He fidgeted uncomfortably and coughed to relieve the pain in his injured throat.
You can't win, not when someone is bigger and stronger than you, he whispered miserably.
Then you don't fight him with your fists, she told him.
You don't rush in and let him stick a dead fish down your throat. He blushed painfully at the humiliation. You wait your chance, and you fight him with your own weapons and on your own terms. You only fight when you are sure you can win. He considered that carefully, examining it from every angle. That's what you did to his father, didn't you? he asked softly, and she was startled by his perception so that she stared at him and the Daimler bumped out of the ruts.
Quickly she caught and controlled the machine, and then she nodded. Yes. That's what I did. You see, we are Courtneys. We don't have to fight with our fists. We fight with power and money and influence. Nobody can beat us on our own ground. He was silent again, digesting it carefully, and at last he smiled. He was so beautiful when he smiled, even more beautiful than his father had been, that she felt her heart squeezed by her love.
I'll remember that, he said. Next time I meet him, I'll remember what you said. Neither of them doubted for a moment that the two boys would meet again, and that when they did, they would continue the conflict that had begun that day.
The breeze was onshore and the stink of rotting fish was so strong that it coated the back of Lothar De La Rey's throat and sickened him to the gut.
The four trawlers still lay at their berths but their cargoes were no longer glittering silver. The fish had packed down and the top layer of pilchards had dried out in the sun and turned a dark, dirty grey, crawling with metallic green flies as big as wasps. The fish in the holds had squashed under their own weight, and the bilge pumps were pouring out steady streams of stinking brown blood and fish oil that discoloured the waters of the bay in a spreading cloud.
All day Lothar had sat at the window of the factory office while his coloured trawler-men and packers lined up to be paid. Lothar had sold his old Packard truck and the few sticks of furniture from the corrugated shack in which he and Manfred lived. These were the only assets that did not belong to the company and had not been attached. The second-hand dealer had come across from Swakopmund within hours, smelling disaster the way the vultures do, and he had paid Lothar a fraction of their real value.
There is a depression going on, Mr De La Rey, everybody is selling, nobody is buying. I'll lose money, believe me. With the cash that Lothar had buried under the sandy floor of the shack there was enough to pay his people two shillings on each pound that he owed them for back wages.
He did not have to pay them, of course, it was the company's responsibility, but that did not occur to him, they were his people.
I'm sorry, he repeated to each one of them as they came to the pay window. That's all there is. And he avoided their eyes.
When it was all gone, and the last of his coloured people had wandered away in disconsolate little groups, Lothar locked the office door and handed the key to the deputy sheriff .
Then he and the boy had gone down to the jetty for the last time and sat together with their legs dangling over the end. The stink of dead fish was as heavy as their mood.
I don't understand, Pa. Manfred spoke through his distorted mouth with the crusty red scab on the upper lip. We caught good fish.
We should be rich. What happened, Pa? We were cheated, Lothar said quietly. Until that moment there had been anger, no bitterness, just a feeling of numbness. Twice before he had been struck by a bullet. The .303
Lee Enfield bullet on the road to Ornaruru when they were opposing Smuts invasion of German South West Africa, and then much later the Luger bullet fired by the boy's mother.
He touched his chest at the memory, and felt the rubbery puckered pit of the scar through the thin cotton of his khaki shirt.
It was the same thing, first the shock and the numbness and then only much later the pain and the anger. Now the anger came at him in black waves, and he did not try to resist. Rather he revelled in it; it helped to assuage the memory of abasing himself, pleading for time from the woman with the taunting smile in her dark eyes.
Can't we stop them, Pa? the boy asked, and neither of them had to define that them'. They knew their enemy.
They had grown to know them in three wars; in 1881 the first Boer War, then again in the Great Boer War of 1899
when Victoria called her khaki multitudes from across the oceans to crush them, and then in 1914 when the British puppet Jannie Smuts had carried out the orders of his imperial masters.
Lothar shook his head, unable to answer, choked by the strength of his anger.
There must be a way, the boy insisted. We are strong. He recalled the feeling of Shasa's body slowly weakening in his grip and he flexed his hands involuntarily. It's ours, Pa.
This is our land. God gave it to us, it says so in the Bible. Like so many before him, the Afrikaner had interpreted that book in his own way. He saw his people as the children of Israel, and Southern Africa as the promised land flowing with milk and honey.
Lothar was silent and Manfred took his sleeve. God did give it to us, didn't he, Pa? Yes. Lothar nodded heavily.
Then they've stolen it from us: the land, the diamonds, and the gold and everything, and now they have taken our boats and our fish. There must be a way to stop them, to win back what belongs to us. 'It's not as easy as that. Lothar hesitated how to explain it to the child. Did he truly understand it himself, how it had happened? They were squatters in the land that their fathers had wrested from the savages and the wilderness at the point of their long muzzle-loading guns.
When you grow up you'll understand, Manie, he said.
When I grow up I'll find a way to beat them. Manfred said it so forcefully that the scab on his lip cracked open and a droplet like a tiny ruby glowed upon it. I'll find a way to get it back from them. You'll see if I don't, Pa. Well,
