H. A. almost felt their ghosts staring down on him from the ancient riverbed’s bank, tiny little spirits wearing nothing but crowns of reeds around their heads and rawhide belts festooned with pouches for their ostrich eggs and quivers for the small poisoned arrows they used to take game.
“What have you found, H. A.?” Jon Varley asked, kneeling in the dirt next to the guide. His once shining dark hair fell lank around his shoulders, but he had somehow maintained the piratical gleam in his eyes.
They were the eyes of a desperate schemer, a man driven by dreams of instant wealth and one willing to risk death to see them fulfilled.
“Water, Mr. Varley.” Though twenty years his senior, H. A. tried to speak deferentially to all his clients.
“What? How? I don’t see anything.”
The Watermen brothers sat on a nearby boulder. Peter Smythe collapsed at their feet. Tim helped the lad move upright so his back was against the water-worn rock. His head lolled against his thin chest and his breathing was unnaturally shallow.
“It’s underground, like I told you.”
“How do we get it out?”
“We dig.”
Without another word the two men began scraping back the soil that a Bushman had laboriously used to refill the precious well so that it didn’t dry out. H. A.’s hands were broad and so callused that he could use them like shovels, tearing into the friable earth with little regard to the flinty shards. Varley had the hands of a gambler, smooth and, at one point, neatly manicured, but he dug just as hard as the guide—raging thirst allowing him to ignore the cuts and scrapes and the blood that dripped from his fingertips.
They excavated two feet of earth and still no sign of water. They had to expand the hole because they were much bigger than the Bushmen warriors whose job it was to dig these wells. At three feet H. A.
took out a scoopful of dirt and when he dropped it away from the hole a thin layer clung to his skin. He rolled it between his fingers until he’d produced a little ball of mud. When he squeezed it a quivering drop of water shone in the starlight.
Varley whooped and even H. A. cracked an uncommon smile.
They redoubled their efforts, slinging mud from the hole with reckless abandon. Ryder had to put a restraining hand on Varley’s shoulder when he felt they’d dug deep enough.
“Now we wait.”
The other men crowded around the well and they watched in expectant silence as the darkened bottom of the excavation suddenly turned white. It was the moon reflecting off water seeping into the hole from the surrounding aquifer. H. A. used a piece torn from his shirt as a filter and dipped his canteen into the muddy water. It took several minutes for it to fill halfway. Peter moaned when he heard it sloshing as H.
A. lifted it from the hole.
“Here you go, lad,” Ryder said, handing over the canteen. Peter reached for it eagerly but Ryder didn’t let go. “Slowly, my boy. Drink it slowly.”
Smythe was too far gone to listen to H. A.’s advice; his first massive gulp sent him into a paroxysm of coughing and the mouthful of water was wasted on the desert floor. When he’d recovered he took tentative sips, looking sheepish. It took four hours to recover enough water for the men to drink their fill and finally manage to eat their first meal in days.
H. A. was still watering the horses when the sun began to brush against the eastern horizon. He was careful with them so they wouldn’t bloat or cramp, and fed them sparingly, but still their great bellies rumbled with contentment as they ate and managed to stale for the first time in days.
“H. A.!” Tim Watermen had gone over the riverbank to relieve himself in private. He stood silhouetted against the dawn frantically waving his hat and pointing toward the rising sun.
Ryder plucked his telescope from his saddlebag and raced from the horses, climbing the hill like a man possessed. He smashed into Watermen so both fell to the dust. Before Tim could protest, Ryder clamped a hand over his companion’s mouth and hissed, “Keep your voice down. Sound travels well over the desert.”
Lying flat, H. A. extended the telescope and set it against his eye.
Look at them come, he thought.God, they are magnificent .
WHAT had brought these five men together was Peter Smythe’s utter hatred of his father, a fearsome man who claimed to have had a vision of the archangel Gabriel. The angel had told Lucas Smythe to sell everything he owned and travel to Africa to spread the word of God among the savages. While not particularly religious before his vision, Smythe devoted himself to the Bible with such urgency that when he applied to the London Missionary Society they considered denying his application because he had become a zealot. But in the end the Society accepted him if for no other reason than to get him away from their offices. They sent him and his begrudging wife and son to Bechuanaland, where he was to replace a minister who’d died of malaria.
Away from the constraints of society at a tiny mission in the heart of the Herero people, Smythe became a religious tyrant, for his was a vengeful God who demanded total self-sacrifice and severe penitence for even the most minor transgressions. It was nothing for Peter to be cane-whipped by his father because he mumbled the last words of a prayer or be denied dinner for not being able to recite a particular psalm on command.
At the time of the family’s arrival, the Herero king, Samuel Maharero, who had been baptized some decades earlier, was in a bitter dispute with the colonial authorities, and thus shunned the German minister sent to his lands by the Rhenish Mission Society. Lucas Smythe and his family enjoyed the patronage of the king even if Maharero was hesitant of Smythe’s rantings of hellfire and brimstone.
While young Peter enjoyed his friendships with the king’s many grandchildren, life as a teen near the royal kraal was tedium punctuated with moments of terror when the Spirit seized his father, and he wanted nothing more than to run away.
And so he plotted his escape, confiding in Assa Maharero, one of the king’s grandsons and his best friend, what he intended to do. It was during one of their many strategy sessions that Peter Smythe made the discovery that would change his life.
He was in a storagerondoval , a circular hut the Herero used to store fodder when the fields were too barren for their thousands of cattle. It was the place he and Assa had chosen as their hide out, and though Peter had been there dozens of times, this was the first he noticed that the hard-packed earth along one mud-and-grass wall had been dug up. The black soil had been carefully tamped down but his sharp eye spotted the irregularity.
He used his hands to dig into the spot, and discovered that there was only a thin layer of soil laid over a dozen large earthen beer pots. The jugs were the size of his head, and a membrane of cowhide had been stretched over their tops. He lifted one from its resting place. It was heavy and he could feel something rattling around inside.
Peter carefully worked the stitches around the rim, loosening them just enough so that when he tipped the pot a few unremarkable stones dropped into his palm. He began to shake. While they looked nothing like the stylized drawings of faceted stones he’d seen, he knew by how they scattered the meager light in the hut that he was holding six uncut diamonds. The smallest was the size of his thumbnail. The largest more than twice as big.
Just then Assa ducked through the arched doorway and saw what his friend had uncovered. His eyes went wide with terror and he quickly looked over his shoulder to see if any adults were about. Across the fenced stockade a couple of boys were watching some cattle and a woman was walking a few hundred yards away with a bundle of grass perched atop her head. He leapt across therondoval and took the beer pot from Peter’s startled fingers.
“What have you done?” Assa hissed in his odd German-accented English.
“Nothing, Assa, I swear,” Peter cried guiltily. “I saw that something had been buried and I just wanted to see what it was, is all.”
Assa held out a hand and Peter dumped the loose stones into his palm. The young African prince spoke as he tucked the stones back under the leather cover. “On pain of death you must never speak of this to anyone.”
“Those are diamonds, aren’t they?”
Assa regarded his friend. “Yes.”
“But how? There are no diamonds here. They’re all down in the Cape Colony around Kimberley.”
