"Whores and whore masters," said Zouga. He stood on the wide verandah, in the shade of the thatched roof which had replaced the original tent of the first camp.
Ralph stood below him in the sunlight, blinking up at his father.
"Perhaps you have no respect for your family, for the name of Ballantyne, but do you have none for yourself and for your own body?"
Zouga was barring the front door to the cottage of raw unbaked brick. He was bare-headed, so that his thick dark gold hair shone like a war helmet and his neatlycropped beard emphasized the jut of his heavy jaw, and the long black tapered hippohide kurbash whip hung from his right hand, touching the floor at the toe of his riding boot.
"Do you have an answer?" Zouga's tone was quiet, and deadly cold.
Ralph was still dusty as a miller from the pit. The dust was thick and red in his hair, and outlined the curl of his nostrils and ran like tears from the corners of his eyes. He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve, an excuse to break the gaze of his father's eyes, and then examined the muddy smear with attention.
"Answer me," Zouga's voice did not alter. "Give me a reason, just one reason why I should not throw you out of this home, for ever."
Jordan could bear it no longer, the thought of losing Ralph overcame his terror of his father's wrath.
He ran down the length of the verandah, and seized the arm that held the whip.
"Papa! Please, Papa, don't send him away."
Without glancing at Jordan, Zouga lashed out and the blow caught Jordan across the chest and hurled him back against the verandah wall.
"Jordie did nothing," said Ralph, as quietly as his father had spoken.
"Oh, you do have a tongue?" Zouga asked.
"Get out of it, Jordie," Ralph ordered. "This is not your business."
"Stay where you are, Jordan." Zouga still did not look at him, his gaze was riveted on Ralph's face. "Stay here and learn about whores and the kind of men who lust after them."
Jordan was stricken, his face like last night's camp-fire ashes, his lips dry and white as bone. He knew what they were talking about, for he had listened while Bazo and Ralph wove their fantasies aloud, and with his interest piqued, he had questioned Jan Cheroot furtively and the replies had disgusted and terrified him.
"Not like animals, Jan Cheroot, surely not like dogs or goats."
Jordan's questions to Jan Cheroot had been generalized , men and women, not any person he knew or loved or respected. It had taken him days fully to appreciate Jan Cheroot's reply, and then the terrible realization had struck, all men and women, his father who epitomized for him all that was noble and strong and right, his mother, that sweet and gentle being who was already a fading wraithlike memory, not them, surely not them.
He had been physically sickened, vomiting and wracked by excruciating bowel cramps so that Zouga had dosed him with sulphur and treacle molasses.
Now they were talking about that thing, that thing so dreadful that he had tried to purge his memory of it.
Now the two most important people in his world were talking about it openly, using words he had only seen in print and which had even then shamed him. They were mouthing those words and the air was full of shame and hatred and revulsion.
"You have wallowed like a pig where a thousand other pigs have wallowed before you, in the foetid cesspool between that scarlet whore's thighs."
Jordan crept away along the wall, and reached the corner of the stoep. He could go no further.
"If you were not ashamed to muck in that trough, did you not give a thought to what those other rutting boars had left there for you?"
His father's words conjured up vivid images in Jordan's mind. His stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth with his hand.
"The sickness a harlot carries there is the curse of God upon venery and lust. If you could only see them in the pox hospital at Greenwich, raving idiots with their brains eaten half away by the disease, drooling from empty mouths, their teeth rotted out, their noses fallen into black festering holes, blind eyes rolling in their crazed skulls, " Jordan doubled over, and sicked up on his own rawhide boots.
"Stop it," said Ralph. "You have made Jordie sick."
"I have made him sick?" Zouga asked quietly. "It is you who would make any decent person sick."
Zouga came down the steps into the dusty yard, and he swung the whip, cutting the air with it, across and back and the lash fluted sharply.
Ralph stood his ground, and now his chin was up defiantly.
"If you take that whip to me, Papa, I shall defend myself."
"You challenge me," Zouga stopped.
"You only use a whip on an animal."
"Yes," Zouga nodded. "An animal, that's why I take it to you."
"Papa, I warn you."
Gravely Zouga inclined his head and considered the young man before him. "Very well. You claim to be a man, make good that claim."
Zouga tossed the hippohide whip casually onto the verandah, and then turned back to his son.
Ralph was prepared, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, although his hands were held low before him, they were balled into fists.
He never saw it. For a moment he thought that someone else had used a club on him from behind. The crack of it seemed to explode under the dome of his skull. He reeled backwards, his nose felt numb and at the same time swollen horribly. There was a tickling warmth on his upper lip and dumbly he licked it. It tasted of coppery salt, and he wiped at it with the back of his hand and then stared at the smear of blood on the back of his wrist.
His rage came on him with startling ferocity, as though a beast had pounced upon his back, a black beast that goaded him with its claws. He heard the beast growl in his ears, not recognizing his own voice, and then he rushed forward.
His father's face was in front of him, handsome, grave and cold, and he swung his fist at it with all his strength, wanting to feel the flesh crush under his knuckles, the gristle of that arrogant beaked nose break and crackle, the teeth snap out of that unforgiving mouth.
His fist spun through air, meeting no check, swinging high about the level of his own head, and the blow died there, the sinews of his shoulder wrenched by the unexpected travel of his arm.
Again that burst of sound in his skull, his teeth jarring, his head snapping back, his vision starring momentarily into pinpoints of light and areas of deep echoing black, and then clearing again so that his father's face floated back towards him.
Until that instant the only feelings he had ever had for Zouga were respect and fear and a weighty monumental love, but suddenly from some deep place in his soul rose a raging unholy hatred.
He hated him for a hundred humiliations and punishments, he hated him for the checks and frustrations with which he filled each precious day of Ralph's life, he hated him for the reverence and deep respect in which other men held him, for the example that he knew he would be expected to follow faithfully all his life and doubted that he could. He hated him for the enormous load of duty and devotion he owed him and which he knew he could never discharge. He hated him for the love he had stolen from him, the love his mother had given unstintingly to his father and which he wanted all for himself.
He hated him because his mother was dead, and his father had not prevented her going.
But most of all he hated him because he had taken something which had been wonderful and made it filthy, had taken a magical moment and made him ashamed of it, sick and dirty ashamed.
He rushed back at Zouga, swinging wildly with both fists meeting only air, and the blows that landed on his own head and face sounded as though somebody far away was chopping down a tree with a steel axe.
Zouga fell away neatly before each charge, swaying his head back or to the side, deflecting a blow with his arms, ducking carefully under a flying fist, and counter-punching only with his left hand, flicking it in with deceptive lightness, for at each shot Ralph's head snapped backwards sharply and the blood from his nose and his swollen lips slowly turned his face into a running red mess.