by Wilbur Smith
Kadem was by now so agitated that he burst out: “I am the bearer of the sacred fatwa entrusted to me by my master the ruler of Oman, Caliph Zayn al-Din ibn al-Malik.”
“Why would such a noble and mighty monarch entrust such a mission to a miserable slice of rancid pork fat such as you?” Koots gave a mocking laugh. Although Oudeman had not understood a word of the Arabic exchanges he laughed like an echo.
“I am a prince of the royal blood,” Kadem avowed angrily. “My father was the Caliph’s brother. I am his nephew. The Caliph trusts me because I command his legions and I have proven myself to him a hundred times over in war and in peace.”
“Yet you have failed to accomplish this sacred fatwa of yours,” Koots taunted him. “Your enemies still flourish, and you are in rags, tied to a tree and covered with filth. Is that the Omani ideal of a mighty warrior?”
“I have slain the incestuous sister of the Caliph, which was part of the task I was given, and I have stabbed al-Salil so deeply and grievously that he might still perish of the wound. If he does not, I will not rest until my duty is accomplished.”
“All this is the raving of a madman.” Koots smirked at him. “If you are driven by this sacred duty, why do I find you wandering like a beggar in the wilderness, dressed in filthy rags, carrying a musket with al-Salil’s emblem branded on it, trying to steal a horse on which to escape?”
Skilfully Koots milked the information out of his captive. Kadem boasted of how he had inveigled himself on board the Gift of Allah. How he had waited his opportunity, and how he had struck. He described his assassination of the Princess Yasmini, and how he had come so close to killing al-Salil also. Then he described how, with the help of his three followers, he had escaped from the Courtney ship while it lay in the lagoon, how they had avoided the pursuit and at last had stumbled on Koots’s troop.
There was much in this account that was entirely new to Koots, especially the flight of the Courtneys from the colony of Good Hope. This must have taken place long after he had left in pursuit of Jim Courtney. However, all of it was logical and he could detect no weak spots in the story, nor any attempt to deceive him in Kadem’s rendition of it. Everything seemed to fit neatly into what he knew of Keyser and his intentions. It was also the kind of resourceful enterprise that Tom and Dorian Courtney between them might devise.
He believed it, with reservations. There were always reservations. Yes! he gloated inwardly, without letting it show in his expression. This is an extraordinary stroke of fortune, he thought. I have been sent an ally I can bind to me by chains of steel, a religious fatwa and a burning hatred beside which even my own determination pales.
Koots stared hard at Kadem while he made his decision. He had lived among the Mussulmen, fought for and against them long enough to understand the teachings of Islam and the immutable codes of honour that bound them.
“I also am the sworn enemy of the Courtneys,” he said at last. He saw the naked passion in Kadem’s eyes veiled immediately.
Have I made a fatal mistake? he wondered. Have I rushed too swiftly to my purpose, and startled my quarry? He watched Kadem’s suspicion growing stronger. However, I have taken the plunge now, and I cannot go back. Koots turned to Oudeman. “Loosen his bonds,” he ordered, “and bring water for him to wash and drink. Give him food to eat and let him pray. But watch him carefully. I don’t think he will try to escape, but do not give him the chance.”
Oudeman looked mystified by these orders. “What about his men?” he asked uncertainly.
“Keep them tied up and under close guard,” Koots told him. “Don’t let Kadem speak to them. Don’t let him go near them.”
Koots waited until after Kadem had bathed, eaten and carried out the solemn ritual of the midday prayers. Only then did he send for him to continue their conversation.
Koots observed the polite form of greeting and, in so doing, changed Kadem’s status from that of captive to guest, with all the responsibilities that that relationship placed on both of them. Then he went on. “The reason why you find me here, in the wilderness so far from the civilized abodes of men, is that I am following the same quest as you. Behold these wagon tracks.” He pointed them out, and Kadem glanced at them. Of course he had noticed them while he had stalked the horses and closed in on the camp.
“Do you see them?” Koots insisted.
Kadem’s face set in a stony expression. He was already regretting his previous indiscretions. He should never have let his emotions run away with his tongue and revealed so much to the infidel. By now he had recognized that Koots was a clever, dangerous man.
“These tracks were made by four wagons that are being driven by the only son of Tom Courtney, whom you know as Klebe.” Kadem blinked but showed no other expression. Koots let him think about that for a while. Then he explained why Jim Courtney had been forced to leave the colony.
Although Kadem listened in silence and his eyes showed no more emotion than those of a cobra, he was thinking furiously. While he had been masquerading as a lowly seaman aboard the Gift of Allah he had heard all this discussed by his companions. He knew about Jim Courtney’s flight from Good Hope.
“If we follow these wagon tracks, we can be certain that they will lead us to the place somewhere on the coast where father and son have agreed to meet,” Koots finished, and again they were silent.
Kadem thought about what Koots had told him. He turned it over and back and forth in his mind, the way a jeweller examines a precious stone for impurities. He could detect no false notes in Koots’s version of events. “What do you want of me?” he asked, at last.
“We share the same purpose,” Koots answered. “I propose a pact, an alliance. Let us take the oath together in the sight of God and his Prophet. Let us dedicate ourselves to the total destruction of our mutual enemies.”
“I agree to that,” said Kadem, and the mad glitter he had so carefully masked returned to his eyes. Koots found it unsettling, more menacing than the cutlass and dagger in the Arab’s hands when they had fought that morning.
They took the oath beneath the towering branches of a camel-thorn tree, in which new growth had already burgeoned to replace that which had been devoured by the locust swarms. They swore on the blade and the haft of Kadem’s Damascus-steel dagger. Each placed a pinch of coarse salt on the other’s tongue. They shared a slice of venison, swallowing a morsel each. With the razor-sharp Damascus blade they opened a vein in their right wrists, then massaged the arm until the blood was flowing bright and warm down into their cupped palms. Then they clasped hands so that their blood mingled, and maintained the grip while Kadem recited the wondrous names of God. At last they embraced.
“You are my brother in blood,” said Kadem, and his voice trembled in awe at the binding power of the oath.
“You are my brother in blood,” Koots said. Though his voice was firm and clear and his gaze into Kadem’s eyes was steady, the oath sat lightly upon his conscience. Koots recognized no God, especially not the foreign deity of a dark-skinned, inferior race. The profit in the bargain was all his for he could turn away from it when the time came, even kill his new blood-brother with impunity if it were called for. He knew that Kadem was bound by his hope of salvation and the wrath of his God.
Deep in his heart Kadem recognized the fragility of the bond between them. That evening as they shared the campfire and ate meat together, he showed how astute he was. He gave Koots an undertaking more poignant than any religious oath. “I have told you that I am the favourite of my uncle, the Caliph. You know also the power and riches of the Omani empire. Its realm encompasses a great ocean and the Red and Persian Seas. My uncle has promised me great reward if I carry his fatwa to a successful conclusion. You and I have sworn, as brothers in blood, to dedicate ourselves to that end. Once it is done we will return together to the Caliph’s palace on Lamu island, and to his gratitude. You will embrace Islam. I will request my uncle to place you in command of all his armies on the African mainland. I will ask
him to make you governor of the provinces of Monamatapa, the land from which come the gold and slaves of Opet. You will become a man of power and wealth uncountable.”
The spring tides of Herminius Koots’s life were beginning to flow strongly.
Now they moved along the wagon trail with renewed determination. Even Xhia was infected with this enhanced sense of purpose. Twice they cut the trail of herds of elephant coming down out of the north lands. Perhaps in some mysterious way the elephant were aware of the bounty the rains had brought upon the land. From afar Koots surveyed the massed herds of these grey giants through the lens of his telescope, but he showed only a passing interest in them. He would not let a hunt for a few ivory tusks deter him from his main quest.
He ordered Xhia to detour round the herds and they went onwards, leaving them unmolested. Both Koots and Kadem grudged every hour of delay and they drove horses and men hard along the tracks of their quarry.
They passed out of the wide swath that the locusts had cut through the land and left the great plains behind them. They entered a lovely land of rivers and lush forests, and the air tasted as sweet as the perfume of wild flowers. Scenes of great beauty and grandeur surrounded them, and the promise of riches and glory led them onwards.
“We are not far behind the wagons now,” Xhia promised them, “and each day we draw closer.”
Then they came to a confluence of two rivers, a wide, deep flow and a smaller tributary. Xhia was amazed by what he found there. He led Koots and Kadem through the field of rotting, sun-dried human remains, which had been chewed and scattered by the hyena and other scavengers. He did not have to point out to them the discarded spears and assegais and the rawhide shields, most of them shot through by musket fire. “There was great battle here,” Xhia told them. “These shields and weapons are those of the fierce Nguni tribes.”
Koots nodded. No man who had lived and travelled in Africa as he had could have been ignorant of the legend of the warrior tribes of the Nguni. “Good, so!” he said. “Tell us what else you see here.”
“The Nguni attacked the wagons Somoya had drawn up here, across the neck between the two rivers. That was a good place for him, his back and both his sides protected by the water. The Nguni had to come at him from the front. He killed them like chickens.” Xhia giggled and shook his head with admiration.
Koots walked across to the crater in the middle of the area of devastated ground in front of which the wagons had stood. “What is this?” he asked. “What happened here?”
Xhia picked a short length of charred slow-match out of the dirt, and brandished it. Even though he had seen fuse and explosives used before, he did not have the vocabulary to describe it. Instead he mimed the act of lighting the slow-match and made a sizzling sound as he ran along the path the flame must have taken. When he reached the crater he shouted, “Ba-poof!” and leaped high into the air to illustrate the explosion. Then he fell on his back and kicked both legs, shrieking with laughter. It was so expressive that even Koots had to laugh.
“By the pox-ridden vagina of the great whore,” he guffawed, “the Courtney puppy let off a mine under the impis as they stormed the wagons. We will have to take care when we catch up with him. He has grown as crafty as his father.”
It took Xhia the rest of the day to unravel all the secrets of the battlefield, spread out as it was over such a vast stretch of the veld. He showed Koots the path the routed impis had taken, and how Jim Courtney and his men had chased them on horseback and shot them down as they ran.
They came at last to the abandoned Nguni encampment, and Xhia became almost incoherent as he realized the extent of the cattle herds Jim had captured. “Like the grass! Like the locusts!” he squeaked, as he pointed out the spoor the herds had trodden as they were driven away eastwards.
“A thousand?” Koots wondered. “Five thousand, or maybe more?”
He tried to form a rough estimate of the value of these cattle if he could get them to Good Hope.
There are not enough guilders in the Bank of Batavia, he concluded. One thing is certain. When I catch up with them, Oudeman and these stinking Hottentots will not see a single centime. I will kill them first, before I hand over a guilder. By the time I am finished here I will make Governor van de Witten look like a pauper in comparison.
That was not the end of it. When they entered the camp Xhia led him to the far side of the encampment where a stockade stood, made of stout timber poles lashed together with strips of bark.
Koots had never seen such a sturdy construction, even in the permanent villages of the tribes. Is it a grain store? he wondered, as he dismounted and entered. He was further puzzled when he found that it contained what seemed to be drying or smoking racks. However, there was no sign of ash or scorched areas beneath them. As with the construction of the walls, the timber used seemed too massive for such a simple purpose. It was clear that the racks had been designed to support a much greater weight than strips of meat.
Xhia was trying to tell him something. He jumped up on the racks and repeated the word “chicken.” Koots frowned irritably. This was no hen coop, nor even an ostrich coop. Koots shook his head. Xhia began another mime, holding one arm in front of his face like a long nose, and flapping his other hand from the side of his head like an ear. Koots puzzled over the meaning, then remembered that the San words for “chicken” and “elephant” were almost identical.
“Elephant?” he asked, and touched the elephant-hide belt at his waist.
“Yes! Yes! You stupid man.” Xhia nodded vigorously.
“Are you mad?” Koots asked in Dutch. “An elephant would never fit through that doorway.”
Xhia leaped down from the rack and ferreted around under it. Then he crawled out again. He showed Koots what he had found. It was an immature tusk, taken from an elephant calf. It was only as long as Xhia’s forearm and so slim that he could encircle it at the thickest point with thumb and finger. It must have been overlooked when the storeroom was emptied. Xhia waved it in Koots’s face.
“Ivory?” Koots began to understand. Five years previously, when he was acting as aide-de-camp to the governor of Batavia, the governor had made an official visit to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The Sultan was proud of his collection of ivory tusks. He had invited the governor and his staff to tour his treasury and view the contents. The ivory had been laid out on racks much like these, to keep it off the damp floor.
“Ivory!” Koots breathed hard. “These are ivory racks!” He imagined the tusks stacked high, and tried to estimate the value of such a treasure. “In the name of the black angel, this is another great fortune to match the plundered herds of cattle.”
He turned and strode out of the shed. “Sergeant!” he bellowed. “Sergeant Oudeman, get the men mounted up. Kick the brown backsides of our Arab friends. We ride at once. We must catch Jim Courtney before he reaches the coast and comes under the protection of the guns on his father’s ships.”
They rode eastwards along the spoor of the cattle herds, a beaten roadway almost a mile wide, along which the cattle had grazed and trodden down the grass.
“A blind man could follow this on a moonless night,” Koots told Kadem, who rode beside him.
“What a fine bait this piglet of the great hog will make for our trap,” Kadem agreed, with grim determination. They expected to come up with the wagons and the herds of plundered cattle at any moment. However, day succeeded day, and although they rode hard and Koots took every opportunity to spy out the land ahead through his telescope they caught no glimpse of either cattle or wagons.
Each day Xhia assured them that they were gaining rapidly. From the sign he was able to tell Koots that Jim Courtney was hunting for elephant while his caravan was on the march.
“This is slowing him down?” Koots asked.
“No, no, he hunts far ahead of the wagons.”
“Then we can surprise the caravan while he is not with them to defend them.”
“We have to catch up with them first
,” said Kadem, and Xhia cautioned Koots that if they approached Jim Courtney’s caravan too closely before they were ready to attack it, Bakkat would immediately discover their presence. “In just the same way as I discovered that these brown baboons,” he indicated Kadem and his Arabs disdainfully, “were creeping up on us. Although Bakkat is no match for Xhia, the mighty hunter, in stealth and wizard-craft, neither is he a fool. I have seen his footprints and his sign where he swept his back trail every evening before the wagons went into camp.”
“How do you know it is Bakkat’s sign?” Koots demanded.
“Bakkat is my enemy, and I can pick out his footprints from those of any other man that walks this land.” Then Xhia pointed out other circumstances that Koots had not taken into consideration before. The signs showed clearly that Jim Courtney had made other additions to his retinue apart from the herds of captured cattle: men, many men—Xhia thought there were at least fifty and that there might be as many as a hundred additional men to face them when they attacked the wagons. Xhia had employed all his genius and wizardry to determine the character and condition of these new men.
“They are big, proud men. That I can tell by the manner in which they carry themselves, by the size of their feet and the length of their stride,” he told Koots. “They bear arms and are freemen, not captives or slaves. They follow Somoya willingly and they guard and care for his herds. It comes to me that these are Nguni who will fight like warriors.” Koots was learning from experience that it was best to accept the little Bushman’s opinion. So far he had never been wrong in such matters.
With such quantity and quality of reinforcements added to the hard core of mounted musketeers, Jim Courtney had now mustered a formidable force which Koots dared not underestimate.
“We are outnumbered many times over. It will be a hard fight.” Koots weighed these new odds.
“Surprise,” said Kadem. “We have the element of surprise. We can choose our time and place to attack.”