Blue Horizon

by Wilbur Smith

  On the tenth morning Dorian opened his eyes and looked at Mansur. He spoke weakly but clearly: “Is your mother buried? Have you said the prayers?”

  “She is buried and I have prayed over her grave, for you and for myself.”

  “That is good, my son.” Dorian sank away, but within an hour he woke again and asked for food and drink.

  “You will live,” Sarah told him as she brought a bowl of broth. “You ran it very fine, Dorian Courtney, but now you will live.”

  Relieved of the terrible anxiety over Dorian’s condition, Tom let Sarah and the women servants take over his share of the vigil at the bedside, and he and Mansur devoted themselves to other business.

  Every day Tom ordered Kadem to be brought up from the orlop deck, and exercised in the sunlight and open air. He made sure he was well fed, and that the gash in his scalp healed cleanly. He felt no compassion for the prisoner, but he wanted to ensure his survival in good condition: he was an important part of Tom’s plans for the future.

  Tom had ordered the bush-pigskin to be salted and hung in the Gift’s rigging. He questioned Kadem almost every day in fluent Arabic, forcing him to squat in the shadow of the pigskin that flapped over his head, a constant reminder of the fate that awaited him if he refused to answer.

  “How did you learn that this ship belonged to me and my brother?” he demanded, and Kadem named the merchant in Zanzibar who had given him this information, before the life was choked out of him by the garotte.

  Tom passed the information to Dorian, when he was strong enough to sit up unaided. “So our identity is now known by the spies of Zayn al-Din at every anchorage along the coast from Good Hope to Hormuz and the Red Sea.”

  “The Dutch know us also,” Dorian agreed. “Keyser promised that every VOC port in the Orient would be closed to us. We must change the cut of our jibs.”

  Tom set about altering the appearance of the two ships. One after the other they warped them to the beach. Tom used the rise and fall of the tide to careen them over. First they scraped away the heavy infestation of weed and treated the shipworm that had already taken firm hold in the hulls. Some of these loathsome creatures were as thick as a man’s thumb and as long as his arm. They could riddle the timbers with holes until the ship was rotten as cheese and might easily break up in rough weather. They tarred the ship’s bottom and renewed the copper sheathing where strips had been torn off, allowing the worm to enter. It was the only effective cure. Then Tom changed the masts and rigging. He stepped a mizzen on the Gift. This was something he and Dorian had discussed before: the additional mast altered the appearance and performance of the ship completely. When he took her out to sea for her trials, she sailed a full point closer to the wind and logged an additional two knots of speed through the water. Tom and Batula were delighted and reported the success gleefully to Dorian, who insisted on being allowed to hobble to the head of the beach to look at her.

  “In God’s name, she is as fresh as a virgin again.”

  “She must have a new name, brother,” Tom agreed. “What shall it be?”

  Dorian barely hesitated. “The Revenge.”

  Tom saw by his expression what he was thinking, and gave him no argument. “That is an illustrious name.” He nodded. “Our great-great-grandfather sailed with Sir Richard Grenville on the old Revenge.”

  They repainted the hull in sky blue, for that was the hue of the paint they had brought with them in abundance, and chequered the gunports in darker blue. It gave the Revenge a saucy air.

  Then they began work on the Maid of York. She had always shown a flighty inclination to broach-to when driven hard before the wind. Tom took this opportunity to add an additional ten feet to the mainmast and give it five degrees more rake. He also lengthened the bowsprit and moved the jib stay and the staysail stay a touch forward. He repositioned the cradles of the water casks in the holds nearer to the stern to alter her trim. This not only changed her profile but made her more responsive to the helm and corrected her tendency to being down by the head.

  Tom gave her the contrary colour scheme to the Revenge: a dark blue hull and sky blue gunports.

  “She was named after you, the Maid of York,” Tom reminded Sarah. “Fair is fair, you must rename her now.”

  “Water Sprite,” she said immediately, and Tom blinked.

  “How did you hit on that? ’Tis a quirky name.”

  “And I am a quirky lady.” She laughed.

  “That you are.” He laughed with her. “But just plain Sprite might be better.”

  “Are you naming her, or am I?” Sarah asked sweetly.

  “Let’s say rather, we are.” Sarah threw up both her hands in capitulation.

  When the forty days of mourning for Yasmini had passed, Dorian was sufficiently recovered to walk unaided to the far end of the beach and swim back across the channel. Although he had recovered much of his strength, the loneliness and deep sadness had marked him. Whenever Mansur could find time from his duties he and Dorian spent it sitting together and talking quietly.

  Each evening the entire family gathered around the campfire and discussed their plans. Soon it became obvious that none of them wished to make the lagoon their new home. As they were without horses Tom and Mansur’s scouting expeditions on foot did not penetrate far inland, and they encountered none of the tribes that had once inhabited this country. The old villages were burned and deserted.

  “There’s no trade, unless you have someone to trade with,” Tom pointed out.

  “It is a sickly place. Already we have lost one of our people to the fever.” Sarah supported him. “I had hoped so much to meet our Jim Boy here, but in all this time there has been neither sign nor sight of him. He must have moved on further to the north.” There were a hundred other possible reasons why Jim had disappeared, but she put them out of her mind. “We will find him there,” she said firmly.

  “I, for another, cannot remain here,” Mansur said. In these last weeks he had taken his place quite naturally at the family councils. “My father and I have a sacred obligation to find the man who ordered the death of my mother. I know who he is. My destiny lies to the north, in the kingdom of Oman.” He looked at his father enquiringly.

  Slowly Dorian nodded agreement. “Yasmini’s murder has changed everything. I now share your sacred obligation of vengeance. We will go northwards together.”

  “So, it’s settled, then.” Tom spoke for all of them. “When we reach Nativity Bay, we can decide again.”

  “When can we sail?” Sarah asked eagerly. “Name a day!”

  “The ships are almost ready, and so are we. Ten days from now. The day after Good Friday,” Tom suggested. “A propitious day.”

  Sarah composed a letter to Jim. It ran to twelve pages of heavy parchment in her elegant close-written script. She stitched it into a canvas cover and painted the packet with sky blue ship’s paint and sealed the seams with hot tar. She printed his name on it in white paint and block capitals: James Archibald Courtney Esq. Then she carried it up the hill and, with her own hand, hid it in the recess below the post stone. She built a tall cairn on top to signal to Jim when he came that a letter was waiting for him.

  Mansur hunted far up the valley and killed five more Cape buffalo. The women salted, pickled and dried the meat, then made spiced sausage for the voyage ahead. Mansur supervised the crews as they refilled all the water casks on both ships. When this was done, Tom and the Arab captains were rowed around the ships to check their trim. Though heavily laden, both vessels rode well. They looked wonderfully elegant in their new paint.

  Chained and heavily guarded, Kadem al-Jurf was allowed on deck for a few hours each day. Tom and Dorian took turns to interrogate him. With the dried pigskin casting its shadow across the deck Kadem responded to their questions, if not willingly at least with some show of respect. However, that disconcerting stare never faded from his eyes. Though Tom and Dorian phrased the same questions in different guises, Kadem’s replies were consistent and
he avoided the traps they set for him. He must have known what his eventual fate would be. The law allowed Dorian and Mansur little discretion of mercy: when they stared at him Kadem saw death in their eyes, and all he could hope for was that when the time came they would grant him a swift, dignified execution, without the horror of dismemberment or the sacrilege of the pigskin.

  Over the weeks, Kadem’s incarceration in the orlop developed its own routine and rhythm. Three Arab seamen shared the duty of acting as his warders during the night, each taking a shift of four hours. They had been carefully chosen by Batula, and at first they were mindful of his orders. While themselves remaining mute, they reported Kadem’s most casual remarks to Batula. However, the nights were long and the guard duty as dull as the need to remain awake was onerous. Kadem had been trained by the most famous mullahs of the Royal House of Oman in dialectic and religious debate. The things he whispered in the darkness to his warders while the rest of the crew were ashore or sleeping on the upper deck were compelling to those devout young men. The truths he spoke were too poignant and moving to report to Batula. They could not close their ears to him, and they listened at first with awe when he spoke of the truth and beauty of God’s way. Then they began, against their own will, to respond to his whispers with their own. From the fire in his eyes they knew Kadem to be a holy man. By the fervour of his own devotion and the unassailable logic of his words they were convinced. Slowly they were held in thrall by Kadem ibn Abubaker.

  Meanwhile, the excitement of impending departure built up in the rest of the company. The last sticks of furniture and goods were taken from the huts at the forest edge and ferried on board. On Good Friday Tom and Mansur applied torches to the empty huts. The thatch had dried out and they burned like bonfires. The day after Good Friday they sailed early in the morning watch, so that Tom had light enough to make out the channel. The wind stood fair offshore, and he led the little flotilla out through the heads into the open sea.

  It was midday and the land was low and blue on the western horizon before one of the crew came up from below decks in a state of terrible agitation. Tom and Dorian were on the quarter-deck together, Dorian seated in the sling chair Tom had rigged for him. At first neither could understand the man’s wild shouts.

  “Kadem!” Tom caught the gist of it. He went bounding down the companionway to the orlop deck. Locked securely in the wooden cage that the carpenters had built for him, Kadem was curled in sleep upon the straw mattress. His chains were still secured to the ring bolts in the deck. Tom seized a corner of the single blanket that covered the prisoner from the top of his head to his feet, jerked it aside and then kicked the dummy that lay beneath it. It was cunningly made of two sacks filled with oakum and tied with short pieces of old rope to give it the outline of a human body beneath the blanket.

  They searched the ship swiftly from stem to stern, Tom and Dorian with swords in hand raging through the holds and probing every corner and cranny.

  “Three other men are missing,” Batula reported with a shamed face.

  “Who are they?” Dorian demanded.

  Batula hesitated before he could bring himself to answer. “Rashood, Pinna and Habban,” he croaked, “the same three men I set to guard him.”

  Tom altered course and steered alongside the Revenge. Through the speaking tube, he hailed Mansur who had command of her. Both vessels went about and headed back towards the entrance of the lagoon, but the winds that had allowed them to clear the lagoon so handily now blocked them offshore. For days more they beat back and forth across the entrance. Twice they were almost piled up to the reef as Tom in frustration tried to force the passage.

  It was six days after they had sailed that at last they dropped anchor off the beach of the lagoon once again. Since their departure it had rained heavily, and when they went ashore they found that any sign left by the fugitives had been washed away. “Yet there is only one direction they would have taken.” Tom pointed up the valley. “But they have almost nine days’ start on us. If we are to catch up with them we must march at once.”

  He ordered Batula and Kumrah to check the weapons lockers and the magazines. They came ashore with sorry expressions to report that four muskets were missing, with the same number of cutlasses, bullet bags and powder flasks. Tom stopped himself reviling the two captains further, for they had already suffered enough.

  Dorian argued vehemently when Tom told him he must stay behind to take care of the ships and Sarah while they chased the fugitives. In the end, Sarah joined in to convince him that he was not yet strong enough for such an expedition, which would call for hard marches and perhaps even harder fighting. Tom selected ten of his best men to go with him, those who were proficient with sword, musket and pistol.

  An hour after they had first stepped ashore all was ready. Tom kissed Sarah, and they left the beach heading inland. Tom and Mansur strode out at the head of the line of armed men.

  “I would that little Bakkat were with us,” Tom muttered. “He would follow them though they grew wings and flew ten feet above the ground.”

  “You are a famous elephant hunter, Uncle Tom. I have heard you tell it since I was a child.”

  “That was more than a year or two ago,” Tom smiled ruefully, “and you must not remember all I tell you. Boasts and brags are like debts and childhood sweethearts—they often come back to plague the man who made them.”

  At noon on the third day they stood on the crest of the range of mountains that ran in an unbroken rampart north and south. The slopes below them were covered with banks of purple heather. This was the dividing line between the littoral and the inland plateau of the continental shield. Behind, the forests lay like a green carpet down to the edge of the ocean. Ahead, the hills were harsh and rocky and the plains were endless, stretching for ever to the horizon, blue with distance. The tiny dustclouds kicked up by the moving herds of game drifted in the warm breezes.

  “Any one of those might mark the path of the men we are hunting, but the hoofs of the herds will have wiped out their tracks,” Tom told Mansur. “Still and all, I doubt they would have headed into that great emptiness. Kadem would have the sense at least to try to find human habitation.”

  “The Cape colony?” Mansur looked southwards.

  “More likely the Arab forts along the Fever Coast or the Portuguese territory of Mozambique.”

  “The land is so big.” Mansur scowled. “They could have gone anywhere.”

  “We will wait for the scouts to come in before we decide what next to do.”

  Tom had sent his best men to cast north and south, ordering them to try to cut Kadem’s trail. He would not say so to Mansur, not yet at least, but he knew that their chances were remote. Kadem had too long a start on them and, as Mansur had remarked, the land was big.

  The rendezvous Tom had set at which to meet the scouts was a distinctive peak shaped like a cocked hat that could be seen from twenty leagues in any direction. They camped on the southern slope at the edge of the treeline, and the scouts came dribbling back during the night. None had been able to cut human sign.

  “They have got clean away, lad,” Tom told his nephew. “I think we can do naught else but let them go, and turn back for the ships. But I would like your agreement. ’Tis your duty to your mother that dictates what we do next.”

  “Kadem was only the messenger,” Mansur said. “My blood feud is with his master in Lamu, Zayn al-Din. I agree, Uncle Tom. This is fruitless. Our energies may best be expended elsewhere.”

  “Think on this also, lad. Kadem will fly straight back to his master, the pigeon to its loft. When we find Zayn, Kadem will be at his side, if the lions have not eaten him first.”

  Mansur’s face brightened and his shoulders straightened. “In God’s Name, Uncle, I had not considered that. Of course you are right. As for Kadem perishing in the wilderness, it seems to me that he has the animal tenacity and fanatical faith to survive. I feel sure we will meet him again. He will not escape my vengeance. Let’
s hurry back to the ships.”

  Before first light Sarah left her bunk in the little cabin of the Sprite. Then, as she had done every morning since Tom left, she went ashore and climbed to the hilltop above the lagoon. From there she watched for Tom’s return. From afar she recognized his tall, straight figure and his swinging walk at the head of his men. The image blurred as her eyes filled with tears of joy and relief.

  “Thank you, God, that you paid heed to my prayers,” she cried aloud, and ran down the hillside straight into his arms. “I was so worried that you would get yourself into trouble again, without me to look after you, Tom Courtney.”

  “I had no chance for trouble, Sarah Courtney,” he hugged her hard, “more’s the pity.” He looked to Mansur. “You are faster than me, lad. Run ahead to warn your father that we are returning, and to have the ships ready to sail again as soon as I set foot aboard.” Mansur set off at once.

  As soon as he was out of earshot Sarah said, “You’re the crafty one, aren’t you, Thomas? You did not want to be the one who gave the bitter news to Dorry that Yassie’s murder is unrevenged.”

  “’Tis Mansur’s duty more than mine,” Tom replied breezily. “Dorry would have it no other way. The only profit in this bloody business is that it might bring father and son closer than they have ever been before—and that was mighty close.”

  They sailed with the ebb of the tide. The wind stood fair and they had made good their offing before darkness fell. The ships were within two cables’ length of each other, with the wind fresh on the quarter, their best point of sailing. The Revenge showed her new turn of speed and began to pull ahead of the Sprite. Thus it was with reluctance that Tom gave the order to shorten sail for the night. It seemed a pity not to take full advantage of the wind that was bearing them so swiftly towards Nativity Bay.

  “But I am a trader and not a man-o’-war,” Tom consoled himself. As he gave the order to shorten sail he saw Mansur in the Revenge furl his staysail and reef his mizzen and main. Both ships hoisted lanterns to their maintops, to enable them the better to keep night stations on each other.