Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 29

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Again Bazo was silent.

"I have a stone," he admitted at last. "But I do not know if it has the spirit you seek, for it is a strange stone, like none other we have ever seen."

"Let me see it, my old friend," Hendrick whispered encouragingly. "I will give you the advice of a father to his favourite son."

Bazo took the snuff-horn and turned it over and over between his fingers, the muscles in his shoulders and arms bulged and subsided and his smooth regular features, knitted now in thought, seemed to be carved from the wood of the wild ebony.

"Go," he said at last. "Return when the moon sets.

Come alone, without a gun, without a knife. And know you that one of my brothers will stand always at your back ready to drive the blade of his assegai out of your breastbone if you so much as think a treacherous thought."

When Hendrick Naaiman crawled through the low doorway again it was past midnight; the fire had sunk to a puddle of ruddy ash, the smoke swirled like grey phantoms in the light of the bull's-eye lantern he carried, and the naked blades of the short broad stabbing spears flickered blue and deadly in the shadows.

He could smell the nervous sweat of the men that wielded those dreadful weapons, and the vulture wings of death seemed to rustle in the dark recesses of the hut.

Hendrick knew how close that dark presence could crowd about him, for frightened men are dangerous men.

it was part of his trade, this ever-present threat of death, but he could never accustom himself to it, and he heard the quaver in his own voice as he greeted Bazo.

The young Matabele sat as he had last seen him, facing the single door of the hut, his back protected by the thick mud wall and his assegai at his side, the shaft ready to his hand.

"Sit," he instructed the Griqua, and Hendrick squatted opposite him.

Bazo nodded to two of his men and they slipped away as silently as hunting leopards to stand guard in the starlight, while two others knelt at Hendrick's back, their assegais in their right hand, the points merely inches from his cringing spine.

There was the weird "woo woo" call of a nightjar out in the starlight, clearly the signal for which Bazo waited; one of his Matabele assuring him that they were unobserved. Hendrick Naaiman nodded in approval, the young Matabele was clever and careful.

Now Bazo lifted into his lap a small cloth-wrapped package on which fresh earth still clung in little yellow balls. He unwrapped it swiftly and, leaning forward across the smouldering fire, placed the contents in Hendrick's cupped hands.

The big Griqua sat paralysed like that, his cupped hands before his face, his dark pock-marked features frozen in an expression of disbelief, of utter astonishment. Then his hands began to tremble slightly, and quickly he placed the huge glittering stone on the hardpacked mud floor as though it had burned his fingers, but his tar-dark eyes seemed to bulge from their deep sockets as he stared at it still.

Nobody spoke or moved for almost a minute, and then Hendrick shook himself as though he were waking from deep sleep, but his eyes never left that stone.

"It is too big," he whispered in English. "It cannot be."

Then suddenly he was hasty; he snatched up the stone and dipped it and his hand wrist-deep into the calabash of drinking water which stood beside the fire; then, holding it up in the lantern light, he watched the great stone shed water as though it had been greased, as though it were the feather of a wild goose.

"By my daughter's virgin blood," he whispered again, and the men watching him stirred darkly into the shadows. His emotions had infected them with restless excitement.

Hendrick reached for the side pocket of his buckskin coat, and immediately the point of the assegai pricked the soft skin behind his ear.

"Tell him!" Hendrick blurted, and Bazo shook his head.

The prick of steel ceased and Hendrick took from his pocket a shard of curved dark green glass, part of a shattered champagne bottle discarded in the veld behind one of the grog-shops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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