'If he had any sense he'd have given you a shove, you miserable bastard.'
There was a hubbub of cheers and hooted derision.
'I'm going to buy this boy a drink,' announced Sanderson belligerently.
'That will be some sort of record. You ain't never bought nobody a drink yet.'
Sanderson ignored them haughtily. 'Just as soon as he turns eighteen, I'm going to buy him a drink.'
The meeting started to break up in a storm of friendly catcalls and laughter, the diggers streaming away across the square to the canteens.
It was obvious to even the most bloody-minded of them that there wasn't going to be a lynching, and hardly any of them bothered to wait for the Committee's verdict. it was more important to get a good place at the bar.
'Which doesn't mean we approve of your behaviour, young man,' Pickering told Ralph severely. 'This isn't Buitfontein or Dutoitspan. Here on New Rush we try to set an example to the other diggings. In future, do try and behave like a gentleman. I mean fists are one thing, but whips-' He raised one eyebrow disdainfully and turned to Zouga. 'If you have any ideas about how we are going to work the number 6 area now that the causeway has gone, we'd like to hear them, Major Ballantyne.'
Hendrick Naaiman would have called himself a 'Bastaard', and would have used the term with a deep sense of pride. However, the British Foreign Office had found the word awkward, possibly the double 'A' in the spelling offended the proper order of official correspondence and treaties, especially if one of those treaties should ever be laid for signature before Queen Victoria. So the nation was now referred to as Griqua, and the land on which New Rush stood was renamed Griqualand West, a definition which made it easier for Whitehall to champion old Nicholaas Waterboer, the Bastaard captain's claim to the area, over that of the Boer presidents of the backveld republics which also claimed the area as part of their dominions.
It was remarkable how before the discovery of the bright stones nobody, and especially not Great Britain, had shown the slightest interest in this desolate and and plain, no matter what it was called.
In Hendrick Naaiman's veins flowed the rich intermingled blood of numerous peoples.
Its basis was that of the Hottentot the sturdy goldenskinned, dark-eyed people who had met the first Portuguese circumnavigators of the globe when they stepped onto the gleaming white beach sands of Good Hope.
Added to the Hottentot was the blood of the captured yellow bushman girls. Tiny doll-like creatures whose buttery yellow skins and dainty triangular faces with orientally slanted eyes and flattened pug features were only part of their attraction. To a people who regarded a large female posterior as a mark of beauty, the buttocks of the bushmen girls were irresistible, a bountiful double bulge that stood out behind them like the hump of a camel and in the and deserts of the Kalahari served the same purpose.
To this blood mixture was added the contribution of outcast Fingo and Pondo tribesmen, fugitives from the wiles of their own cruel chiefs and merciless witchdoctors, and Malayan slaves, escaped from their Dutch burgher masters, who had found their way through the secret passes of the mountains that defended the Cape of Good Hope like the turreted walls of a great castle.
They also joined the bands of wandering Griquas on the vast plains of the interior.
This blood mixture was compounded with that of little English girls, orphaned survivors of shipwrecked East India men that had perished on the treacherous rocks scoured by the Agulhas current, and taken to wife at puberty by their darker-skinned rescuers. And there was other northern blood, that of British seamen, pressed into the Royal Navy's service in the time of Napoleon's wars and desperate to exchange that harsh duty even for the life of deserter in such a wild and desert land as Southern Africa. Others had fled into the same wilderness, escaped convicts from the transport ships that had called at Good Hope to reprovision for the long eastern leg of the voyage to Australia and penal settlement of Botany Bay.
Then came travelling Jewish pedlars, Scottish missionaries taking God's injunction 'Be fruitful' as their text for the day, riders on commando, collecting slaves and taking others of the traditional spoils of war in a dusty donga or behind a thorn bush under the inscrutable African sky. The old hunters had passed this way at the century's turn, and had paused in their pursuit of the great elephant herds to take on more tender game at closer range.
These were Hendrick Naaiman's ancestors. He was a Bastaard and proud of it. He had dark gypsy ringlets that dangled to the collar of his tanned buckskin jacket. His teeth were square and strong and starred with tiny white specks from drinking the lime-rich waters of the Karroo wells since childhood.
His eyes were black as tarpits, and his toffee-coloured skin thickly sown with the darker coin-like scars of smallpox, for his white ancestors had bestowed upon the tribe many of the other virtues of civilization: gunpowder, alcohol and more than one variety of the pox.
Despite the scarring, Hendrick was a handsome man, tall, broadshouldered, with long powerful legs, flashing black eyes and a sunny smile. He squatted across the fire from Bazo now, with his wide-brimmed hat still on his head; the ostrich feathers nodded and swirled above the flat crown as he gestured widely, laughing and talking persuasively.
'Only the ant-bear and 'the meercat dig in the earth for no reward more than a mouthful of insects.' Naaiman spoke in fluent Zulu, which was close enough to their own tongue for the Matabele to follow him readily. 'Do these hairy white-faced creatures own all the earth and everything upon and beneath it? Are they then some kind of magical creature, some god from the heavens that they can say to you 'I own every stone in the earth, every drop of water in the-'
' Hendrick paused, for he was about to say oceans, but he knew that his audience had never seen the sea, every drop of water in the rivers and lakes.' Hendrick shook his head so that the ringlets danced on his cheeks. 'I tell you then to see how, when the sun burns away their skin, the red meat that shows through is the same coloured meat as yours or mine. If you think them gods, then smell their breath in the morning or watch them squatting over the latrine pit. They do it the same way as you or me, my friends.'
The circle of black men listened fascinated, for they had never heard ideas like these expressed aloud.
'They have guns,' Bazo pointed out, and Hendrick laughed derisively.
'Guns,' he repeated, and patted the Enfield in his own lap. 'I have a gun, and when you finish your contract you also will have a gun.
