Blue Horizon
Page 14
He did not want her to see his face. Not since he was a child had anyone seen him weep. He jumped to his feet and went to saddle Trueheart. “Come, Hedgehog. It’s a long ride to Majuba. We have no more time to waste in idle chatter.” She came to him obediently and mounted the horse. He led her into the deep defile in the mountains and up the steep gorge. It grew colder as they climbed, and in the dawn, the sun lit the mountain tops with a weird pink light. Patches of old unmelted snow gleamed among the rocks.
It was late in the morning before they paused on the crest at the limit of the treeline and looked down into a hidden valley. There was a tumbledown building among the rocks of the scree slope. She might not have noticed it, were it not for the thin column of smoke rising from the hole in the tattered thatch roof, and the small herd of mules in the stone-walled kraal.
“Majuba,” he told her, as he reined in, “the Place of the Doves, and that is Zama.” A tall young man dressed in a loincloth had come out into the sunlight and was staring up at them. “We have been together all our lives. I think you will like him.”
Zama waved and bounded up the slope to meet them. Jim slipped down from Drumfire’s back to greet him. “Have you got the coffee-pot on?” he asked.
Zama looked up at the girl on the horse. They studied each other for a moment. He was tall and well formed, with a broad, strong face, and very white teeth. “I see you, Miss Louisa,” he said at last.
“I see you also, Zama, but how did you know my name?”
“Somoya told me. How did you know mine?”
“He told me also. He is a great chatterbox, is he not?” she said, and they laughed together. “But why do you call him Somoya?” she asked.
“It is the name my father gave him. It means the Wild Wind,” Zama replied. “He blows as he pleases, like the wind.”
“Which way will he blow now?” she asked, but she was looking at Jim with a small, quizzical smile.
“We shall see.” Zama laughed. “But it will be the way we least expect.”
Colonel Keyser led ten mounted troopers clattering into the courtyard of High Weald. His Bushman tracker ran at his horse’s head. Keyser stood in the stirrups and shouted towards the main doors of the godown: “Mijnheer Tom Courtney! Come out at once!”
From every window and doorway white and black heads appeared, children and freed slaves gawked at him in round-eyed amazement.
“I am on dire Company business,” Keyser shouted again. “Do not trifle with me, Tom Courtney.”
Tom came out through the tall doors of the warehouse. “Stephanus Keyser, my dear friend!” he called, in jovial tones, as he pushed his steel-rimmed spectacles on to the top of his head. “You are welcome indeed.”
The two had spent many evenings together in the Mermaid tavern. Over the years they had done each other many favours. Only last month Tom had found a string of pearls for Keyser’s mistress at a favourable price, and Keyser had seen to it that the charges of public drunkenness and brawling laid against one of Tom’s servants were quashed.
“Come in! Come in!” Tom spread his arms in invitation. “My wife will bring us a pot of coffee, or do you prefer the fruit of the vine?” He called across the courtyard to the kitchens, “Sarah Courtney! We have an honoured guest.”
She came out on to the terrace. “Why, Colonel! This is a delightful surprise.”
“A surprise maybe,” he said sternly, “but delightful, I doubt it, Mevrouw. Your son James is in serious trouble with the law.”
Sarah untied her apron and went to stand beside her husband. He put one thick arm around her waist. At that moment Dorian Courtney, slim and elegant, his dark red hair bound up in a green turban, stepped out of the shadows of the godown and stood at Tom’s other hand. Together, the three presented a united and formidable front.
“Come inside, Stephanus,” Tom repeated. “We cannot talk here.”
Keyser shook his head firmly. “You must tell me where your son, James Courtney, is hiding.”
“I thought you might be able to tell me that. Yesterday evening all the world and his brothers saw you racing Jim over the dunes. Did he beat you again, Stephanus?”
Keyser flushed and fidgeted on his borrowed saddle. His spare tunic was too tight under the armpits. Only hours ago he had recovered his medals and the star of St. Nicholas from the abandoned saddlebags his Bushman tracker had found on the edge of the salt pan. He had pinned these decorations on awry. He touched his pockets to reassure himself that his gold watch was still in place. His breeches were fit to burst their seams. His feet were raw and blistered from the long walk home in the darkness; his new boots pinched the sore spots. He usually took pride in his appearance, and his present disarray and discomfort compounded the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of Jim Courtney.
“Your son has absconded with an escaped convict. He has stolen a horse and other valuable items. All these are hanging matters, I warn you. I have reason to believe that the fugitive is hiding here at High Weald. We have followed his tracks here from the salt pan. I am going to search every building.”
“Good!” Tom nodded. “And when you are finished my wife will have refreshments ready for you and your men.” As Keyser’s troopers dismounted and drew their sabres, Tom went on, “But, Stephanus, you warn those ruffians of yours to leave my serving girls alone, otherwise it will really be a hanging matter.”
The three Courtneys withdrew into the cool shade of the godown, and crossed the wide, cluttered floor to the counting-house on the far side. Tom slumped into the leather-covered armchair beside the cold fireplace. Dorian sat cross-legged on a leather cushion on the far side of the room. With his green turban and embroidered waistcoat he looked like the Oriental potentate he had once been. Sarah closed the door but remained standing beside it to keep watch for any possible eavesdroppers. She studied the pair while she waited for Tom to speak. Brothers could scarcely have been more different: Dorian slim, elegant, marvellously handsome and Tom so big, solid and bluff. The strength of her feelings for him, even after all these years, still surprised her.
“I could happily wring the young puppy’s neck.” Tom’s genial smile had given way to a furious scowl. “We can’t be sure what he has got us all into.”
“You were young once, Tom Courtney, and you were always in hot water up to your neck.” Sarah gave him the smile of a loving wife. “Why do you think I fell in love with you? It could never have been your looks.”
Tom tried not to let his smile reappear. “That was different,” he declared. “I never asked for trouble.”
“You never asked,” she agreed. “You simply grabbed it with both hands.”
Tom winked at her and turned to Dorian. “It must be wonderful to have a dutiful, respectful wife like Yasmini.” Then he was serious again.
“Has Bakkat returned yet?” The herder had sent one of his sons to Tom to tell him of Jim’s nocturnal visit. Tom had felt a sneaking admiration for Jim’s ruse in covering his tracks. “It’s the sort of thing I would have done. He may be wild as the wind but he’s no fool,” he had told Sarah.
“No,” Dorian answered. “Bakkat and the other herders are still moving all of the cattle and sheep over every path and road this side of the mountains. Even Keyser’s Bushman will not be able to work out Jim’s tracks. I think we can be sure that Jim has got clean away. But where did he go?” Both of them looked at Sarah for the answer.
“He planned it carefully,” she answered. “I saw him with the mules a day or so ago. The shipwreck might have been a stroke of luck as far as he was concerned, but he was planning to get the girl off the ship one way or the other.”
“That damned woman! Why is it always a woman?” Tom lamented.
“You, of all people, should not have to ask that,” Sarah told him. “You stole me away from my family with musket balls whizzing around our heads. Don’t try to play the Pope with me, Tom Courtney!”
“Sweet heavens, yes! I’d almost forgotten about that. It was fun, th
ough, wasn’t it, my beauty?” He leaned across and pinched her bottom. She slapped his hand, and he went on unperturbed, “But this woman Jim is with. What is she? A prison drab. A poisoner? A cutpurse? A whore mistress? Who knows what the idiot has picked for himself.”
Dorian had been watching this exchange with a fond expression while he got his hookah pipe to draw properly. It was a habit he had brought back from Arabia. Now he took out the ivory mouthpiece and remarked drily, “I have spoken to at least a dozen of our people who were on the beach and saw it all. She may be all the other things you suggest, but she is no drab.” He blew a long feather of fragrant smoke. “Reports of her vary. Kateng says she is an angel of beauty, Litila says she is a golden princess. Bakkat says she is as lovely as the spirit of the rain goddess.”
Tom snorted with derision. “A rain goddess out of a stinking convict ship? A sunbird hatching from a turkey buzzard’s egg is more likely. But where has Jim taken her?”
“Zama has been missing since the day before yesterday. I didn’t see him go, but my guess is that Jim sent him off with the mules to wait for him somewhere,” Sarah suggested. “Zama will do whatever Jim asks.”
“And Jim spoke to Bakkat about the Robbers’ Road,” Dorian added, “and told him to sweep his tracks from the road to the east and the north of here.”
“The Robbers’ Road is a myth,” said Tom firmly. “There are no roads into the wilderness.”
“But Jim believes in it. I heard him and Mansur discussing it,” Sarah said.
Tom looked worried. “It’s madness. A babe and a prison drab going off empty-handed into the wilderness? They won’t last a week.”
“They have Zama, and they are hardly empty-handed. Jim took six mule-loads of goods,” said Dorian. “I’ve been checking what is missing from the stores, and he chose well. They are well set-up and provisioned for a long journey.”
“He didn’t even say goodbye.” Tom shook his head. “He’s my son, my only son, and he didn’t even say goodbye.”
“He was in somewhat of a hurry, brother,” Dorian pointed out.
Sarah rallied to her son’s defence: “He sent us a message through Bakkat. He didn’t forget us.”
“It’s not the same,” said Tom heavily. “You know he might never come back. He has closed this door behind him. Keyser will catch him and hang him if he ever sets foot in the colony again. No, damn my eyes, I must see him again. Just once more. He is so headstrong and wild. I have to give him my counsel.”
“You have been giving him your counsel for the last nineteen years,” Dorian said wryly. “Look where it has got us now.”
“Where was his rendezvous with Zama?” Sarah asked. “That is where they will be.”
Tom thought about it for a moment, then grinned. “Only one place it could be,” he said firmly.
Dorian nodded. “I know what you’re thinking,” he told Tom. “Majuba is the obvious place for them to hide out. But we dare not follow them there. Keyser will be watching us like a leopard at the water-hole. If one of us leaves High Weald he will put that little yellow bloodhound of his on to us, and we will lead him straight to Majuba, and Jim.”
“If we’re going to find him it must be soon, otherwise Jim will be gone from Majuba. They are well mounted. They have Drumfire and Keyser’s mare. Jim will be halfway to Timbuktu before we can catch up with him.”
At that moment the tramp of boots and loud masculine voices echoed through the main storeroom of the godown.
“Keyser’s men have searched the house.” Sarah glanced out of the door. “Now they’re starting on the warehouse and the outbuildings.”
“We’d better go out to keep an eye on those rogues,” Dorian stood up, “before they start helping themselves.”
“We’ll decide what to do about Jim once we’ve seen Keyser off,” Tom said, as they went through on to the main floor of the godown.
Four of the troopers were poking about aimlessly among the clutter. They were obviously tiring of their fruitless hunt. The long storeroom was piled to the high yellow-wood rafters. If they were to search it thoroughly they would need to clear the tons of goods with which the warehouse was congested. There were bales of silk from China, and cottons from the Indies; sacks of coffee beans and gum arabic from Zanzibar and other ports beyond the Horn of Hormuz; balks of sawn teak, sandalwood and ebony; mounds of pure gleaming copper cast into huge wheels so that armies of slaves could trundle them down the mountain tracks from the far interior of Ethiopia to the coast. There were bundles of the dried skins of exotic animals, tigers and zebras, and the furs of monkeys and seals, and the long curved horns of the rhinoceros, famous through China and the Orient for its aphrodisiac powers.
The Cape of Good Hope sat across the trade routes between Europe and the Orient. In former times the ships from the north had made the long voyage down the Atlantic. Even when they anchored in Table Bay they still faced another seemingly endless passage to the Indies and China, then even further north again to far Japan. A ship might be at sea for three or four years before it could return to Amsterdam, or the Pool of London.
Tom and Dorian had gradually evolved another network of trade. They had convinced a syndicate of ship-owners in Europe to send their ships only as far as the Cape. From the Courtney Brothers’ warehouse they could fill their holds with choice goods, turn round in Table Bay and, with favourable winds, be back in their home ports in under a year. The profit the Courtneys exacted more than compensated for the additional years that the ships would be forced to spend at sea if they went further afield. In the same way ships coming from the east could discharge in Table Bay into the godown of the Courtney Brothers and be back in Batavia, Rangoon or Bombay in less than half the time it would have taken to make the journey across two great oceans.
This innovation was the foundation on which they had built their fortune. Added to this, they had their own trading schooners, which plied the African coast and were captained by Dorian’s trusted Arab followers. As Muslims they could travel into waters forbidden to Christian captains, and venture as far as Muscat and Medina, the Luminous City of the Prophet of God. Although these vessels lacked the large holds in which to carry bulky cargoes, they dealt in the goods of higher value: copper and gum arabic, pearls and mother-of-pearl shells from the Red Sea, ivory from the markets of Zanzibar, sapphires from the mines of Kandy, yellow diamonds from the alluvial field along the great rivers of the empire of the Moguls, and cakes of black opium from the mountains of the Pathans.
There was only one commodity in which the Courtney brothers refused to trade: human slaves. They had intimate knowledge of the barbaric practice. Dorian had spent most of his boyhood in slavery, until his owner, Sultan Abd Muhammad al-Malik, the ruler of Muscat, had adopted him as a son. In his younger days Tom had waged a bitter war against the Arab slave-traders of the East African coast, and had been a witness at first hand of the heartless cruelty of the trade. Many of the Courtney servants and sailors were former slaves who had come into their possession and whom they had manumitted at once. The means by which some of these unfortunates had been brought under the wing of the family varied—sometimes by force of arms, for Tom dearly loved a good fight, or by shipwreck, or in payment of debts, or even by outright purchase. Sarah could seldom bring herself to walk past a weeping orphan on the auction block without importuning her husband to buy the child and give it into her care. She had reared half of her house servants from infancy.
Sarah went out to the kitchens and came back almost immediately with her sister-in-law Yasmini, and a chattering, giggling train of housemaids all bearing jugs of freshly squeezed lime juice, trays of Cornish pasties, pork pies and samosas filled with spicy lamb curry. The bored, hungry troopers sheathed their blades and fell upon the fare with a will. Between bites they ogled and flirted with the maids. The soldiers who were supposed to be searching the coach-house and the stables saw the women carrying the provender out of the kitchens and found an excuse to follow them.
“I hope that now you will accept my word of honour, Colonel, that my son Jim is not anywhere on High Weald.” Tom poured him a glass of jonge jenever from a stone bottle; Sarah cut him a thick wedge of steaming Cornish pasty.
“Ja, very well, I accept that he is not here now, Tom. He has had enough time to get clean away—for the moment, that is. But I think you know where he is hiding.” He glared at Tom as he accepted the long-stemmed glass.
Tom assumed the expression of a choirboy about to receive the sacrament. “You can trust me, Stephanus.”
“That I doubt.” Keyser washed down a mouthful of the pasty with a swallow of gin. “But I warn you, I am not going to let that bumptious puppy of yours get away with what he has done. Do not try to soften my resolve.”
“Of course not! You have your duty to perform,” Tom agreed. “I offer you only common hospitality and I am not attempting to influence you. The minute that Jim returns to High Weald I myself will frogmarch him up to the castle to account to you and His Excellency. You have my word on it as a gentleman.”
Only slightly mollified, Keyser allowed them to usher him out to where a groom was holding his horse. Tom slipped two more bottles of the young Hollands gin into his saddlebags and waved to him as he led his squadron out through the gates.
As they watched them go, Tom said quietly to his brother, “I have to get a message to Jim. He must stay at Majuba until I can reach him. Keyser will be watching for me to ride into the mountains and show him the way, but I’ll send Bakkat. He leaves no tracks.”
Dorian threw the tail of his turban over his shoulder. “Listen to me well, Tom. Don’t take Keyser too lightly. He is not the clown he pretends to be. If he gets his hands on Jim it will be a tragic day for this family. Never forget that our own grandfather died on the gallows of the castle parade.”