Blue Horizon

by Wilbur Smith

  In the fallible light of the moon it seemed that the earth was moving, a flowing mass like black lava bearing down on them, stretching across the full breadth of the gorge from wall to cliff wall. The sound of hoofs was deafening, and they saw the humped backs of the monstrous herd looming closer and faster, the moonlight glinting on their horns.

  “Stampede!” Oudeman yelled in terror, and the others took up the cry. “Stampede!”

  The tight-knit group of riders whirled round, broke up and scattered away before the solid wall of great horned heads and pounding hoofs. Within a dozen strides Goffel’s horse hit an antbear burrow with his off fore. The leg snapped as the horse went down. Goffel was thrown forward to hit the earth with one shoulder. In terror he dragged himself to his feet with his arm dangling from the shattered bones, just as the front rank of cattle swept over him. One of the lead bulls hooked at him as it passed. The point of the horn slid in under his ribs and out of the small of his back at the level of his kidneys. The bull tossed its head and Goffel was thrown high, to drop back under the hoofs of the herd, then trampled and kicked to a boneless pulp. Three other troopers were trapped against an angle of the cliff. When they tried to turn back the herd engulfed them, and their mounts were gored by the enraged bulls. The frenzied horses reared, kicked and threw their riders, and men and horses were overwhelmed by the thrusting of horns and went down under the pounding hoofs.

  Habban and Rashood raced side by side, but when Habban’s horse stepped in a hole and fell with a broken leg Rashood turned back and, right under the horns of the stampede, dragged him up behind his saddle. They rode on, but the double-loaded horse could not keep ahead of the cattle, and was swallowed up by a wave of swinging horns and bellowing beasts. Habban was gored deeply in the thigh and dragged from his perch behind his companion’s saddle.

  “Ride on!” he screamed at Rashood, as he hit the ground. “I am lost. Save yourself!” But Rashood tried to turn back, and his horse was horned again and again until it also fell in a tangle of legs and loose equipment. On hands and knees Rashood crawled through the dust and flying hoofs. Though he was kicked repeatedly, felt muscle and sinew tear in his back and chest and his ribs snap, he reached his fallen comrade and dragged him behind the bole of one of the larger trees. They huddled there, choking and coughing in the dustclouds while the stampede thundered by.

  Even after the stampede had passed they could not leave their hiding-place because a wave of howling Nguni spearmen followed hard on the heels of the herds. Just when it seemed that they would find the two Arabs, an unhorsed Hottentot trooper broke from cover and tried to make a run for it. Like hounds on the fox the Nguni went after him, and were drawn away from Rashood and Habban. They stabbed the trooper repeatedly, washing their blades in his blood.

  Koots and Kadem spurred their horses at full gallop along the bank of the river to keep ahead of the stampede. Oudeman stuck close behind them. He knew that Koots had the animal instinct for survival, and trusted him to find an escape for them from this disaster. Suddenly the horses ran into stands of hook-thorn and were slowed by the dense thickets. The herd leaders coming on close behind them crashed through the thorn without check, and swiftly overhauled them.

  “Into the river!” Koots bellowed. “They’ll not follow us in there.”

  As he shouted he swerved his mount towards the bank and lashed him over the top. They dropped twelve feet and hit the surface of the water with a high splash. Kadem and Oudeman followed him over. They surfaced together and saw Koots already half-way across the river. Swimming beside the horses, they reached the south bank after Koots had landed.

  They climbed out and stood in a sodden, exhausted group and watched the herd still careering by on the far bank. Then in the moonlight they saw Jim Courtney’s horsemen galloping close on the heels of the herd, and heard the thud and saw the muzzle flashes of their muskets as they caught up with the surviving riders of Koots’s troop and shot them down.

  “Our powder is wet,” Koots gasped. “We cannot stand and fight.”

  “I have lost my musket,” said Oudeman.

  “It is over,” Kadem agreed, “but there will be another day and another place when we shall finish this business.” They mounted and rode on swiftly into the east, away from the river, the stampeding herd and the enemy musketeers.

  “Where are we going?” Oudeman asked at last, but neither of the other two answered him.

  It took the Nguni herdsmen many days to round up the scattered herds. They discovered that thirty-two of the great hump-backed beasts had died or been hopelessly maimed in the stampede. Some had fallen over precipices, run into holes, drowned in the rapids of the river or been killed by the lions when they had become separated from the herd. The Nguni mourned them. Lovingly they drove back those cattle that had survived the dreadful night. They moved among them, soothing and gentling them. They dressed their injuries, the horn wounds of their peers and the rips and contusions where they had run into trees or other objects.

  Inkunzi, the head herdsman, was determined to express his outrage to Jim in the strongest terms he dared. “I will demand that he suspend the march and rest in this place until all the cattle are recovered,” he assured his herders, and they all agreed staunchly with him. Despite his threats, the request when he made it to Jim was couched in much milder terms, and Jim agreed with him without quibble.

  As soon as it was light, Jim and his men rode over the battlefield. They came upon four dead horses of Koots’s troop with horn stabs, and two others so badly hurt that they had to be destroyed. However, they retrieved eleven more that were either unhurt or so little injured that they could be treated and added to Jim’s own remount herd.

  They also found the corpses of five of Koots’s men. The features of three were so battered as to be unrecognizable, but from items of their clothing and equipment, and the pay books Jim found in the pockets of two, he could be certain that they were VOC cavalrymen, wearing mufti rather than military uniform. “These are all Keyser’s men. Although he did not come after us himself, Keyser sent them,” Jim assured Louisa.

  Smallboy and Muntu recognized some of the corpses. The Cape colony was a small community where everyone knew his neighbours.

  “Goffel! Now there was a truly bad kerel,” said Smallboy, as he prodded one of the battered corpses with his toe. His expression was stern and he shook his head. Smallboy himself was no angel of purity, and if he disapproved, thought Jim, Goffel must have been a veritable tower of vice.

  “There are still five missing,” Bakkat told Jim. “No sign yet of Koots and the bald sergeant, or of the three strange Arabs we saw with them yesterday. I must cast the far side of the river.” He waded across and Jim watched him scurry along the bank and peer at the ground as he read sign. Suddenly he stopped, like a pointer dog getting the scent of the bird.

  “Bakkat! What have you found there?” Jim yelled across.

  “Three horses, running hard,” Bakkat called back.

  Jim, Louisa and Zama crossed the river to join him and they studied the tracks of galloping horses. “Can you read who the riders were, Bakkat?” Jim asked. It seemed impossible but Bakkat responded to the question as though it were commonplace. He squatted by the tracks.

  “These two are the horses that Koots and the bald one were riding yesterday. The other is one of the Arabs’, the one with the green turban,” he declared, with finality.

  “How can he tell?” Louisa asked, with wonder. “They are all steel-shod horses. Surely the tracks are identical?”

  “Not to Bakkat,” Jim assured her. “He can tell from the uneven wear of the horseshoes, and dents and chips in the metal. To his eye each horse has a distinctive gait, and he can read it in the spoor.”

  “So Koots and Oudeman have got away. What are you going to do now, Jim? Are you going to follow them?”

  Jim did not reply at once. To delay the decision he ordered Bakkat to follow the spoor and make sure of the run of it. After a mile the track
s turned determinedly towards the north. Jim ordered a halt and asked Bakkat and Zama for their opinion. It was a long debate.

  “They are riding fast,” Bakkat pointed out. “They have a start of almost half a night and a day. It will take many days to catch them, if you ever do. Let them go, Somoya.”

  “I think they are beaten,” Zama said. “Koots will not come back. But if you catch him, he will fight like a leopard in a trap. You will lose men.”

  Louisa thought about that. Jim might be one of those wounded or killed. She thought of intervening, but she knew that might harden Jim’s resolve. She had found a wide streak of contrariness in his nature. She bit back her pleas to make him stay, and instead said quietly, “If you go after him, I shall go with you.”

  Jim looked at her. The warlike gleam in his eye faded, and he smiled in defeat, but it was still a conditional surrender. “I have a feeling that Bakkat is right, as usual. Koots has abandoned his hostile intentions towards us, for the present at least. Most of his men have been wiped out. But he still has a formidable force with him. There are five still unaccounted for: Koots, Oudeman and the three Arabs. They could make a bitter fight of it if we cornered them. Zama is also right. We can’t hope to get away scot-free a second time. If we do catch up with them some of our people will be killed or hurt. On the other hand, what seems to be flight might be a trick to draw us away from the wagons. We know Koots is a crafty animal. If we follow, Koots might circle round and attack the wagons before we can get back to intervene.” He drew breath and conceded, “We will keep on for the coast and see what we find at Nativity Bay.” They crossed the river and headed back down the narrow gut of the gorge along the path of the cattle stampede.

  Now that she knew Jim would not ride off after Koots, Louisa was happy and chatted easily as they rode side by side. Zama was anxious to return to the wagons, and he drew steadily ahead, until he was almost obscured by the trees.

  “In a hurry to get back to the lovely lily.” Louisa laughed.

  “Who?” Jim was puzzled.

  “Intepe.”

  “Tegwane’s granddaughter? Is Zama—”

  “Yes, he is,” Louisa confirmed. “Sometimes men are blind. How could you not have noticed?”

  “You are the only thing in my eye, Hedgehog. I see nothing but you.”

  “My love, that was neatly said.” Louisa leaned out of the saddle and offered her mouth. “You shall have a kiss as a reward.”

  But before he could claim it, there was a wild shout and the crash of a musket shot ahead. They saw Frost rear and shy under Zama as he reeled in the saddle.

  “Zama’s in trouble!” Jim shouted, and spurred forward. As he caught up he saw that Zama was wounded. He was hanging half out of the saddle, and blood was shining at the back of his coat. Before Jim could reach him he keeled over and fell to earth in a limp heap.

  “Zama!” Jim shouted, and rode for him, but at that moment he saw a flash of movement to one side. There was danger there and Jim turned Drumfire to meet it. One of the Arabs, in a ragged robe stained with dirt and dried blood, was crouched behind the trunk of a fever tree. He was frantically reloading his long-barrelled musket, ramrodding a ball down the muzzle. He looked up as horse and rider charged down on him. Jim recognized him. “Rashood!” he shouted. He was one of the crewmen from the family schooner, Gift of Allah. Jim had sailed with him more than once, and knew him well, yet here he was riding with a company of the enemy, treacherously attacking the Courtney wagons—and he had shot Zama.

  At the same moment Rashood recognized Jim. He dropped the musket, sprang to his feet and ran. Jim unsheathed his cutlass, and steered Drumfire after him. When he realized he could not escape, Rashood dropped to his knees and spread his arms in a gesture of surrender.

  Jim rose over him in the stirrups.

  “You treacherous, murderous bastard!” He was angry enough to use the edge and split the man’s skull, but at the last moment he controlled himself and swung the flat of the blade across Rashood’s temple. The steel cracked against the bone with such force that Jim feared he might have killed him anyway. Rashood collapsed face forward on to the earth.

  “Don’t you dare die,” Jim threatened him, as he swung down from the saddle, “not until you have answered my questions. Then I will give you a royal send-off.”

  Louisa rode up, and Jim shouted, “See to Zama. I think he is hard hit. I will come to you as soon as I have this swine secured.”

  Louisa sent Bakkat to call for help from the men at the laager, and they carried Zama back on a litter. He had received a dangerous wound at an oblique angle through the chest and Louisa feared for his life, but she hid her anxiety. As soon as they reached the laager Intepe came running to help her nurse him.

  “He is hurt, but he will live,” she told the weeping girl, as they laid Zama on the cardell bed in the spare wagon. With the help of the books and the medicine chest Sarah Courtney had given her, and by dint of much practice and experience, Louisa had become a proficient physician over the months since they had left the Gariep river. She made a more thorough examination of the wound, and exclaimed, with relief, “The ball has gone clean through and out the other side. That’s most propitious. We won’t have to cut for it, and the danger of mortification and gangrene is much reduced.”

  Jim left Zama to the women and took out his concern and anger on Rashood. With arms and legs spreadeagled like a starfish, they lashed him to the spokes of one of the big rear wagon wheels and jacked the rim clear of the ground. Jim waited for him to recover consciousness.

  In the meantime Smallboy brought in the body of another Arab they had found lying close to where he had captured Rashood. This one had died from loss of blood: a horn wound in his groin had severed the big artery there. When they turned him face up, Jim recognized him as another of the sailors from the Gift. “This one is Habban,” he said.

  “It is indeed Habban,” agreed Smallboy.

  “There is something going on here that stinks like rotten fish,” Jim said. “I know not what it is, but this one can give us the answers.” He glared at Rashood, still hanging unconscious on the rear wheel of the wagon. “Throw a bucket of water over him.” It needed not one but three buckets flung into his face to revive him.

  “Salaam, Rashood,” Jim greeted him, as he opened his eyes. “The beauty of your countenance lightens my heart. You are a servant of my family. Why did you attack our wagons and try to kill Zama, a man you know well as my friend?”

  Rashood shook the water from his beard and long, lank hair. He stared back at Jim: he did not speak but the expression in his eyes was eloquent.

  “We must loosen your tongue, Beloved of the Prophet.” Jim stepped back, and nodded to Smallboy. “Give him a hundred turns of the wheel.”

  Smallboy and Muntu spat on their hands and seized the rim. They began to spin it between them. Smallboy counted the turns. The speed built up swiftly until the image of Rashood’s revolving body blurred before their eyes. Smallboy lost the count after fifty and had to start again. When at last he called the hundred and they braked the wheel, Rashood was writhing weakly against his bonds, his dirty robe drenched with sweat. His eyes were unfocused and he was heaving and gasping with vertigo.

  “Rashood, why were you riding with Koots? When did you join his band? Who was the strange Arab with you, the man with the green turban?”

  Despite his distress Rashood turned his eyes towards Jim and tried to focus on him. “Infidel!” he blurted. “Kaffir! I act by virtue of the sacred fatwa of the Caliph Zayn al-Din of Muscat and at the command of his pasha, General Kadem ibn Abubaker. The Pasha is a great and holy man, a mighty warrior and beloved of God and the Prophet.”

  “So the one in the green turban is a pasha? What are the terms of this fatwa?” Jim demanded.

  “They are too sacred to be spoken into the ear of the profane.”

  “Rashood has discovered religion.” Jim shook his head sadly. “I have never heard him prate such bigoted and v
enomous nonsense before.” He nodded to Smallboy. “Give him another hundred turns on the wheel to cool his ardour.”

  The wheel blurred again, but before they reached the count of a hundred, Rashood vomited in a long, sustained jet. Smallboy grunted at Muntu: “Don’t stop!” Then Rashood’s bowels loosed and his bodily excretions erupted simultaneously from both ends of his body, like a deck hose.

  At the hundred count they braked the wheel, but Rashood’s befuddled senses could not tell the difference. The sensation of violent movement seemed to become stronger and he moaned and vomited until his stomach was empty. Then he heaved and dry-retched painfully.

  “What were the terms of the fatwa?” Jim insisted.

  “Death to the adulterers.” Rashood’s voice was barely audible and yellow bile ran down his chin into his beard. “Death to al-Salil and Princess Yasmini.”

  Jim recoiled at the mention of those two beloved names. “My uncle and aunt? Are they dead? Tell me they are still alive or I shall spin your black soul loose from your foul body.”

  Rashood recovered his scattered senses and once more tried to oppose Jim’s questions, but gradually the wheel broke down his resistance, and he answered freely. “The Princess Yasmini was executed by the Pasha. She died with a thrust through her adulterous heart.” Even in his extreme condition Rashood mouthed the words with relish. “And al-Salil was wounded to the brink of death.”

  Jim’s anger and sorrow were overwhelming, so much so that he lost all stomach for further punishment that day. Rashood was cut down from the wheel but chained and guarded for the rest of the night. “I will question him again in the morning,” Jim said and went to tell Louisa the terrible news.

  “My aunt Yasmini was the essence of kindness and goodness. I only wish you could have met her,” he said that night, as they lay in each other’s arms. His tears soaked her nightdress. “Thank God my uncle Dorian seems to have survived the assassination attempt by this fanatic, Kadem ibn Abubaker.”