Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur. Страница 108

Yes, my friend, he whispered. It is me, the kaffir. He drew the man up another inch and wedged the back of his neck against the edge of the roof. Then very deliberately he put pressure on his spine at the base of his skull. The white man writhed and struggled like a fish on the barbs of the harpoon, but Hendrick held him easily, staring deep into his eyes, and bent his neck backwards, lifting with his forearm under the chin.

Hendrick felt the spine loading and locking at the pressure.

it could give no more, and for a second longer he held him at the breaking point. Then with a jerk he pushed the man's chin up another inch and the spine snapped like a dry branch. The white man danced in the air, twitching and shuddering, and Hendrick watched the pale blue eyes glaze over, becoming opaque and lifeless, and over the rush of the wind he heard the soft spluttering release as his sphincter muscle relaxed and his bowels involuntarily voided.

Hendrick swung his dangling corpse like a pendulum and as it cleared the balcony rail he let it drop into the gap between the coaches, directly into the track of the racing wheels. It was sucked away by the spinning steel like a scrap of meat into the blades of a mincing machine.

He lay for a moment recovering his breath. He knew that the overseer's mutilated corpse would be smeared over half a mile of the railway tracks.

He untied his belt from the ventilator and buckled it around his waist, then he crawled back along the roof of the coach until he was directly above the latrine window. He lowered his feet over the sill and with a twist dropped into the cubicle. He replaced the mesh frame over the window and tightened the screws. He went back down the coach to his seat, and Moses Gama was watching him as he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. He nodded at his brother and pulled the corner of the blanket over his head. Within minutes he was asleep.

He was awakened by the shouts of the boss-boys and the jolting of the coach as it was shunted off the main line. He saw the name of the small village where they had stopped painted on a white board on the platform: Vryburg', but it meant nothing to him.

Soon the platform and the coaches were invaded by blue uniformed railway police, and all the recruits were ordered out onto the platform. They lined up, shivering and sleepy under the floodlights, answered to the roll-call. Everyone was present.

Hendrick nudged his brother and with his chin pointed at the wheels and bogey below their coach. The hubs and axles were splattered with blood and tiny slivers and particles of raw red flesh and tissue.

All the following day the coaches stood in the siding while the police individually subjected each of the recruits to a hectoring interrogation in the station master's office. By mid-afternoon it was obvious that they were coming to accept that the overseer's death was accidental and were losing interest in the investigation. The evidence of the locked doors and barred windows was convincing and the testimony of the boss-boys and every one of the recruits was unanimous and unshakable.

in the late afternoon they were loaded back into the coaches and they rumbled on into the night, towards the fabulous Ridge of White Waters.

Hendrick woke to the excited chatter of the men around him, and when he shouldered his way to the crowded window the first thing he saw was a high mountain, so big that it blocked the sky to the north, a strange and wonderful mountain, glowing with a pearly yellow light in the early sun, a mountain with a perfectly flat top and symmetrical sloping sides.

What kind of mountain is this? Hendrick marvelled.

A mountain taken from the belly of the earth, Moses told him. 'That is a mine dump, my brother, a mountain built by men from the rocks they dig up from below. Wherever Hendrick looked there were these flat-topped shining dumps scattered across the undulating grassland or standing along the skyline and near each of them stood tall giraffes of steel, long-necked and skeletal with giant wheels for heads, that spun endlessly against the pale highveld sky.

Headgears, Moses told him. Below each of those is a hole that reaches down into the guts of the world, into the rock bowels that hold the yellow Gold! for which the white men sweat and lie and cheat, and often kill. As the train ran on they saw wonder followed by wonder, taller buildings than they had ever believed possible, roads that ran like rivers of steel with growling vehicles, tall chimneys that filled the sky with black thunderclouds, and multitudes upon multitudes, human beings more numerous than the springbok migrations of the Kalahari, black men in silver helmets and knee-high rubber boots, regiments of them, marching towards the tall headgears or, as the shifts changed, wearily swarming back from the shafts splashed from head to foot with yellow mud. There were white men on the streets and platforms, white women in gaily coloured dresses with remote disdainful expressions, human beings in the windows of the buildings which crowded wall to red brick wall right to the verge of the railway tracks. It was too much, too huge and diffuse for them to assimilate at one time and they gaped and exclaimed and pressed to the windows of the coach.

Where are the women? Hendrick asked suddenly, and Moses smiled.

Which women, brother? The black women, the women of our tribe? 'There are no women here, not the type of women you know. There are only the Isifebi, and they do it for gold.

Everything here is for gold. Once again they were shunted off the main line into a fenced enclosure in which the long white barrack buildings stood in endless rows and the signboard above the gates read: WITWATERSRAND NATIVE LABOUR ASSOCIATION CENTRAL RAND INDUCTION CENTRE From the coaches they were led to a long shed by a couple of grinning boss-boys and instructed to strip to the buff.

The lines of naked black men shuffled forward under the paternal eyes of the boss-boys, who treated them in a friendly jocular fashion.

Some of you have brought your livestock with you, they joked. 'Goats on your scalp, and cattle in your pubic hairs, and dipping the paint brushes they wielded into buckets of bluebutter ointment, they plastered the heads and crotches of the recruits.

Rub it in, they ordered. We don't want your lice and crabs and itchy crawlies. And the recruits entered into the spirit of the occasion and roared with laughter as they smeared each other with the sticky butter.

At the end of the shed they were each handed a small square of blue mottled carbolic soap.

Your mothers may think you smell like the mimosa in flower, but even the goats shudder when you pass upwind. The boss-boys laughed and shoved them under the hot showers.

The doctors were waiting for them when they emerged, scrubbed and still naked, and this time the medical examinations were exhaustive. Their chests were sounded and all their bodily apertures probed and scrutinized.

"What happened to your mouth, and your head? one doctor demanded of Hendrick. No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. He had seen injuries like these before. Those bloody animals in charge of the trains. All, right, we will send you to the dentist to have those stumps pulled, too late to stitch the head, you'll have a couple of lovely scars!

Apart from that, you are a beauty. He slapped Hendrick's hard shiny black muscles. We'll put you down for underground work, and you'll get the underground bonus., They were issued grey overalls and hobnailed boots, and then given a gargantuan meal, as much as they could eat.

It is not like I thought it would be. Hendrick spooned stew into his mouth. Good food, white men who smile, no beatings, not like the train. Brother, only a fool starves and beats his oxen, and these white men are not fools. One of the other Ovambo men took Moses empty dish to the kitchen and returned with it refilled. It was no longer necessary for him to give orders for such menial services.