Men of Men - Smith Wilbur. Страница 22

The Matabele had never seen him like this, but they recognized the killing madness, for they had themselves all been in battle and killed, and it infected them so that they danced and stamped with excitement and spurred Ralph with their voices.

,"Jee!" they sang, and Bazo fell back, giving ground to Ralph's attack as the sticks cracked and rattled. His mouth was wide open now as he gasped for air and his throat was a deep pink cavern. Blood ran in a thin shining slick down behind his ear, spreading over his straining throat and then onto his right shoulder like a mantle.

A glancing blow above his eye had not opened the flesh, but had formed a blister of black blood as large as a walnut under the skin. It hung from Bazo's forehead like some bizarre bloodsucking leech, and still the blows hissed and cracked about him, thick as tropical rain, falling on his guard so that the shock was carried through arm and shoulder and jarred his head upon the thick black column of his neck.

Then another blow went through and the ivory flash of Bazo's teeth was dulled with a film of blood that snaked down from one nostril into his mouth, and another blow went through, on the line of his thigh, the swelling rising instantaneously, the skin stretched glossy and black, and almost crippled Bazo who was pinned by the injured leg, and Ralph was still attacking, instinctively swinging him against the bad leg so that Bazo was slow and clumsy in the turn, and again one of Ralph's sticks fluted and thumped into rubbery muscle and Bazo reeled and almost went down, recovering with an immense effort, his counter-stroke loose and lacking power, so that Ralph spurned it aside and used his point.

He drove the end of his right-hand kerrie through Bazo's guard, using it as though it were a sword rather than a club, and Bazo was not ready for it. With all Ralph's weight behind it, the kerrie tore into Bazo's belly muscles, up under the heavy ribcage, and the Matabele doubled over the blow, one kerrie flying from his hand the other dropping to dangle uselessly at his side.

He dropped on his knees, head bowed to expose the back of his neck, the knuckles of his spine standing out between the ridges of hard black muscle.

Ralph's eyes were fastened on the unprotected neck, and they were glazed over with the same soapy sheen as an uncut diamond, his movements too swift to be anything but instinctive. He threw the kerrie on high and shifted his weight from the back foot to the leading foot, and all his strength flowed into his back and shoulders as he went into the killing stroke.

"Jee!" roared the watchers, themselves carried beyond the frontiers of sanity on the hot wave of fighting madness, crowding forward for the death.

Ralph froze like that, right arm high, his entire body arched like a drawn bow, the fallen Matabele at his feet and then slowly the tension went out of his limbs and he shook his head with the fumbling uncertainty of a man awaking from a nightmare. He looked about him with stunned disbelief, blinking his eyes as though to clear them of that opaque glittering madness, and suddenly his legs were trembling, unable to hold his weight.

He sank down in front of Bazo, knelt facing him and put out one arm and wrapped it around the Matabele's neck, and laid his cheek against Bazo's.

"God," he whispered. "Oh God, I nearly killed you."

Their blood and their sweat mingled, and both of them were pumping for air, their chests heaving, their bodies racked for the precious stuff.

"Never teach an albino baboon a trick," Bazo spoke at last, his voice was husky and unsteady. "He might learn it a little too well.," Then they were dragged to their feet by the laughing, hooting Matabele and carried to the nearest hut.

Ralph drank first from the calabash of gruel, thick bubbling millet beer, and then handed it across to Bazo.

Bazo washed the blood from his mouth and spat it on the ground, then he drank with his head tilted back, a dozen deep swallows before he lowered the gourd and looked at Ralph.

For a moment they were grave, green eyes holding the gaze of smouldering black, and then suddenly they were both laughing, great gusts of shaking uncontrolled laughter, so that the men that squatted in the circle about them began to chuckle also, and then to laugh with them.

Still laughing, Bazo leaned across and gripped Ralph's right forearm briefly. "I am your man," he said, through his laughter, and through the blood in his mouth.

When Zouga stepped off the ladder in the bottom level of the Devil's Own, the heat was already enough to bring out a dark patch of sweat between the shoulder blades of his blue flannel shirt. He lifted his hat to mop the dewdrops along his hairline and then paused and frowned quickly.

"Ralph!" he snapped, and his son sank the pickhead into the yellow gravel, let it stand like that and then straightened with his hands on his hips.

"Just what do you think you are doing?" Zouga demanded.

"I've worked out a new way of doing it," Ralph told him. "First Bazo's gang breaks rock, then Wengi comes along behind and,"

"You know what I'm talking about." Zouga cut in impatiently. "It's Monday; you are supposed to be at school."

"I'm sixteen now," Ralph told him. "And besides, I know how to read and to write."

"Don't you think you might have mentioned your decision," Zouga asked with deceptive mildness, "if only in passing?"

"You were busy, Papa, I didn't want to worry you with something so unimportant. You've got enough to worry about without that."

. Zouga hesitated. Was that just his usual clever twisting, or did Ralph truly realize how finely stretched they were, just how much Zouga truly did have to worry about?

Ralph sensed his advantage. "We need every pair of hands we can get, and these are free." He held them up, and Zouga noticed for the first time that they were powerful and broad with yellow callouses on the palms.

"Just what is this new idea of yours?" Zouga's scowl smoothed away, and Ralph grinned as he realized that he was no longer a schoolboy; and he began to explain, gesturing with spread hands while Zouga nodded.

"All right," he said at last. "It makes sense. We'll try it., Zouga turned and walked away, and Ralph spat on his hands and shouted in Matabele.

"Come on, you are not a bunch of women hoeing for yams; let's break ground."

On Claim number 183 an American digger named Calvin Hine hit an enrichment, a tiny pocket, and in a single bucket he took out two hundred and sixteen diamonds, the biggest over twenty carats. In a stroke he was transformed from a ragged, bearded sun-blackened beggar grovelling in the yellow dust into a rich man.

Calvin was there that night when Diamond Lil climbed up onto the wooden counter of her grog-shop, with her ostrich feathers swirling and her sequins aglitter in the lamplight. She asked in Cockney that chimed like Bow Bells: "Will some sporting gent name me a price for these fancy goods?" and squeezed out her own big round breasts between painted red fingertips, so that they bulged over the top of her crimson velvet bodice, the skin smoother than the velvet and the big pink coin of a nipple coming up like the dawn over the horizon of her neckline.

"Come on, dearies, one night of paradise, one little glimpse of heaven, me loves."

"Termer, Lil darling. Ten iron men," shouted a digger at the back of the bar, and Lil turned and flipped up the back of her skirts at him.

"Shame on you, for a mean little man," she chided him over her white shoulder; and the laced and beribboned pantaloons beneath her rustling skirts had no crotch to them, so for a fleeting part of a second they saw what she was selling, and bellowed like trek-oxen five days in the desert when they smell the waterhole.