The River of Diamonds Read online

  I eased forward. I lost my footing and slipped, heavily.

  I fell on a body.

  There was not one body, there were scores of them!

  My cushion gave a loud grunt. Seals! Blinder reef seals! I'd fallen into a seal nursery. The big wet glossy creatures grunted, slithered and bellowed. I expected to be savaged. I made for a corner, where a bull snarled and bared his fangs. I screamed hysterical obscenities at them above the wind, but apart from grunting they remained quiet. An occasional dollop of sea found its way into the nursery. There must have been several hundred seals, but in the half-light I could not be sure. I lay where I was.

  The darkness of the sky became the darkness of senselessness.

  Wood crunched into bone, sickeningly. I awoke, and I smelt blood. All I could see was the stars. Then a wooden club rose in silhouette. It was all bloody, held by a naked, massive fist. It was not the sight of the club which drew my dry scream of terror so much as the grotesque grouping of piebald blotches on the skin of the upraised arm. The scream died in my throat and all I managed to get out was a strangled whisper.

  'God, Koeltas, a white man!'

  The club sank out of sight and with it the piebald arm and torso. The silence in the darkness was as unnerving as my rise to consciousness to find that death-dealing club poised.

  Then a thin voice, harsh and authoritative, rasped, 'Johaar, hold that torchie nice and low, will you!'

  The light blinded me as I raised myself on an elbow.

  A third voice said, 'Cut his bladdy throat, man — it's one of Shelborne's men!'

  I said, 'Do you know Shelborne? Shelborne of Mercury Island?'

  There was another scarifying silence. The torch swept across me, picking out my sodden, torn clothes.

  'I'm saying to you, cut his throat!' repeated one voice.

  The thin, metallic voice said, 'Hold your big jaw, Kim, you stupid bloody poacher!'

  I guessed at the type behind the thin voice. I had heard that note too often in my childhood in the Richtersveld to be mistaken. It was one of the savage little nomads who escaped extermination during the brutal German-Hottentot war at the turn of the century. A mixture of Hottentot, Bushman and Strandloper — that Stone Age survivor on the Sperrgebiet who stinks worse than a hyena — these little men are either outlaws or fishermen on the coast; indeed, I had two or three in my crew of the Praying Mantis. No effective control can be exercised over the isolated communities on the coast who live wandering lives between the shore and the desert. They are superb seamen who live a twilight existence poaching, stealing seals, smuggling illicit diamonds from native workers at Oranjemund to undercover spots in Angola and West Africa, and running law-breakers from civilized ports to remote hideouts on the coast. They are small-boned, short, wiry men with heads of tight curls like Bushmen; they are intelligent and authoritative and generally crew their ships with half-breed Malay and Cape Coloured fishermen. They are a dying race — tuberculosis and alcohol have an appalling annual toll.

  I dropped into the Hottentot-Bushman patois of the wild mountains, a series of broken clicks like a hungry man swallowing oysters and cracking the shells in his teeth. 'If you're poachers, then come and poach something worthwhile with me, not these seals which bring you a couple of shillings a pelt!'

  There was a rumble from the piebald man I associated with the name Johaar. 'Ag, God, he asks us nice and sweet, come and poach with me when he lies like a wet poop on the rocks!'

  The thin voice said, 'You speak like us — how is this in a white man?'

  My life depended on my reply. 'Diamonds!'

  The torch swivelled and they laughed softly, sinisterly, yet impressed by my use of their patois. There were three of them.' Koeltas, a thin, spare, yellow man with a rudimentary nose and oblique eyes, to my dazed senses he looked like one of Genghis Khan's ancient Tartar riders. A yellow oilskin hung below his knees. This was a genuine Hottentot sailor-nomad, Johaar, of the naked torso, was a giant half-caste. Hand-sized splotches of piebald skin stood out like the markings of some dread disease in the faint light. The third, Kim — which I took for a shortened form of Gakim, which meant Malay blood in his mixed ancestry — was peering at me sardonically, aquiline nose thrust forward. It was he who wanted to cut my throat. Savage, dangerous, unpredictable outcasts with a wayward sense of humour which could win or lose a life in a flash. If I could make them laugh I might be safe.

  'Did you ever hear a seal talk Hottentot?'

  Koeltas did laugh. 'Even Kim never thought of having a love-affair with a seal.'

  The three of them joined in the silent mirth.

  'Who are you?'

  'John Tregard. My ship was wrecked.'

  A look of cunning and avidity spread across the yellow face. 'Where is she, this ship of yours? Was she carrying diamonds?'

  'Any brannewyn — brandy?' Johaar followed up quickly.

  Kim leaned down until his face was six inches from mine. He had an odd Semitic look about his rather handsome half-caste features. 'You lie about diamonds.'

  'My ship wasn't carrying diamonds…' I began.

  'You lie!' Koeltas asserted flatly. 'You lie about the ship too.'

  'Cut his bloody throat!' said Kim.

  My life hung in the balance. A fight would have been hopeless. I remembered the diamonds in the German Knight's Cross. Had it survived my jump and desperate crawl through the rocks? I fumbled in my pocket. Perhaps Johaar thought I was going for a gun, because he held the club poised. I breathed thankfully as my fingers closed on the medal.

  I showed it to them. 'See this — diamonds! There are lots more where I am looking.'

  Koeltas demanded, 'Where is the ship?'

  I hung the cross by its gold chain round my neck. I tried to get to my feet, but I was too weak. 'I'll show you.'

  Johaar said, 'Let's go then. I'll carry this bastard since he can't walk. A ship on the rocks is better than killing seals.'

  The Tartar-like Koeltas held a knife in his left hand. These were the types Shelborne had spoken of, men who came in blacked-out ships under darkness and plundered his carefully-tended nurseries for the sake of a few score pelts and were gone again before dawn. They were as predatory and hungry-looking as the jackals along the shore.

  Koeltas's laugh had no humour in it. 'Tonight you are lucky — twice. We don't use the dynamite (he pronounced it dinnameet) because we don't want the noise, unnestan'? Other nights we float in an old oil drum filled with dinnameet and a time-fuse. It kills the seals — whoof! Why aren't you Shelborne's man?'

  I told him simply and briefly something of my survey, the Mazy Zed, the sea-bed diamonds, and finally of Shelborne's directions when the storm blew up. Koeltas's face aped a comic rubber mask when he heard Shelborne's instructions to me. He spoke quickly to the other two in a curious mixture of English, Afrikaans and patois. The three of them rocked with silent laughter.

  The little yellow man said, 'Shelborne wants to kill your ship, so he steers you on to this blinder. Every one of us poachers knows this rock lies across the northern entrance. But, by Jesus, it is we who get your ship instead!'

  'You mean Shelborne deliberately…?'

  My anger flared. I recalled how carefully Shelborne had repeated his directions to me. Why, if he had been so certain about the storm, had he troubled to go to the barometer in the wheelhouse? Was it the barometer he went to see? Minnaar's remark about the compass being slow hit me like a left hook. Had Shelborne deliberately fiddled with the compass to send us to our deaths? Had he concealed something in his sealskin jacket which he had been at such pains to take from the flatboom?

  I said thickly, 'Listen, Koeltas, I need a ship. I want your ship. You can have what is left in my whaler. That and Ј500 to sail me where I want to go.'

  The cunning eyes were two slits. 'Spencer Bay? Mercury?'

  'Yes.'

  'I have a good ship,' he replied with a touch of pride. 'Name Malgas — the Mad Goose. You know, the birds that dive for fish in t
he islands. Schooner. No engines. Not good for seal poaching. I sail her anywhere.'

  Koeltas would know every tide, every rip, every rock and blinder along the Sperrgebiet. I meant to get back to Mercury. He was my man.

  He went on. 'If Shelborne sees me, he kills me. He knows I steal his seals.'

  'I'm chartering you,' I said. 'He can't do a damn about that. I can charter whoever I like. I have the right to prospect this coast.'

  I told him about the court ruling giving us the prospecting rights. He seemed puzzled, but I let it go.

  'Okay,' he said, breathing a formidable oath against Shelborne. He went on, 'For fifteen years now I sail the Sperrgebiet. Sometime I would like to see Mercury in daylight.'

  He signalled Johaar, who heaved me up on his piebald shoulders. We set off for the wreck.

  I nodded at the peardrop-shaped rock. 'I crawled up that way. The stern must lie close over there — if it hasn't slipped into deep water.'

  The water isn't deep,' Koeltas replied confidently.

  Less than thirty feet from the main bulk of the blinder we found what was left of the Praying Mantis. There was no sign of life. Rigging lay in a wild tangle: stays, running gear and cables thumped dismally against the torn plating.

  'Fine ship.' Koeltas paused for a moment before jumping nimbly from rock to rock to the hulk. It was as good an epitaph as any, but it did not mitigate my cold rage against Shelborne for his deliberate murder of my team. Minnaar had been tough, likeable and dependable, the crew the pick of the fishing fleet — fine sailors, loyal and attached to me. Kim followed Koeltas, Johaar and I bringing up the rear. On the bridge Koeltas used his torch cautiously. The place was a shambles. Gratings and deck were ripped up; the wheel was intact, but the binnacle was split wide open, probably from the savage jar the rudder had given when she struck.

  The Hottentot's eyes almost closed with amusement when he shone the torch into the shattered compass housing. 'Shelborne — the sonofabitch!'

  In a fist-sized chunk of rock were two diamonds.

  I felt weak, shattered, at this evidence of some new evil, coming hard on the heels of the loss of my crew. With an oath, more to sustain my morale than anything, I bent to look. Koeltas's fingers, hard as a vulture's talon, bit into my shoulder. He stood transfixed. The others froze, listening.

  Across the water, from the direction of Mercury, came a weird, reverberating sound. It wasn't music, it wasn't gunfire, it wasn't depth-charges. It sounded hollow, chesty. It rumbled, grew, ebbed. Wonderment, but chiefly fear, was in their faces.

  Koeltas's click-clack vowels rattled like a machine-gun. 'Quick, quick! We get the hell out of the bay — now, now, now!'

  I hung back. I had to get to the bottom of the binnacle mystery. 'What the hell…?'

  His fingers clamped hard. 'Come! The Malgas! Quick!'

  That noise…'

  He rounded on me. The skin was drawn tight over the high cheekbones. It was ash rather than yellow.

  'The Bells of St Mary's,' he whispered.

  8

  Too Big for Fate

  It rolled across the water after our tiny dinghy racing for the schooner. The Bells of St Mary's! They weren't bells; it was a monstrous death-rattle in the wind's breathing, some undefined weirdness choking out its life behind us in the fog. And Mercury lay behind. The rumble ended with a paroxysm, as if boulders had been shaken together for a poker-dice throw. Koeltas shuddered.

  'Bells?' I rasped. 'The Bells of St Mary's…?'

  His dead panic made the oaths come tumbling from Koeltas's lips. 'The sonofabitch, the bladdy sonofabitch Shelborne! He makes the Bells back there on Mercury. It is his name for them, the Bells of St Mary's. He tells the skipper so. He kills us with them. He knows the Malgas comes…'

  I recalled Shelborne's vigilant flag-hoist; he would always be on the alert. Shelborne's attitude towards intruders was pretty rough — there was no doubt now that he had sent the Praying Mantis to her doom — and it would be rougher still towards the likes of Koeltas and the Mad Goose. I wished now I had got more out of Shelborne when he had talked out in the dunes. He'd spoken freely because — I thought grimly — dead men tell no tales. From now on I'd need men of the ruthless calibre of Koeltas, Johaar and Kim. I didn't intend to be so gentle myself when I returned to Mercury.

  I tried to quiet Koeltas's fear. 'He can't see any of us, or your ship, in this fog. Pull yourself together, man. These Bells — it's something quite simple, we'll find out.'

  Shelborne must have played somehow on the superstitions of the Coloured and Malay fishermen — I had had an example on the passage to Mercury when I found my Malay helmsman changing course against orders to pass to windward of a school of porpoises. They were; he told me, the angels of the sea and to pass to leeward was an insult to the sea-dead. I suspected Shelborne of rigging some sort of loudspeaker gear.

  Koeltas snarled, 'Shut your trap! What the hell do you know about the Bells? They'll kill us all if we don't get out quick!'

  Fear sharpened his uncanny instinct for the whereabouts of his ship. In a few moments the Malgas was right ahead. She was a schooner of about 150 tons with very long hardpine masts, painted an indeterminate khaki to merge into the dun background — like the disguise of Namib plants whose young leaves exude a stickiness to which blown sand clings and camouflages them with a fine rough-cast which makes them indistinguishable from the desert. The foremast had been stepped right forward into the eyes of the schooner I had a glimpse of her heavy sparring as we vaulted over the low rail. It was enough to tell what the Malgas was: a strandloper of the ocean, the sea-going equivalent of the starving carrion scavengers of the Sperrgebiet beaches.

  Johaar left the dinghy to trail astern while he shot below. Half a dozen men, Coloureds and Malays, were hauling on the sheets before they had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. Johaar did not have to spur them on, the Bells did that. The whole operation of running up the fore and mizzen sails, the jib and flying jib above the bowsprit, was done in silence. Each knew he appointed task. No orders were given. Kim took the wheel, came forward to watch the luff of the big mainsail, ochre-coloured like the others. The wind was fluky. Koeltas went over to Kim and spoke in a low voice. They got the foregaff on her as Kim brought her round on to the port tack — her heading struck a chord of fear into me.

  'You're crazy, Koeltas — you can't beat out by the southern passage!'

  He stood by the rail, listening, peering into the fog.

  'Shut up!' he snapped in a low urgent voice. There was a flicker in the thin eyes above the Tartar cheekbones. 'Who says so — Shelborne?'

  'Yes!'

  He gave a derisive, harsh little chuckle. He came close. He was sweating. The smell of fear blended with the bitter, repugnant stench of the oilskin. 'In a moment, we see a rock — there!' He thrust an arm out to starboard. 'We are on course, then — dead between Mercury and Sudhuk. Sudhuk blocks the wind. Past the rock we get a little more wind, maybe. Look for the rock!'

  I looked. It wasn't a rock I saw. It was Shelborne's face.

  The flatboom was right under our forefoot. Shelborne was at the tiller. He half-rose in the sternsheets. The Malgas was upon him.

  'Jesus!'

  Kim saw it too. He gave the wheel a spoke or two. The tower of sail eased. The schooner leaned away from the flatboom. Shelborne's face was white and taut against the sealskin collar. Then — faces, oars, rowers were gone, lost in the fog astern. My words would not come when I saw the rock seconds later. Koeltas, too, said nothing, but threw out his hand towards the key-point with the stiff, stylized motion with which the desert Bushman throws his scanty food into the eye of the desert wind to placate his gods. The Malgas, turning at the rock, hung in stays for an agonizing moment. Then her head came round and she moved silently under a full press of sail out to the open sea.

  Koeltas said, without preliminary, 'How much diamant?' He seemed to be having second thoughts about my charter, which to him meant smuggling diamonds, not mining t
hem. 'One of my fren's — also a schooner skipper — takes diamant out to the ships fishing out deep — there! Russian. Jan. Maybe Jap, I dunno. He gets five years in jail. Johaar!'

  Koeltas fired a volley of crackling vowels and staccato consonants at him. Even for me it was too quick, but here and there I caught the word diamond. Johaar laughed when Koeltas mentioned the Praying Mantis. I was too raw over her loss to join in.

  Koeltas said, 'Mister, Johaar, Kim and me like the job. But Shelborne chases us away, us all in the Malgas. Lots of trouble. When he sees the Malgas he shout, voetsak you Malay bastard, get to hell out of my bay.'

  'It isn't his bay,' I replied. Simply, and in some detail, I explained that the Mary Zed project was under licence, legitimate, not outside the law. It was almost impossible to convey this last fact to him.

  'I must get back to the wreck before Shelborne,' I told them: 'I want to see what I can salvage of my gear, the diving suits especially.'

  I wondered how- much damage the Hydrodist had suffered. It was not irreplaceable but it would take time to get a new one. With or without it, by modem or old-fashioned methods, I intended to survey the bay. More than survey it — investigate it. Priority number one was the inside of the Glory Hole. The three of them grinned as I spoke, Kim from the wheel nearby. The wind had died away and the Malgas, despite the spread she was carrying, ghosted along, barely under way.

  'I know about wrecks,' said Koeltas. That was the biggest understatement I had heard since coming aboard. I also wanted to find out what Shelborne had put in the binnacle.