Wilbur Smith - The Power of the Sword

Synopsis:

Half-brothers and blood enemies Manfred de la Rey and Shasa Courtney, the sons of Centaine de Thiry-Courtney, are irrevocably caught up in an age-old and savage war to seize the sword of power in their land. The Power of the Sword follows them through two decades of South African history in an epic story of life-long love and hate, of rivalry and revenge, of winners and losers in a deadly struggle where only the ruthless survive.

WILBUR SMITH

Power of the Sword

If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all Laws chang'd according to the Power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here. King Charles I of England.

Speech on the scaffold, 30 January 1649.

The Power of the Sword

The fog smothered the ocean, muting all colour and sound.

It undulated and seethed as the first eddy of the morning breeze washed in towards the land. The trawler lay in the fog three miles offshore on the edge of the current line, where the vast upwellings from the oceanic depths, rich in life-bringing plankton, met the gentle inshore waters in a line of darker green.

Lothar De La Rey stood in the wheelhouse and leaned on the spoked wooden wheel as he peered out into the fog. He loved these quiet charged minutes of waiting in the dawn.

He could feel the electric tingle starting in his blood, the lust of the huntsman that had sustained him countless times before, an addiction as powerful as opium or strong spirits.

Casting back in his mind he remembered that soft pink dawn creeping stealthily over the Magersfontein Hills as he lay against the parapets of the trenches and waited for the lines of Highland infantry to come in out of the darkness, to march with kilts swinging and bonnet ribbons flutting onto their waiting Mausers, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh at the memory.

There had been a hundred other dawns since then, waiting like this to go out against great game, shaggy maned Kalahari lion, scabby old buffalo with heads of armoured horn, sagacious grey elephant with wrinkled hides and precious teeth of long ivory, but now the game was smaller than any other and yet in its multitudes as vast as the ocean from which it came.

His train of thought was interrupted as the boy came down the open deck from the galley. He was barefoot and his legs were long and brown and strong. He was almost as tall as a grown man, so he was forced to stoop through the wheelhouse door balancing a steaming tin mug of coffee in each hand.

Sugar? Lothar asked.

Four spoons, Pa. The boy grinned back at him.

The fog had condensed in dew droplets on his long eyelashes, and he blinked them away like a sleepy cat. Though his curling blond head was bleached to streaks of platinum by the sun, his eyebrows and lashes were dense and black; they framed and emphasized his amber-coloured eyes.

Wild fish today. Lothar crossed the fingers of his right hand in his trouser pocket to ward off the ill luck of having said it aloud. 'We need it, he thought. To survive we need good wild fish. Five years previously he had succumbed once more to the call of the hunter's horn, to the lure of the chase and the wilds. He had sold out the prosperous road and railway construction company which he had painstakingly built UP, taken everything he could borrow and gambled it all.

He had known the limitless treasures that the cold green waters of the Benguela Current hid. He had glimpsed them first during those chaotic final days of the Great War when he was making his last stand against the hated English and their traitorous puppet Jan Smuts at the head of his army of the Union of South Africa.

From a secret supply base among the tall desert dunes that flanked the South Atlantic, Lothar had refuelled and armed the German U-boats that were scourging the British mercantile fleets, and while he waited out those dreary days at the edge of the ocean for the submarines to come, he had seen the very ocean moved by its own limitless bounty. it was there merely for the taking, and in the years that followed that ignoble peace at Versailles he made his plans while he laboured in the dust and the heat, blasting and cleaving the mountain passes or driving his roads straight across the shimmering plains. He had saved and planned and schemed for this taking.

The boats he had found in Portugal, sardine trawlers, neglected and rotten. There he had found Da Silva also, old and wise in the ways of the sea. Between them they had repaired and re-equipped the four ancient trawlers and then with skeleton crews had sailed them southwards down the length of the African continent.

The canning factory he had found in California, situated there to exploit the tuna shoals by a company which had overestimated their abundance and underestimated the costs of catching these elusive unpredictable chicken of the sea'.

Lothar had purchased the factory for a small fraction of its original cost and shipped it out to Africa in its entirety. He had re-erected it on the compacted desert sands alongside the ruined and abandoned whaling station which had given the desolate bay its name of Walvis Bay.

For the first three seasons he and old Da Silva had found wild fish, and they had reaped the endless shoals until Lothar had paid off the loans that had fettered him. He had immediately ordered new boats to replace the decrepit Portuguese trawlers which had reached the end of their useful lives, and in so doing had plunged himself more deeply into debt than he had been at the outset of the venture.

Then the fish had gone. For no reason that they could divine, the huge shoals of pilchards had disappeared, only tiny scattered pockets remaining. While they searched futilely, running out to sea a hundred miles and more, scouring the long desert coastline far beyond economic range from the canning factory, the months marched past remorselessly, each one bringing a note for accrued interest that Lothar could not meet, and the running costs of factory and boats piled up so that he had to plead and beg for further loans.

Two years with no fish. Then dramatically, just when Lothar knew himself beaten, there had been some subtle shift in the ocean current or a change in the prevailing wind and the fish had returned, good wild fish, rising thick as new grass in each dawn.

Let it last, Lothar prayed silently, as he stared out into the fog. Please God, let it last. Another three months, that was all he needed, just another three short months and he would pay it off and be free again.

She's lifting, the boy said, and Lothar blinked and shook his head slightly, returning from his memories.

The fog was opening like a theatre curtain, and the scene it revealed was melodramatic and stagey, seemingly too riotously coloured to be natural as the dawn fumed and glowed like a display of fireworks, orange and gold and green where it sparkled on the ocean, turning the twisting columns of fog the colour of blood and roses so that the very waters seemed to burn with unearthly fires. The silence enhanced the magical show, a silence heavy and lucid as crystal so that it seemed they had been struck deaf, as though all their other senses had been taken from them and concentrated in their vision as they stared in wonder.

Then the sun struck through, a brilliant beam of solid golden light through the roof of the fog-bank- It played across the surface, so that the current line was starkly lit. The inshore water was smudged with cloudy blue, as calm and smooth as oil. The line where it met the up welling of the true oceanic current was straight and sharp as the edge of a knife-blade, and beyond it the surface was dark and ruffled as green velvet stroked against the pile.

Daar spring hy! Da Silva yelled from the fore-deck, pointed out to the line of dark water There he jumps! As the low sun struck the water a single fish jumped. It was just a little longer than a man's hand, a tiny sliver of burnished silver.