Men of Men by Wilbur Smith

laughter all the same; now they were angry and vicious,
their self-esteem smarting as much as their injuries.
    ‘Shut up, you little sissy,’ blurted Henry, as he obeyed his brother and brought down his horny heel on Jordan’s white knuckles. Jordan’s shrieks of agony and horror and
terror reverberated in the tiny iron shed as he kicked and fought.
    Against their combined strength, Jordan’s wildest efforts were ineffectual. His fingernails scratched white splinters from the wooden seat, and his shrieks mounted hysterically, but his
head was forced down. The stench was suffocating, the disgust choked his throat and strangled his cries.
    At the moment that he felt the cold wet filth soaking into his golden curls the door of the shed was wrenched open and Mrs Gander’s motherly bulk filled the opening.
    For a moment she stared incredulously, and then she began to swell with outrage. Her right arm, muscled from kneading bread and pounding wet washing, flew out in a round open-handed blow that
knocked both twins flying into a corner of the latrine – and she gathered Jordan up, holding him at arms’ length. With her flushed face wrinkling at the smell of his soaked curls, she
rushed out with him, shouting to her husband to bring a bucket of precious water and a bar of the yellow and blue mottled soap.
    Half an hour later Jordan reeked of carbolic soap and his curls were fluffing out again as the sun dried them into a shining halo, and from behind the closed doors of the vestry the yells of
pain emitted by the twins were punctuated by the clap of the Reverend Gander’s Malacca cane walking stick as his wife urged him on to greater endeavour.
    A round the whittled remains of Colesberg kopje had grown up a miniature range of man-made hillocks. These were the tailings from the diamond
cradles, dumped haphazardly on the open ground beyond the settlement. Some of these artificial hills were already twenty feet high, and they formed a wasteland where no tree nor blade of grass
grew. A maze of narrow footpaths laced the area, made by the daily pilgrimage of hundreds of black workers to the pit.
    The shortcut between the Lutheran church and Zouga’s camp followed one of these footpaths, and in the heat-hushed hour of noon, the labourers were still in the workings and the hills were
deserted. The sun directly overhead threw only narrow black strips of shade below the mounds of loose gravel as Jordan hurried along the dusty path, his eyes still red-rimmed with weeping the tears
of humiliation and stinging from the foam of carbolic soap.
    ‘Hello Jordie-girl.’ Jordan recognized the voice instantly, and it stopped him dead, blinking his swimming eyes in the sunlight, peering up at the summit of one of the gravel mounds
beside the path.
    One of the twins stood silhouetted against the pale blue noon sky. His thumbs hooked into his braces, his shaven head thrust forward, his eyes with their thin colourless lashes as vicious as
those of a ferret.
    ‘You told, Jordie-girlie,’ the twin accused flatly.
    ‘I never told,’ Jordan denied, his voice squeaking uncertainly.
    ‘You screamed. That’s the same as telling – and now you are going to scream again, but this time there isn’t going to be anyone to hear you, Jordie-girl.’
    Jordan spun around, and in the same movement he was running with all the desperation and speed of a gazelle pursued by a hunting cheetah; but he had not gone a dozen frantic paces when the
second twin slid down the sloping bank, the gravel hissing around his bare feet, full into the narrow pathway ahead of Jordan, his arms spread in welcome, his mouth twisted into a grin of
anticipation.
    They had laid the trap with care. They had caught him in a narrow place, where the gravel banks were highest, and behind him the first twin slid adroitly down to block the path, keeping his
balance on the little avalanche of rolling gravel under his bare feet until he hit the level