by Wilbur Smith
Led by the drummer the procession marched with slow and measured tread towards him, and Slow John waited with his arms folded over his chest. Even he turned his head as the Governor’s carriage came down the avenue through the gardens, and crossed the Parade. Slow John bowed to the Governor and his wife as Aboli guided the six grey horses to the foot of the scaffold and brought the vehicle to a halt.
Slow John’s yellow eyes met those of Katinka through the slits in his black headcloth. He bowed again, this time to her directly. She knew, without words being spoken, that he was dedicating the sacrifice to her, to his Goddess Kali.
‘He has no reason to act so grand. The oaf has made a botch of the job so far,’ van de Velde said grumpily. ‘He has killed the man without getting a word out of him. I don’t know what your father and the other members of the Seventeen are going to say when they hear that the cargo is lost. They are going to blame me, of course. They always do.’
‘As always you will have me to protect you, my darling husband,’ she said, and stood up in the carriage to have a better view. The escort stopped at the foot of the gallows and the litter with the still figure upon it was lifted high and placed at Slow John’s feet. A low growl went up from the watchers as the executioner knelt beside it to begin his grisly task.
A little later when the crowd gave forth a lusty roar, made up of excitement and horror and obscene glee, the grey horses shied and fidgeted nervously in the traces at the sound and smell of fresh human blood. With an impassive face and gentle hands on the reins Aboli checked them and brought them back under control. Slowly he turned away his head from the dreadful spectacle taking place before his eyes and looked towards the unfinished walls of the castle.
He recognized the figure of Hal among the other convicts. He stood almost as tall as Big Daniel now, and he had the shape and set of a fully mature man. But he has a boy’s heart still. He should not look upon this thing. No man or boy should ever have to watch his father die. Aboli’s own great heart felt that it might burst in the barrel of his chest, but his face was still impassive beneath the cicatrice of tattoos. He looked back at the scaffold as Sir Francis Courtney’s body rose slowly in the air and the crowd bellowed again. Slow John’s pressure on the rope was gentle and sure as he lifted Sir Francis from the litter by his neck. It required a delicate touch not to snap the vertebrae, and end it all too soon. It was a matter of pride to him that the last spark of life must not be snuffed out of that broken husk until after the drawing out of the viscera.
Firmly Aboli turned away his eyes and looked again to the bereft and tragic figure of Hal Courtney on the castle walls. We should not mourn for him, Gundwane. He was a man and he lived the life of a man. He sailed every ocean, and fought as a warrior must fight. He knew the stars and the ways of men. He called no man master, and turned aside from no enemy. No, Gundwane, we should not mourn him, you and I. He will never die while he lives on in our hearts.
For four days Sir Francis Courtney’s dismembered body remained on public display. Every morning as the light strengthened, Hal looked down from the walls and saw it still hanging there. The gulls came from the beach in a shrieking cloud of black and white wings and squabbled raucously over the feast. When they had gorged, they perched on the railing of the gibbet and whitewashed the planks with their liquid dung.
For once Hal hated the clarity of his own eyesight, that spared him no detail of the terrible transformation that was taking place as he watched. By the third day the birds had picked the flesh from his father’s skull so that it grinned at the sky with empty eye-sockets. The burghers crossing the open Parade on their way to the castle walked well downwind of the scaffold on which he hung, and the ladies held sachets of dried herbs to their faces as they passed.
However, on the dawning of the fifth day when Hal looked down upon it, the gibbet was empty. His father’s pathetic remains no longer hung there, and the seagulls had gone back to the beach.
‘Thank the merciful Lord,’ Ned Tyler whispered to Daniel. ‘Now young Hal can begin to heal.’
‘Yet it is passing strange that they have taken the corpse away so soon.’ Daniel was puzzled. ‘I would not have thought that van de Velde could be so compassionate.’
Sukeena had shown him how to slip the grating on one of the small back windows of the slave quarters and squeeze his great body through. The night guard at the residence had become lax over the years, and Aboli had little difficulty in evading the watch. For three consecutive nights he escaped from the slave quarters. Sukeena had warned him that he must return at least two hours before dawn for at that hour the watch would rouse themselves and put on a show of vigilance to impress the awakening household.
Once he had escaped over the walls it took Aboli less than an hour to run through the darkness to the boundary of the colony, marked by a hedge of bitter almond bushes planted at the order of the Governor. Although the hedge was still scraggy and there were more gaps than barriers in its length, it was the line over which no burgher might pass without the Governor’s permission. On the other hand, none of the scattered Hottentot tribes that inhabited the limitless wilderness of plain, mountain and forest beyond were allowed to cross the hedge and enter the colony. On the orders of the Company, they were to be shot or hanged if they transgressed the boundary. The VOC was no longer prepared to tolerate the savages’ treachery, their sly thieving ways or their drunkenness when they were able to get their hands on spirits. The wanton whoring of their women, who would lift their short leather skirts for a handful of beads or a trifling trinket, was a threat to the morals of the God-fearing burghers of the colony. Selected tribesmen, who might be useful as soldiers and servants, were allowed to remain in the colony but the rest had been driven out into the wilderness where they belonged.
Each night Aboli crossed this makeshift boundary and ranged like a silent black ghost across the flat plain whose wide expanses cut off Table Mountain and its bastion of lesser hills from the main ranges of the African hinterland. The wild animals had not been driven off these plains, for few white hunters had been allowed to leave the confines of the colony to pursue them. Here, Aboli heard again the wild, heart-stopping chorus of a pride of hunting lions that he remembered from his childhood. The leopards sawed and coughed in the thickets, and often he startled unseen herds of antelope, whose hoofs drummed through the night.
Aboli needed a black bull. Twice he had been so close as to smell the buffalo herd in the thickets. The scent reminded him of his father’s herds of cattle, which he had tended in his childhood, before his circumcision. He had heard the grunting of the great beasts and the lowing of the weaning calves, he had followed their deeply ploughed hoofmarks and seen splashes of their wet dung still steaming in the moonlight. But each time as he closed with the herd, the wind had tricked him. They had sensed him and gone crashing away through the brush, galloping on until the sound of their flight dwindled into silence. Aboli could not pursue them further, for it was past midnight and he was still hours away from the bitter almond hedge and from his cell in the slave quarters.
On the third night he took the chance of creeping out of the window of the slave quarters an hour earlier than Sukeena had warned him was wise. One of the hounds rushed at him, but before it could alarm the watch, Aboli calmed it with a soft whistle. The hound recognized him and snuffled his hand. He stroked its head and whispered softly to it in the language of the forests and left it whining softly and wagging its tail as he slipped over the wall like a dark moon shadow.
During his previous hunts, he had discovered that each night the buffalo herd left the fastness of the dense forest to drink at a waterhole a mile or so beyond the boundary hedge. He knew that if he crossed it before midnight he might be able to catch them while they were still at the water. It was his best chance of being able to pick out a bull and make his stalk.
From the hollow tree at the edge of the forest he retrieved the bow that he had cut and carved from a branch of wild olive. Sukeena had s
tolen the single iron arrowhead from the collection of weapons that Governor Kleinhans had assembled during his service in the Indies, which now hung on the walls of the residence. It was unlikely that it would be missed from among the dozens of swords, shields and knives that made up the display.
‘I will return it to you,’ he promised Sukeena. ‘I would not have you suffer if it should be missed.’
‘Your need of it is great than my risk,’ she told him as she slipped the arrowhead, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, beneath the seat of the carriage. ‘I also had a father who was denied a decent burial.’
Aboli had fitted the arrowhead to a reed shaft and bound it in place with twine and pitch. He had fletched it with the moulted feathers from the hunting falcons housed in the mews behind the stables. However, he did not have time to search for the insect grubs from which to brew poison for the barbs, and so he must rely on this single shaft flying true to the mark.
Now as Aboli hunted in the shadows, himself another silent gliding shadow, he found old forgotten skills returning to him, and recalled the instruction that he had undergone as a young boy from the elders of his tribe. He felt the night wind softly caress his bare chest and flanks and was aware of its direction at all times as he circled the waterhole until it blew straight into his face. It brought down to him the rich bovine stench of the prey he sought.
The wind was strong enough to shake the tall reeds and cover any sound he might make so he could move in swiftly over the last hundred paces. Above the soughing of the north wind and the rustle of the reeds he heard a coughing grunt. He froze and nocked his single arrow. Had the lions come to the water ahead of the herd, he wondered, for that had been a leonine sound. He stared ahead, and heard the sound of great hoofs plodding and sucking in the mud of the waterhole. Above the rippling heads of the reeds a dark shape moved, mountainous in the moonlight.
‘A bull,’ he breathed. ‘A bull of a bull!’
The bull had finished drinking. The crafty old beast had come ahead of the cows and calves of the breeding herd. His back was coated with glistening wet mud from the wallow, and he plodded towards where Aboli crouched, his hoofs squelching in the mud.
Aboli lost sight of the prey as he sank down among the swaying stems and let him come on. But he could mark him by the sound of his heavy breathing, and by the rasping of the reeds dragging down his flanks. The bull was very close, but still out of Aboli’s sight, when suddenly he shook his head as the reed stems tangled in his horns, and his ears flapped against his cheeks. If I reach out now I could touch his snout, Aboli thought. Every nerve in his body was drawn as tight as the bowstring in his fingers.
The reed bank parted in front of Aboli, and the massive head came through, the moonlight gleaming on the curved bosses of the horns. Abruptly the bull became aware of something amiss, of danger lurking close at hand, and he stopped and raised his huge black head. As he lifted his muzzle to test the air, his nose was wet and shining and water drooled from his mouth. He flared his nostrils into dark pits and snuffled the air. Aboli could feel his breath hot upon his naked chest and his face.
The bull turned his head, questing for the scent of man or cat, for the hidden hunter. Aboli stayed still as a tree-stump. He was holding the heavy bow at full draw. The power of the olive branch and the gut bowstring were so fierce that even the granite muscles in his arms and shoulder bulged and trembled with the effort. As the bull turned his head he revealed the notch behind his ear where the neck fused with the bone of his skull and the massive boss of his horns. Aboli held his aim for one heartbeat longer, then loosed the arrow. It flashed and whirred in the moonlight, leaping from his hand and burying half its length in the massive black neck.
The bull reeled back. If the arrowhead had found the gap between the vertebrae of the spine, as Aboli had hoped, he would have dropped where he stood but the iron point struck the spine and was deflected by bone. It glanced aside but sliced through the great artery behind the jawbone. As the bull bucked and kicked to the stinging impact of the steel, the severed artery erupted and a spout of blood flew high in the air, black as an ostrich feather in the light of the moon.
The bull dashed past Aboli, hooking wildly with those wide curved horns. If Aboli had not dropped his bow and hurled himself aside, the burnished point that hissed by, a finger’s width from his navel, would have skewered him and ripped open his bowels.
The bull charged on and reached the hard dry ground. On his knees Aboli strained his ears to follow his quarry’s crashing rush through the scrub. Abruptly it came up short. There was a long, fraught pause, in which he could hear the animal’s laboured breathing and the patter of streaming blood falling on the leaves of the low bushes around it. Then he heard the bull stagger and stumble backwards, trying to remain on his feet while the strength flowed out of his huge body on that tide of dark blood. The beast fell heavily so that the earth trembled under Aboli’s bare feet. A moment later came the rasping death bellow, and thereafter an aching quietness. Even the night birds and the bullfrogs of the swamp had been silenced by that dreadful sound. It was as though all the forest held its breath at the passing of such a mighty creature. Then, slowly, the night came alive once again, the frogs piped and croaked from the reedbeds, a nightjar screeched and from afar an eagle owl hooted mournfully.
Aboli skinned the bull with the knife that Sukeena had stolen for him from the residence kitchens. He folded the green skin and tied it with bark rope. It was heavy enough to tax even his strength. He staggered with the bundle until he could get under it and balance it on his head. He left the naked carcass for the packs of night-prowling hyena and the flocks of vultures, carnivorous storks, kites and crows that would find it with the first light of morning, and set off back towards the colony and the table-topped mountain, silhouetted against the stars. Even under his burden he moved at the ground-eating trot of the warriors of his tribe that was becoming so natural to him again after his confinement for two decades in a small ship upon the seas. He was remembering so much long-forgotten tribal lore and wisdom, relearning old skills, becoming once more a true son of this baked African earth.
He climbed to the lower slopes of the mountain and left the bundled skin in a narrow crevice in the rock cliff. He covered it with large boulders, for the hyenas roamed here also, attracted by the rubbish and wastes and sewage generated by the human settlement of the colony.
When he had placed the last boulder he looked up at the sky and saw that the curling scorpion was falling fast towards the dark horizon. Only then he realized how swiftly the night had sped, and went bounding back down the slope. He reached the edge of the Company gardens just as the first rooster crowed in the darkness.
Later that morning, as he waited on the bench with the other slaves outside the kitchens for his breakfast bowl of gruel and thick, curdled sour milk, Sukeena passed on her way to tend the affairs of the household. ‘I heard you return last night. You were out too late,’ she whispered, without turning her head on the orchid stem of her neck. ‘If you are discovered, you will bring great hardship on all of us, and our plans will come to naught.’
‘My task is almost finished,’ he rumbled softly. ‘Tonight will be the last time I need to go out.’
‘Have a care, Aboli. There is much at risk,’ she said and glided away. Despite her warning she had given him any help he had asked for, and without watching her go Aboli whispered to himself, ‘That little one has the heart of a lioness.’
That night, when the house had settled down for the night, he slipped through the grating. Again the dogs were stilled by his quiet whistle, and he had lumps of dried sausage for each of them. When he reached the wall below the lawns, he looked to the stars and saw in the eastern sky the first soft luminescence of the moonrise. He vaulted over it and, keeping well clear of the road, guided himself by touch along the outside of the wall, towards the settlement.
No more than three or four dim lights were showing from the cottages and buildings of the village. T
he four ships at anchor in the bay were all burning lanterns at their mastheads. The castle was a dark brooding shape against the starlight.
He waited at the edge of the Parade and tuned his ears to the sounds of the night. Once, as he was about to set out across the open ground, he heard drunken laughter and snatches of singing as a party of soldiers from the castle returned from an evening of debauchery among the rude hovels on the waterfront, which passed as taverns in this remote station, selling the rough raw spirit the Hottentots called dop. One of the revellers carried a tar-dipped torch. The flames wove uncertainly as the man stopped before the gibbet in the middle of the Parade, and shouted an insult at the corpse that still hung upon it. His companions bellowed with drunken laughter at his humour, and then reeled on, supporting each other, towards the castle.
When they had disappeared through the gates, and when silence and darkness fell, Aboli moved out swiftly across the Parade. Though he could not see more than a few paces ahead, the smell of corruption guided him; only a dead lion smells as strongly as a rotting human corpse.
Sir Francis Courtney’s body had been beheaded and neatly quartered. Slow John had used a butcher’s cleaver to hack through the larger bones. Aboli brought down the head from the spike on which it had been impaled. He wrapped it in a clean white cloth and placed it in the saddle-bag he carried. Then he retrieved the other parts of the corpse. The dogs from the village had carried off some of the smaller bones, but even working in darkness Aboli was able to recover what remained. He closed and buckled the leather flap of the bag, slung it over his shoulder and set off again at a run towards the mountain.
Sukeena knew the mountain intimately, every ravine, cliff and crag. She had explained to him how to find the narrow concealed entrance to the cavern where, the previous night, he had left the raw buffalo skin. In the light of the rising moon, he returned unerringly to it. When he reached the entrance he stooped and swiftly removed the boulders that covered the buffalo skin. Then he crawled further into the crevice and drew aside the bushes that hung down from the cliff above to conceal the dark throat of the cavern.