The River of Diamonds

Slowly, my teeth clamped against my torn lips, I yanked the barrel up until the sights lay again on his chest. My eyelids were as heavy as the rifle. My thumb was numb against the butt but I fought for leverage with it — and my index finger responded. They tautened for the shot.

'Don't shoot! Don't shoot!'

Mary half-stumbled, half-fell across my back, knocking me forwards from my kneeling position. The rifle flew out of my hands. I heard Koeltas's savage oath and the roar of the shot and Mary's stifled scream. Shelborne spun round, cannoning into the wall. My senses were fading.

Shelborne's two shots were so quick that they sounded like one. I heard the ugly thud of the bullets into Koeltas and his thin scream of pain. He came upright and tripped over me, fell. His body jerked to the path-edge. The sand, as if extending a courtesy, fell back and he slid slowly over.

I lost consciousness.

It wasn't the land that was rocking so sickeningly, but the sea. I recognized the folding table first and then I knew where I was — in one of the Gquma's bunks. The blood-stained bandages everywhere must come from my wound. Or so I thought until I looked across at the opposite bunk. Shelborne's strong face was like lead and there was a tell-tale mound of bandages on his right side. Mary came in, took a handkerchief and wiped the ominous pink froth from his lips. His wheeze told me the rest of the story: Koeltas's bullet was in his lung.

Remembering what happened on the Long Wall brought me upright. 'Mary! What…!'

Her face was taut with worry. 'I'm glad you've come to. How do you feel?'

My mouth was dry and my head throbbed like a hangover. My hand went to my shoulder, close to the neck. There were no bandages, nothing except a small square of sticking-plaster. It was a little numb round about. I'd been shot with deadly accuracy in a fatal spot and all I had to show for it was an insignificant wound and a small ache. 'I… I…'

I was still in my Namib clothes. She hadn't even taken off the shirt. It was clear that the star patient was in the other bunk.

'What the hell goes on?' I asked harshly.

She came over so that her face was level with mine. 'Do you think you can sail this boat, John? The wind's right and we could be at Walvis Bay in three days. We've got to get him to hospital. He needs specialist attention. I've done what I can to stop the bleeding.'

'Sail to Walvis Bay?' I echoed. 'Look, Mary, my mind's still muzzy, but I do know that I was shot and that I passed out. The man who murdered your father tried to murder me. If ever anyone has blood on his hands, it's him. I…'

She smiled, and all the warmth I associated with her came flooding back to me. 'He didn't try to kill you, John.' She went to the table and picked a small sharp nylon dart-like thing out of a white surgical dish. She handed it to me. That's what he shot you with.'

I balanced it in my hand and laughed shakily. 'An anaesthetic dart?'

She nodded. 'Yes. The sort you shoot small game with to drug them for capture.'

I tossed up the tiny dart, speechless. Shelborne had deliberately aimed wide the first time — using a proper bullet — as I slid down towards the Long Wall. His delay over the second shot, which enable me to get away, was to load the dart. Clear, too, why he had stood, a wide-open target, while I battled to get my sights on him; he knew the drug would get me before I could fire. The two bullets he had fired at Koeltas were not darts, though. His superb marksmanship and guts had won that deadly exchange.

'Besides,' she said, and her eyes welled with tears, 'no man shoots his own son.'

I must be imagining her words in my drug-induced torpor, I told myself. But my head felt clearer as I swung out of the bunk. I took her by the shoulders. She sobbed quietly.

'My father! How can he be…? You mean that man is not Shelborne but Fred Tregard?'

'No,' she replied gently. 'That man in the bunk is the legend: Frederick William Caldwell.'

The tiny cabin swam around me. I held on to the table. 'You said my father. You mean… your father.'

'My father — and yours.'

'He shot me.'

'And with a bullet in his lung… I didn't know he was so bad… he half-carried you down the Long Wall to the beach and — collapsed there. I rowed you both here…'

'But Shelborne killed Caldwell.'

'He didn't, for the simple reason there was never any Shelborne. Shelborne did not exist, any more than the Hottentots' Paradise.'

'I'm not with you… He told you this…?'

She said, firmly, 'Yes, he did — on our way to Walvis. That's why he turned back after you, not to kill you as you thought, but to tell you who he was, who you are. I am his daughter and you are his son — we're half-brother and sister. He knew I was his daughter — Caldwell's daughter — in court. You saw how it took him then. He was forced — he called it his luck again — to bid against his own daughter for the sea-bed right.'

'What about the deed of cession.'

'It was a fake. He deliberately changed his handwriting to that fine italic style so it wouldn't be recognized. There was never any Shelborne. Dad was as much of a loner as you are. He invented the whole thing. He wanted the world to believe that the great Caldwell was dead.'

'And your mother too?'

'I didn't know until he told me, and she never said: before Kleinzee she had told him that if he went off on what she described as another of his hare-brained expeditions, she was through with him. She never understood his "behind the ranges" side. She wanted security, a husband with a steady job, a suburban home. Caldwell, the legend, the diamond genius — and his fate — weren't for her. She told him so. He tried to sugar the pill by saying he was off to the Hottentots' Paradise but in fact he had a hunch — like you — that Mercury was the fountainhead of the Sperrgebiet, its original and sole source of diamonds. He explored the coast and the desert. There's an enormous underground cavern…'

'I know,' I roughed in the picture of the methane gas barrier, the ancient river, and the Bells of St Mary's.

She nodded.. 'He prospected the coastline until he knew practically every rock of it. He suspected the diamonds were there. If he went back with his fountain-head theory unsubstantiated and with no diamonds to prove it, you realize what they would have said: Caldwell missed all the big ones and now he's back with one of those cock-and-bull yarns about an inaccessible treasure trove. He had to prove it. He returned to tell my mother…'

He returned?'

'Yes. She didn't believe a word of his story. She thought he'd gone off on another wild-goose chase and was soft-soaping her. He'd gone, despite her ultimatum. As far as she was concerned, he could go off for good on his wild schemes. She told him so.'

That was what sent him to the Takla Makan and the Atacama?'

'Yes. He became a sailor in order to get back to Mercury…'

'I thought that was it. The Shelborne impersonation came later?'

'It was easy. Even my mother scarcely recognized him after his blackwater fever at Strandloper's Water. He was bald — as he told the court — and he'd changed in himself too. He'd got asthma and that's what worries me now about his lung.' She said gently. 'You think he's tough, but it's his conquest of himself that makes him so…'

'All this doesn't make Caldwell my father.'

She said softly, 'You remember the cairn on the Oyster Line, John. The little boy? It was probably a gang of the Hottentot refugees and riff-raff which used to terrorize those parts in the early days who took him. Dad didn't know your story until I told him on the way to Walvis bay. Dates, times, age — everything tallies. Tregard the missionary was your foster-father, you know that, but what about where you really came from. You were the little boy. Your mother was murdered.' She made a curious, heart-warming gesture towards the other bunk. 'He's suffered greatly, John. He discovered the Oyster Line and he came back to… well, to that cairn of stones. The diamond fountainhead is his — it's his dream, his life, — and then the bitterness of finding it hopelessly inaccessible, beyond his power to break open. He has sat his life away on Mercury, watching, waiting, hoping…' There was a long silence. The only sound was the creak of the cutter's anchor cables. 'When he heard about you, he turned the Gquma round then and there. You were in grave danger, he said, something big was about to happen. He risked his life to fetch you.'