"I like a man who thinks big, a man who counts not in ones and twos but in tens of thousands," Rhodes nodded approval.
"At this moment I count my fortune in ones and twos."
"We could change that." Rhodes shot a pale piercing glance towards the bird carving, but Zouga chuckled and shook his head.
"I would like first refusal," Rhodes persisted.
"If I sell, it will be to you," Zouga agreed, and Rhodes stepped up in the stirrup, swung a leg over the horse's rump, settled in the saddle and rode out of the camp.
Pickering edged his mount closer to Zouga and leaned down from the saddle to tell him seriously: "He will have it from you, in the end he will have it. "I think not." Zouga shook his head.
But Pickering smiled. "He always gets what he sets his heart on. Always."
He saluted Zouga with the hand that held the reins and then started his horse into a canter and followed Rhodes out onto the dusty starlit track.
"Give the stone to the yellow man," Karnuza urged quietly. "Five hundred gold queens, and we will return to our own people with treasures. Your father, the induna of Inyati, will be pleased, even the king will call us to the great kraal at Thabas Indunas for audience. We will become important men."
"I do not trust the Bastaard."
"Do not trust him. Trust only the yellow coins he brings."
"I do not like his eyes. They are cold and he hisses like a yellow cobra when he speaks."
They were silent then, a circle of dark figures in the smoky hut, squatting around the diamond as it lay on the clay floor and flickered with weird lights in the reflection of the fire.
They had argued since the sunset had released them from their labours. They had argued over the meal of stringy mutton with its rind of greasy fat and maize porridge baked until it was stiff as cake.
They had argued over the snuff-horn and beer pot, and now it was late. Soon, very soon, there would be a scratching at the door of the hut as the Bastaard came for his answer.
"The stone is not ours to sell. It belongs to Bakela.
Does a son sell the calves from his father's herds?"
Karnuza made a clucking sound of exasperation.
"Surely it is against law and custom to steal from the tribe, from the elders of the tribe, but Bakela is not Matabele. He is buni, white man, it is not wrong doing to take from him any more than it is against law and custom to send the assegai through the heart of a Mashona dog, or to mount his wife in sport, or to take the cattle of a Tswana and put fire into his kraal to hear his children squeal. Those are natural and right things for a man to do."
"Bakela is my father, the stone is his calf, given into my care."
"He will give you a single coin," Karnuza lamented, and Bazo seemed not to hear him.
He picked up the diamond again and turned it in his hand.
"It is a large stone," he mused aloud, "a very large stone." He held it to his eye and looked into the stone as though it were a mountain pool, and he watched with awe the fires and shapes move within it.
Still holding it to his eye, he said, "If I bring my father a newborn calf, he will be happy and give me a reward.
But if I bring him one hundred calves how much greater will be his joy, and one hundred times greater the reward that he will give me."
He lowered the stone and gave a series of orders that sent his men hurrying out into the night, to return immediately with the tools Bazo had sent them to fetch.
Then in silence they watched him make his preparations.
Firstly he spread a kaross of silver jackal pelts on the earth floor and then in the centre of the fur he placed a small steel anvil at which he had watched Zouga shaping horse-shoes and working the iron hoops to repair the wagon wheels.
On the anvil Bazo placed the diamond, and then he threw aside his cloak so that he stood stark naked in the firelight, tall and lean and hard, his belly muscles standing up in concentric ridges under the dark satiny skin and the wide rangy shoulders overdeveloped by practice with shield and spear.
With his legs braced wide, he stood over the anvil, and hefted the sweat-polished handle of the pick, feeling the balance and weight of the steel head that had become so familiar.
Bazo narrowed his eyes, measuring his stroke, and then he reared back with the pick almost touching, the thatched roof. He drove his body weight into the stroke, and the steel pick head came hissing down from on high.
The point caught the diamond exactly on the high centre of its curved upper surface, and the great stone exploded as though a bucketful of mountain water had been dashed to the earth. The sparkling drops, the shattered fragments, the glowing chips of priceless crystal, seemed to fill the whole hut with a burst of sunlight.
They pattered against the thatched walls, stung the naked skins of the watching Matabele, kicked little puffs of grey ash as they fell into the fire, and scattered on the lustrous fur of the silver jackal kaross, shining there like live fish in the net.
"Son of the Great Snake," hooted Kamuza joyously. "We are rich men." And the laughing Matabele flung themselves into the task of gathering up the fragments.
They picked them from the ashes, swept them up from the earthen floor, shook them out of the jackal skin kaross, and piled them into Bazo's cupped hand until it was filled to overflowing. Even then they missed some of the tiny chips that had fallen into the dust or the fire and were lost for ever.
"You are a wise man," Kamuza told Bazo with unaffected admiration.
"Bakela has his stones, a hundred calves , and we will have more coins than the yellow Bastaard would give us."
There was no work in the collapsed number 6 Section, no need to rise before dawn, so the sun was clear of the horizon when Zouga strode out of the tent, clinching his belt as he joined Jan Cheroot and the two boys under the camel-thorn tree.
The table was a packing-case, the lid stained with candle grease and spilled coffee, and breakfast was maize-meal porridge in chipped enamel bowls, unsweetened, for the price of sugar had recently risen to a pound a pound on the diamond fields.
Zouga's eyes were red-rimmed, for he had slept little the previous night, but had lain awake worrying and scheming, going over and over in his mind every detail of the plans for the new staging, and coming back each time to the most important detail, the one for which there seemed to be no solution: the cost, the enormous cost of it all.
The two boys saw his face, recognized his mood, and were immediately silent, applying themselves with complete absorption to the unappetizing grey gruel in their bowls.
A shadow fell across the group, and Zouga looked up irritably, squinting into the early sunlight with the spoon half raised to his lips. "What is it, Bazo?"
"Pick-ups, Bakela." The tall young Matabele used the English words. "Pick-ups." Zouga grunted.
"Let me see it." Zouga was immediately uninterested.
Almost certainly it would be a worthless chip of quartz or rock crystal. But Bazo placed a small bundle wrapped in a dirty scrap of cloth beside Zouga's bowl.
"Well, open it," Zouga ordered; and Bazo picked the knot, and spread the cloth.
"Glass!" thought Zouga disgustedly. There was almost a handful of it, chips and pieces, the biggest not much bigger than the head of a wax Vesta.
"Glass!" and he made the gesture of sweeping it away, and then stayed his hand as the sunlight fell on the pile and a shaft of it pricked his eyes in a rainbow burst of colours.
Slowly, disbelievingly, he changed the gesture of dismissal and reached hesitantly, almost reverently for the glittering heap, but Jordan forestalled him.
With a shriek of joy the child's small graceful fingers danced over the pile.
"Diamonds, Papa," he screamed. "They are diamonds, real diamonds."
"Are you sure, Jordie?" Zouga asked the question unnecessarily, his voice hoarse, realizing it was too good to be true. There must be many hundreds of precious stones in the pile, small, very small, but of what superb colour, white, ice-white, seeming to crackle like lightwng they were so bright.