Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bayete! Bayete!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And do you know who he is?"

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

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

"How old is your sporting friend?"

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

"Two beers coming up, mister Lennox."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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