Men of Men (25 page)

‘Kill her! Rip her to pieces!’ screamed the pretty blonde 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:

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.

‘Mr Ballantyne,’ bellowed Barry Lennox across the street. ‘Mr 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, Mr 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.

The corpses of seven hundred British dead, militia and regular regiments, had already lain for six months on the bleak grassland below the little hill. Lord Chelmsford had abandoned the field,
and his dead lay where they had fallen, their bellies ripped open by Zulu assegais to allow their souls to escape, the litter of wagons and broken equipment scattered about them, their flesh taken
off the bone by vulture and jackal and hyena.

The thought of leaving British soldiers unburied on the battlefield seemed to threaten the very foundation of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

‘Chelmsford must retake the field,’ said one of the men at the bar.

‘No, sir,’ Ralph shook his head firmly. ‘That will be inviting another disaster for a sentimental gesture.’

‘What do you propose, Mr Ballantyne?’ the man asked sarcastically.

‘A page from the Boer book.’ Ralph had an audience of grown men listening to him – perhaps not with respect, but at least with attention. This was heady stuff, even though the
ideas were his father’s, and Ralph threw in an oath. ‘By God, those fellows know how to fight the tribes. Mounted men as a screen around a column of wagons that can be thrown into
laager within minutes. Go for the heart of the Zulu nation – their cattle herds – pull the impis into the open, make them come in across good shooting ground against the laagered
wagons—’ Ralph did not finish his plan of battle; abruptly he lost his sequence of ideas and began to stutter like an idiot, a blush darkening his tanned, handsome young face.

Barry Lennox followed the direction of Ralph’s gaze, and then he grinned delightedly.

Diamond Lil had entered the canteen through the rear door. It was six o’clock in the evening and an hour before she had risen, stretching and yawning like a sleepy leopard, from the brass
bed in the darkened room behind the canteen.

A servant had filled the enamelled hip bath with buckets of steaming water, and Lil had poured in a vial of perfume before stepping into the bath and settling luxuriously into the fragrant
water, shouting for her canteen manager.

She listened attentively, a small frown cracking the perfect pale skin of her forehead, as he recited the figures of the previous night’s take, his eyes averted from the white skin of her
shoulders and the tight pink-tipped bosom that peeked through the hot suds. Then she had dismissed him with a wave of her hand and stepped naked from the bath, glowing pinkly from the hot water,
her steam-damp hair dangling down the sleek white body. She poured a little gin into a coloured Venetian glass and sipped it neat as she started the powdering and the painting, rolling her eyes at
herself in the mirror, practising her professional smile with the tiny diamond twinkling in the centre of the wide display of white teeth, then, at last, considering herself levelly and
appraisingly.

She was twenty-three years old, and she had come a long hard way from the house in Mayfair where Madame Hortense had sold her maidenhood to an elderly Whig minister of state for one hundred
guineas. She had been thirteen years old then, only ten years ago, but it seemed like a dozen lifetimes.

The house in Mayfair was truly the only home she had ever known, and she often thought back with nostalgia to those days. Madame Hortense had treated her more like a daughter than a house girl.
There was always a pretty bonnet or a new dress on her birthday and at Christmas, and she had had special privileges. Lil would ever be grateful for what she learned about men and money and power
from Hortense.

Then one Saturday evening a half dozen young officers from a famous cavalry regiment, celebrating their orders for foreign service, had visited the house in Mayfair. Amongst them was a young
captain, dashing, rich and beautiful; he saw Lil across the salon the moment he entered. Ten days later Lil had sailed with him for India on the Peninsular and Orient mailship, while Madame
Hortense wept on the quay and waved until the ship cleared the pool of London and disappeared beyond the first bend of the river. Forty days later Lil found herself abandoned by her protector.

From an upper window of the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town she watched her cavalry captain’s ship clear Table Bay for Calcutta, her sorrow at parting alleviated by the luxurious
surroundings in which her protector had left her. Lil shrugged off her grief, drank a glass of gin, bathed and re-painted her face, then sent for the manager.

‘I cannot pay my bill,’ she told him and, taking his hand, led him unprotestingly into the bedroom of her suite.

‘Madame, may I give you some advice?’ he asked a little later as he retied his Ascot and shrugged into his waistcoat.

‘Good advice is always welcome, sir.’

‘There is a place called New Rush five hundred miles north of here and there are five thousand diggers there, each with a pocket full of diamonds.’

Now Lil entered her canteen. It was still early for a Sunday. It was one of the things she had learned from Madame Hortense, always be there long before you are expected. It keeps clients
satisfied and employees honest.

Quickly she checked her clientele. It was the usual Sunday afternoon crowd. It would be better soon. She stooped and counted the bottles under the bar counter, examining the wax seals to make
certain they had not been tampered with.

‘Never be greedy, darling,’ Hortense had taught her. ‘Water the beer, they expect that, but keep good whisky.’

She straightened and opened the huge ornate cash register with a chime of bells, making certain that it flagged the correct price, and then touched the line of gold sovereigns in their special
slotted drawer. The metal had a marvellous feel under her fingertips, and she picked up a coin as though merely to feel the weight and take pleasure from it. Gold was the only thing in all the
world she trusted. Her barman was watching her in the mirror as he swabbed the counter top; she pretended to replace the sovereign in its slot, letting it clink and then palmed it smoothly and
closed the drawer of the register. The barman was new. It would be interesting to see if he covered the shortage or reported it, little things like that had made her rich at the age of
twenty-three.

She glanced up into the mirror, once again appraising her own face and shoulders in the less flattering sunlight that streamed into the canteen. Her eyes were sharp as a stropped razor, but the
skin around them was clear and fresh as rose petals without the first sign of wrinkling.

‘You will wear well, my dear,’ Hortense had told her, ‘if you use the gin and don’t let it use you.’ She had been right, Lil decided. She looked as she had when she
was sixteen years old.

She shifted her gaze from her own face, and swept the canteen. The mirror was imperfect, and the silvering was beginning to go in dark spots, slightly distorting the young face that was watching
her intently. Her gaze flicked over it, and then came back.