"Why did you run away?" he whispered. "You would have been better with us. Are we not the ones who love you? "It was better that you stayed, for now you are Panes. If we make you a sacrifice of rice and meat, will you not come back to us? See the sacrifice we set for you, great Panes."
The morning wind stirred, and Jordan heard the branch of the camel-thorn scrape upon the roof before the wind touched him. It was a warm, soft wind, and it ruffled his hair.
Jordan clenched his eyes even tighter, and the little insects of awe crawled upon his skin. The goddess had many ways of showing her presence. This was the first time she had come as a soft warm wind.
"Oh great Panes, I don't want to wallow in filth like Ralph. I don't ever want to smell the trough where a thousand pigs have wallowed. I don't want to go mad, and have my teeth rot out of my mouth." He whispered softly but ardently, and then the tears began to squeeze out from between his lids.
"Please save me, great Panes." He poured out all his horror and disgust to the sacred bird-woman. "They were hitting each other. They were hating each other, and the blood, oh the blood At last he was silent, head bowed, shivering, and then he rose to his bare feet, and for the first time looked at the image.
The bird stared back at him stonily, but Jordan cocked his lovely golden head as though he were listening, and the moonlight silvered his skin.
He turned, still clutching the book, and crept back along the verandah. As he turned the far corner there was a furry rush of dark bodies out of the shadows, and the soft squeals of the bush rats as they squabbled over the sacrifice.
Jordan pushed open the door of the kitchen and it smelled of woodsmoke and curry powder and carbolic soap.
He stooped to the ashbox of the black iron stove, and when he blew lightly through the grating the ashes glowed.
He pushed a long wax taper through the bars and blew again and a little blue flame popped into life. He carried it carefully across the kitchen, sheltering it with his cupped hand, and transferred the flame to the stump of candle in the neck of the dark green champagne bottle.
Then he blew out the taper and placed the bottle on the scrubbed yellow deal table and stepped back.
For a few seconds longer he hesitated, then he took the skirts of the faded and patched nightshirt, lifted them as high as his shoulders and looked down at his body.
The puppy fat had disappeared from his belly and hips.
His navel was a dark eye in the flat clean plain of his trunk, and his legs were gracefully shaped. His buttocks lean and tight, like immature fruit.
His body was smooth and hairless except for the golden wisps at the juncture of his legs. It was not yet thick enough to curl, and was sparse and fine as silk thread freshly spun upon the cocoon.
From the centre of this cloudy web his penis hung down limply. It had grown alarmingly in the last few months, and in Jordan's horrified imagination, he foresaw the day when it would be thick and heavy as his arm, a huge shameful burden to carry through life.
At this moment it looked so soft and white and innocent, but when he woke in the mornings it was hard as bone, hot and throbbing with a sinfully pleasurable ache.
That was bad, but in these last weeks that terrible swelling and stiffening had come upon him at the most unexpected times: at the dinner table with his father seated opposite him, in the schoolroom when the new schoolmistress had leaned over him to correct his spelling, seated at the sorting-table beside Jan Cheroot, on the gelding's back when the friction of the saddle had triggered it, and that awful stiff thing had thrust out the front of his breeches.
He took it in his hand now and it seemed helpless and soft as a newborn kitten, but he was not deceived. He stroked it softly back and forth and instantly he felt it change shape between his fingers. He released it quickly.
The joint of mutton that the family had dined off the previous evening stood on the deal table, under a steel mesh fly-cover. Jordan lifted the cover, and the leg was hacked down to the bone.
His father's hunting knife lay beside the cold joint.
The handle was stag-horn and the blade was nine inches long, sweeping up to a dagger point, and the white mutton fat had congealed upon the blade.
Jordan picked up the knife in his right hand.
The previous evening he had watched his father flicking the edge of the blade across the long steel. It always fascinated him, because Zouga held the razor edge towards his own fingers as he worked.
The proof of his father's expertise with the steel was the way in which the heavy knife seemed to glide effortlessly through the meat of the joint. It was wickedly sharp.
Jordan looked down again at that long white thing that stuck out of his body. The loose skin at the tip was half retracted so that the pink acorn pushed out from beneath it.
He tucked the tail of his shirt under his chin to free both hands and seized himself at the root, enclosing within the circle of his fingers the wrinkled bag with its tender marbles of flesh, and he pulled it out, stretching it out like the neck of the condemned man upon the headsman's block, while with the other hand he brought the knife down and laid the blade against his own belly, just above the fine golden fluff of pubic hair.
The blade was so cold that he gasped, and the mutton fat left a little greasy smear on his belly. He took a long breath to steel himself, and then slowly began to draw the blade downwards, to free himself for ever of that shameful wormlike growth.
"Jordie, what are you doing?" The voice from the doorway behind him startled him so that he cried out aloud.
He threw the knife onto the table and at the same time dropped the shirt to cover himself.
"Jordie!"
He turned swiftly, breathing in sharp little gasps, and Ralph came towards him from the kitchen door. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts, and there were goose-bumps on the smooth bare skin of his chest from the pre-dawn chill.
"What were you doing?" he repeated.
"Nothing. I wasn't doing anything." Jordan shook his head wildly.
"You were whacking your old winker, weren't you?" Ralph accused and grinned. "You dirty little bugger."
Jordan let out a choking sob and fled past him to the door, and Ralph chuckled and shook his head.
Then he picked up the stag-handled knife and cut a thick slab of mutton off the joint, dipped the blade into the stone pot and smeared a gob of yellow mustard over the meat, and munched it as he went about building up the fire in the stove and setting the coffee water to boil.
The following Sunday afternoon on the white sand of the fighting arena, Inkosikazi, the spider, died an agonizing death in the ghastly embrace of a smaller more agile adversary.
Bazo mourned her as he would a lover, and Kamuza sang the dirge with him just as sadly, for the Matabele syndicate had lost twenty sovereigns with her passing.
The return from Market Square to Zouga's camp resembled Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, headed by Ralph and Bazo bearing between them the basket and its sorry contents.
Opposite Diamond Lil's canteen, Ralph halted the cortege for a moment and wistfully contemplated the painted windows across the street, and listened for a moment to the sounds of laughter from beyond the green door, imagining that he could distinguish Lil's tinkling chimes.
When they reached the thatched beehive communal hut, Kamuza passed Ralph the clay pot of bubbling millet beer.
"How much did you lose, Henshaw?"
"Everything," Ralph replied tragically. "The very reason for living." He took a long swallow of the thick gruellike beer.
"That is bad; only a foolish man keeps all his cows in the same kraal."
"Kamuza, your words are always a great solace," Ralph told him bitterly. "But I am unworthy of such wisdom.
Keep those treasures for yourself alone."
Kamusa looked smug and turned to Bazo. "Now you know why I would not lay fifty gold queens, as you bid me."
Bazo shot a glance at Ralph, and they acted together.