and then dissolved

so she could feel their hot soft flooding, as hot as the blood

that mounted to her cheeks and as hot as her anger against

herself and her inability to master that animal corner of her

motions. In all other things she had trained herself like an

athlete, but always that unruly streak of sensuality was just

beyond her control.

She looked beyond the man in the doorway, and she saw ... ...

Shasa standing out in the sunlight, her beautiful child,

watching her curiously, and she was ashamed and angry to

have been caught in that naked and unguarded moment

when she was certain that her basest feelings had been on

open display.

Close the door, she ordered, and her voice was husky

and level. Come in and close the door. She turned away and

stared out of the window, bringing herself under complete

control once More before turning back to face the man she

had set herself to destroy.

The door closed and Shasa suffered an acute pang of disappointment . He sensed that something vitally important was taking place. That blond stranger with the cat-yellow eyes who knew his name and its derivation stirred something in him, something dangerous and exciting. Then his mother's reaction, that sudden high colour coming up her throat into her checks and something in her eyes that he had never seen before, not guilt, surely? Then uncertainty, which was totally uncharacteristic. She had never been uncertain of anything in the world that Shasa knew of. He wanted desperately to know what was taking place behind that closed door. The walls of the building were of corrugated galvanized iron sheeting.

If you want to know something, go and find out. it was one of his mother's adages, and his only compunction was that she might catch him at it as he crossed to the side wall of the office, stepping lightly so that the gravel would not crunch under his feet, and laid his ear against the sun-heated corrugated metal.

Though he strained, he could only hear the murmur of voices. Even when the blond stranger spoke sharply, he could not catch the words, while his mother's voice was low and husky and inaudible.

The window, he thought, and moved quickly to the corner. As he stepped around it, intent on eavesdropping at the open window, he was suddenly the subject of attention of fifty pairs of eyes. The factory manager and his idle workers were still clustered at the main doors, and they fell silent and turned their full attention upon him as he appeared round the corner.

Shasa tossed his head and veered away from the window.

They were all still watching him and he thrust his hands into the pockets of his Oxford bags and, with an elaborate show of nonchalance, sauntered down towards the long wooden jetty as though this had been his intention all along.

Whatever was going on in the office now was beyond him, unless he could wheedle it out of his mother later, and he didn't think there was much hope of that. Then suddenly he noticed the four squat wooden trawlers moored alongside the jetty, each lying low in the water under the glittering silver cargo they carried, and his disappointment was a little mollified. Here was something to break the monotony of his hot dreary desert afternoon and his step quickened as he went onto the timbers of the jetty. Boats always fascinated him.

This was new and exciting. He had never seen so many fish, there must be tons of them. He came level with the first boat. It was grubby and ugly, with streaks of human excrement down the sides where the crew had squatted on the gunwale, and it stank of bilges and fuel oil and unwashed humanity living in confined quarters. It had not even been graced with a name: there were only the registration and licence numbers painted on the wave-battered bows.

A boat should have a name, Shasa thought. It's insulting and unlucky not to give it a name. His own twenty-five-foot yacht that his mother had given him for his thirteenth birthday was named The Midas Touch, a name that his mother had suggested.

Shasa wrinkled his nose at the smell of the trawler, disgusted and saddened by her disgracefully neglected condition.

If this is what Mater drove all the way from Windhoek for, He did not finish the thought for a boy stepped around the far side of the tall angular wheelhouse.

He wore patched shorts of canvas duck, his legs were brown and muscled and he balanced easily on the hatch coarning on bare feet.

As they became aware of each other both boys bridled and stiffened, like dogs meeting unexpectedly; silently they scrutinized each other.

A dandy, a fancy boy, Manfred thought. He had seen one or two like him on their infrequent visits to the resort town of Swakopmund up the coast. Rich men's children dressed in ridiculous stiff clothing, walking dutifully behind their parents with that infuriating supercilious expression upon their faces. Look at his hair, all shiny with brilliantine, and he stinks like a bunch of flowers. One of the poor white Afrikaners, Shasa recognized his type. A bywoner, a squatter's kid. I His mother had forbidden him to play with them, but he had found that some of them were jolly good fun. Their attraction was of course enhanced by his mother's prohibition. One of the sons of the machine-shop foreman at the mine imitated bird calls in such an amazingly lifelike manner that he could actually call the birds down from the trees, and he had shown Shasa how to adjust the carburettor and ignition on the old Ford which his mother allowed him to use, even though he was too young to have a driver's licence. While the same boy's elder sister, a year older than Shasa, had shown him something even more remarkable when they had shared a few forbidden moments together behind the pumphouse at the mine. She had even allowed him to touch it and it had been warm and soft and furry as a new-born kitten cuddling up there under her short cotton skirt, a most remarkable experience which he intended to repeat at the very next opportunity.

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