by Wilbur Smith
‘I assure you, Mijnheer, his language and address come as more of a shock to me than they do to you. I take great offence, and I implore you to take him seriously to task at the first opportunity,’ replied Katinka, clinging to the door of the carriage with one hand and to her bonnet with the other.
‘I will do better than that, Mevrouw. He will be on the next ship back to Amsterdam. I cannot abide with such impertinence. Moreover, he is responsible for the predicament we are now in. As commander of the castle, the prisoners are his responsibility. Their escape is due to his incompetence and the dereliction of his duty. The dastard has no right to speak to you in such a fashion.’
‘Oh, yes, he does,’ said Sukeena sweetly. ‘Colonel Schreuder has the right of conquest in his favour. Your wife has been lying under him often enough with her legs in the air for him to call her darling, or even to call her whore and slut if he chose to be more honest.’
‘Quiet, Sukeena!’ shrilled Katinka. ‘Are you out of your mind? Remember your place. You are a slave.’
‘No, Mevrouw. A slave no longer. A free woman now, and your captor,’ Sukeena told her, ‘so I can say to you anything I please, especially if it is the truth.’ She turned to van de Velde. ‘Your wife and the gallant colonel have been playing the beast with two backs so blatantly as to delight every tattle-tale in the colony. They have set a pair of horns on your head that are too large for even your grossly bloated body.’
‘I will have you thrashed!’ van de Velde gurgled apoplectically. ‘You slave bitch!’
‘No, you won’t,’ said Althuda, and placed the point of the jewelled scimitar against the Governor’s pendulous belly. ‘Rather, you will apologize for that insult to my sister.’
‘Apologize to a slave? Never!’ van de Velde began in a bellow, but this time Althuda pricked him with more intent and the bellow turned into a squeal, like air escaping from a pig’s bladder.
‘Apologize not to a slave, but to a freeborn Balinese princess,’ Althuda corrected him. ‘And swiftly.’
‘I beg your pardon, madam,’ van de Velde gritted through clenched teeth.
‘You are gallant, sir.’ Sukeena smiled at him. Van de Velde sank back in his seat and said no more, but he fixed his wife with a venomous stare.
Once they had left the settlement behind them, the surface of the road deteriorated. There were deep wheel ruts left by the Company wagons going out to fetch firewood, and the carriage rocked and lurched dangerously through them. Along the edge of the lagoon the water had seeped in to turn the tracks to mud and slush and, in many places, the seamen were forced to put their shoulders to the tall rear wheels to help the horses drag the vehicle through. It was late morning before they saw ahead the framework of the wooden bridge over the first river.
‘Soldiers!’ Aboli called. From his high seat he had picked out the glint of a bayonet and the shape of the tall helmets.
‘Only four,’ said Hal. His eyes were still the sharpest of all. ‘They’ll not be expecting trouble from this direction.’ He was right. The corporal of the bridge guard came forward to meet them, puzzled but unalarmed, his sword sheathed and the match on his pistols unlit. Hal and his crew disarmed him and his men, stripped them to their breeches and sent them running back towards the colony with a discharge of muskets over their heads.
While Aboli walked the carriage over the bridge and took it on along the rudimentary track, Hal and Ned Tyler climbed beneath the wooden structure and roped a barrel of gunpowder under the heavy timber kingpost. When it was secure Hal used the butt of his pistol to drive in the bung of the barrel, thrust a short length of slow-match into it and lit it. He and Ned scrambled back onto the roadway and ran after the carriage.
Hal’s leg was painful now. It was swelling and stiffening, but he was looking back over his shoulder as he hobbled along through the ankle-deep sand. The centre of the bridge suddenly erupted in a spout of mud, water, shattered planks and piers. The wreckage fell back into the river.
‘That will not hold the good colonel long, but at least he will get his breeches wet,’ Hal muttered, as they caught up with the carriage. Althuda jumped down and called to him, ‘Take my place. You must favour that leg.’
‘There is little wrong with my leg,’ Hal protested.
‘Other than that it can barely carry your weight,’ said Sukeena sternly, leaning over the door. ‘Come up here at once, Gundwane, or else you will do lasting damage to it.’
Meekly Hal climbed up into the coach and took the seat opposite Sukeena. Without looking at the pair, Aboli grinned to himself. Already she gives the orders and he obeys. It seems they have the tide and a fair wind behind them.
‘Let me look at that leg,’ Sukeena ordered, and Hal placed it on the seat between her and Katinka.
‘Take care, clod!’ Katinka snapped, and pulled away her skirts. ‘You will bloody my dress.’
‘If you do not have a care to your tongue, it will not be the only thing I will bloody,’ Hal assured her, and scowled. She withdrew into the farthest corner of the seat.
Sukeena worked over the leg with swift, competent hands. ‘I should lay a hot poultice on these bites, for they are deep and will certainly fester. But I need boiling water.’ She looked up at Hal.
‘You will have to wait for that until we reach the mountains,’ he told her. Then, for a while, their conversation broke down and they gazed into each other’s eyes bemusedly. This was as close as they had ever been and each found something in the other to amaze and delight them.
Then Sukeena roused herself. ‘I have my medicines in the saddle-bags,’ she said briskly, and climbed over the seat to reach the panniers on the back of the carriage. She hung there as she rummaged in the leather bags. The carriage jolted on over the rough track, and Hal looked with awe on her small rounded bottom, pointed skywards. Despite the ruffles and petticoats that shrouded it, he thought it almost as enchanting as her face.
She climbed back with cloths and a black bottle in her hand. ‘I will swab out the wounds with this tincture and then bind them up,’ she explained, without looking again into the distraction of his green eyes.
‘Avast!’ Hal gasped at the first touch of the tincture. ‘That burns like the devil’s breath.’
Sukeena scolded, ‘You have endured whip and shot and sword and savaging by an animal. But the first touch of medicine and you cry like a baby. Now be still.’
Aboli’s face creased into a bouquet of tattoos and merry laughter lines but, though his shoulders shook, he held his peace.
Hal sensed his amusement, and rounded on him. ‘How far ahead is the bitter-almond hedge?’
‘Another league.’
‘Will Sabah meet us there?’
‘That is what I believe, if the green-jackets don’t catch up with us first.’
‘Methinks we will have some respite. Schreuder made an error by rushing alone in pursuit of us. He should have mustered his troops and come after us in an orderly fashion. My guess is that most of the green-jackets will be chasing the other prisoners we turned free. They will concentrate on us only once Schreuder takes command.’
‘And he has no horse,’ Sukeena added. ‘I think we will get clear away, and once we reach the mountains—’ She broke off and lifted her eyes from Hal’s leg. Both she and Hal looked ahead to the high blue rampart that filled the sky ahead.
Van de Velde had been avidly following this conversation, and now he broke in. ‘The slave wench is right. You have succeeded in this underhand scheme of yours, more’s the pity. However, I am a reasonable man, Henry Courtney. Set my wife and me free now. Give the carriage over to us and let us return to the colony. In exchange I will give you my solemn undertaking to call off the chase. I will order Colonel Schreuder to send his men back to their barracks.’ He turned on Hal what he hoped was an open and guileless countenance. ‘I offer you my word as a gentleman on it.’
Hal saw the cunning and malice in the Governor’s eyes. ‘Your excellency, I am uncertain of the valid
ity of your claim to the title of gentleman, besides which I should hate to be deprived so soon of your charming company.’
At that moment one of the front wheels of the carriage crashed into a hole in the tracks. ‘The aardvarks dig these burrows,’ Althuda explained, as Hal clambered down from the lopsided vehicle.
‘Pray, what manner of man or beast is that?’
‘The earth pig, a beast with a long snout and a thick tail that digs up the burrows of ants with its powerful claws and devours them with its long sticky tongue,’ Althuda told him.
Hal threw back his head and laughed. ‘Of course, I believe that. I also believe that your earth pig flies, dances the hornpipe and tells fortunes by cards.’
‘You have a few things yet to learn about the land that lies out there, my friend,’ Althuda promised him.
Still chuckling, Hal turned from him. ‘Come on, lads!’ he called to his seamen. ‘Let’s get this ship off the reef and running before the wind again.’
He made van de Velde and Katinka get out and the rest of them strained with the horses to pull the carriage free. From here onwards, though, the track became barely passable, and the bush on either hand grew taller and more dense as they went on. Within the next mile they were stuck in holes twice more.
‘It is almost time to get rid of the carriage. We can get on faster on our own shanks,’ Hal told Aboli quietly. ‘How much further to the hedge?’
‘I thought we should have reached it by now,’ Aboli replied, ‘but it cannot be far.’ They came to the boundary around the next kink in the narrow track. The famous bitter-almond hedge was a straggly and blighted excrescence, hardly shoulder high, but the road ended dramatically against it. There was also a rough hut, which served as a guard post to the border picket, and a notice in Dutch.
‘WARNING!’ the notice began, in vivid scarlet letters, and went on to forbid movement by any person beyond that point, with the penalty for infringement being imprisonment or the payment of a fine of a thousand guilders or both. The board had been erected in the name of the Governor of the Dutch East India Company.
Hal kicked open the door of the single room of the guard hut and found it deserted. The fire on the open hearth was cold and dead. A few articles of Company uniform hung on the wooden pegs in the wall, and a black kettle stood over the dead coals, with odd bowls, bottles and utensils lying on the rough wooden table or on shelves along the walls.
Big Daniel was about to put the slow-match to the thatch, but Hal stopped him. ‘No point in giving Schreuder a smoke beacon to follow,’ he said, ‘and there’s naught of value here. Leave it be,’ and limped back to where the seamen were unloading the carriage.
Aboli was turning the horses out of the traces and Ned Tyler was helping him to improvise pack saddles for them, using the harness, leatherwork and canvas canopy from the carriage.
Katinka stood forlornly at her husband’s side. ‘What is to become of me, Sir Henry?’ she whispered as he came up.
‘Some of the men want to take you up into the mountains and feed you to the wild animals,’ he replied. Her hand flew to her lips and she paled. ‘Others want to cut your throat here and now for what you and your fat toad of a husband did to us.’
‘You would never allow such a thing to happen,’ van de Velde blustered. ‘I only did what was my duty.’
‘You’re right,’ Hal agreed. ‘I think throat-cutting too good for you. I favour hanging and drawing, as you did to my father.’ He glared at him coldly, and van de Velde quailed. ‘However, I find myself sickened by you both. I want no further truck with either of you, and so I leave you and your lovely wife to the mercy of God, the devil and the amorous Colonel Schreuder.’ He turned and strode away to where Aboli and Ned were checking and tightening the loads on the horses.
Three of the greys had kegs of gunpowder slung on each side of their backs, two carried bundles of weapons and the sixth horse was loaded with Sukeena’s bulky saddle-bags.
‘All shipshape, Captain.’ Ned knuckled his forehead. ‘We can up anchor and get under way at your command.’
‘There’s nothing to keep us here. The Princess Sukeena will ride on the lead horse.’ He looked around for her. ‘Where is she?’
‘I am here, Gundwane.’ Sukeena stepped out from behind the guard hut. ‘And I need no mollycoddling. I will walk like the rest of you.’
Hal saw that she had shed her long skirts and that she now wore a pair of baggy Balinese breeches and a loose cotton shift that reached to her knees. She had tied a cotton headcloth over her hair, and on her feet were sturdy leather sandals that would be comfortable for walking. The men ogled the shape of her calves in the breeches, but she ignored their rude stares, took the lead rein of the nearest horse and led it towards the gap in the bitter-almond hedge.
‘Sukeena!’ Hal would have stopped her, but she recognized his censorious tone and ignored it. He realized the folly of persisting, and wisely tempered his next command. ‘Althuda, you are the only one who knows the path from here. Go ahead with your sister.’ Althuda ran to catch up with her, and brother and sister led them into the uncharted wilderness beyond the hedge.
Hal and Aboli brought up the rear of the column as it wound through the dense scrub and bush. No men had trodden this path recently. It had been made by wild animals: the marks of their hoofs and paws were plain to see in the soft sandy soil, and their dung littered the track.
Aboli could recognize each animal by these signs, and as they moved along at a forced pace, he pointed them out to Hal. ‘That is leopard and there is the spoor of the antelope with the twisted horns we call kudu. At least we shall not starve,’ he promised. ‘There is a great plenty of game in this land.’
This was the first opportunity since the escape that they had had to talk, and Hal asked quietly, ‘This Sabah, the friend of Althuda, what do you know of him?’
‘Only the messages he sent.’
‘Should he not have met us at the hedge?’
‘He said only that he would lead us into the mountains. I expected him to be waiting at the hedge,’ Aboli shrugged, ‘but with Althuda to guide us we do not need him.’
They made good progress, the grey mare trotting easily with them hanging onto her traces and running beside her. Whenever they passed a tree that would bear Aboli’s weight he shinned up it and looked back for signs of pursuit. Each time he came down and shook his head.
‘Schreuder will come,’ Hal told him. ‘I have heard men say that those green-jackets of his can run down a mounted man. They will come.’
They moved on steadily across the plain, stopping only at the swampy water holes they passed. Hal hung onto the horse to ease his injured leg and, as he limped along, Aboli recounted all that had happened in the months since they had last been together. Hal was silent as he described, in his own language, how he had retrieved Sir Francis’s body from the gibbet and the funeral he had given him. ‘It was the burial of a great chief. I dressed him in the hide of a black bull and placed his ship and his weapons within his reach. I left food and water for his journey, and before his eyes I set the cross of his God.’ Hal’s throat was too choked for him to thank Aboli for what he had done.
The day wore on, and their progress slowed as men and horses tired in the soft sandy footing. At the next marshy swamp where they stopped for a few minutes’ rest, Hal took Sukeena aside.
‘You have been strong and brave but your legs are not as long as ours, and I have watched you stumble with fatigue. From now on you must ride.’ When she started to protest he stopped her firmly. ‘I obeyed you in the matters of my wounds, but in all else I am captain and you must do as I say. From here on you will ride.’
Her eyes twinkled. She made a pretty little gesture of submission, placing her fingertips together and touching them to her lips, ‘As you command, master,’ and allowed him to boost her up on top of the saddle-bags on the leading grey.
They skirted the swamp and went on a little faster now. Twice more Aboli climbed
a tree to look back and saw no sign of pursuit. Against his natural instincts Hal began to hope that they might have eluded their pursuers, that they might reach the mountains that loomed ever closer and taller without being further molested.
In the middle of the afternoon they crossed a broad open vlei, a meadow of short green grass where herds of wild antelope with scimitar-curved horns were grazing. They looked up at the approach of the caravan of horses and men, standing frozen in wide-eyed astonishment, their coats a metallic blue-grey hue in the afternoon sunlight.
‘Even I have never seen beasts of that ilk,’ Aboli admitted.
As the herds fled before them, wreathed in their own dust, Althuda called back, ‘Those are the animals the Dutch call blaauwbok, the blue buck. I have seen great herds of them on the plains beyond the mountains.’
Beyond the vlei the ground began to rise in a series of undulating ridges towards the foothills of the range. They climbed towards the first ridge, with Hal toiling along at the rear of the column. By now he was moving heavily, in obvious pain. Aboli saw that his face was flushed with fever, and that blood and watery fluid had seeped through the bandage that Sukeena had placed on his leg.
At the top of the ridge Aboli forced a halt. They looked back at the great Table Mountain, which dominated the western horizon. To their left, the wide blue curve of False Bay opened. However, they were all too exhausted to spend long admiring their surroundings. The horses stood, heads hanging, and the men threw themselves down in any shade they could find. Sukeena slid off her mount and hurried to where Hal had slumped with his back to a small tree-trunk. She knelt in front of him, unwrapped the bandage from his leg and drew a sharp breath when she saw how swollen and inflamed it was. She leaned closer and sniffed the oozing punctures. When she spoke her voice was stern.