by Wilbur Smith
‘Get to your damned feet, shark bait!’ the whip man bellowed, lashing the African who was trying but failing to rise. ‘Get up, I said!’ The cat bit again and then without any conscious thought of what he was doing, or why, Hal saw himself fly at the whip man and felt his stumbling momentum checked by the impact of flesh and bone. Then the two of them fell and Hal’s hands were around the man’s throat.
‘Coward!’ Hal spat. Full of rage and hunger to kill these heinous fiends who thought nothing of treating men like the meanest of beasts, feeling fellowship with the African now, rather than rivalry, he brought his forehead down on the man’s nose, bursting it.
‘Get him off me!’ the whip man was screaming, and Hal felt himself being lifted into the air. He kicked and flailed, broke free but fell to the deck and then they were on him again.
‘Hold him still!’ Barros bellowed as the officers hauled Hal up, one of them wrapping Hal’s hair around his fist and yanking his head back so that Captain Barros’s face came into view just inches from Hal’s own.
‘You insolent English dog!’ Barros spat, backhanding Hal across his face. ‘You would get yourself killed over a filthy Negro?’ He struck again, the knuckles splitting Hal’s lip.
‘I would kill you for him,’ Hal said, rage driving out any sense of his own best interests, still less those of Judith and their child from his mind. Blood spilled from his lip into his beard and he licked the torn flesh, relishing the moisture in his parched mouth.
He knew what was coming and tensed the corded muscle of his stomach just as Barros drove his fist into it. The blow knocked the wind from him but not enough to prevent him calling Barros a milk-livered son of a Spanish whore.
Barros did not reply. Instead, he went over to the side and pulled one of the unused belaying pins from the rail on the inside of the bulwarks. Brandishing the solid wood shaft like a club, he cracked it against Hal’s temple.
White-hot light seared through Hal’s vision and in his blindness he heard Barros say, ‘You are a friend to the animals, Englishman, I wonder if that affinity stretches to the fish.’ He turned to his men. ‘Fetch another rope. We shall have ourselves another wager, gentlemen.’
They held Hal and the African down while they tied the long ropes round their chests. Hal surrendered to the inevitable, preserving his stamina for when he would need it, but the African was still fighting, terror overcoming his exhaustion, as he and Hal were manhandled aft and lowered over the stern larboard rail. Down they went, the sailors of the Madre de Deus on the other ends of the ropes, and Hal cursing as the flesh of his forearms and lower legs was shredded against the barnacles on the ship’s hull. And when he splashed into the ocean he yelled because of the burning pain of the salt water in his wounds.
The men of the Madre de Deus let the ropes play out and Hal and the African were swept off into the ship’s wake, spluttering and thrashing to keep their heads above water. Hal arched his body and kicked furiously but the rope was long and as more of it was let out he drifted back beyond the worst of the rough, hull-ploughed, bubbling ocean, so that by hauling himself along the rope he could hold his mouth clear of the water.
He looked across and was relieved to see that the African had not drowned either but was gripping the rope with grim determination, the muscles of his arms bunched and swollen with the strain.
‘Hold on!’ he called, making a show of grabbing with his hands, hoping the African could discern his meaning, even if his actual words were incomprehensible. ‘Just hold on. They’ll pull us up soon!’ Which was what Hal was telling himself, for surely Captain Barros was not such an idiot that he would rather see them die than earn himself the money they would bring in at the slave block.
The ship’s officers had removed their broad hats now for fear of them being blown over the side. Hal could see them gathered at the stern rail and beyond them he saw the Madre de Deus’s sails, and two dozen sailors clambering up the shrouds.
He’s slowing the ship, Hal thought, fully aware of what it would mean if the ship lost two or three knots. But sure enough he could see her topmastmen strung out across the mizzen and mainmast, dark shapes against the blue sky. They were busy furling the topgallants and royals and when it was done there was a discernible drop in his own speed through the water. This at least made it easier to keep his head above the surface and when he looked across at the African he grimaced, an expression that Hal interpreted as relief.
He thinks we are saved, Hal thought. The fool dares to hope we will come through this trial with a few cuts and bruised pride. The thought of his own blood in the water made Hal look behind him for the first time. Craning his neck as he clung on to the rope, he strained to see beyond the furrow of his own wake.
That’s when he saw the following fins.
He could hear the Madre de Deus’s crew cheering now. They lined the merchantman’s rails and clung to the shrouds whooping with excitement.
‘God help us,’ Hal muttered. The shoal of tiger sharks was a cable’s length behind them. He was certainly no stranger to the predators that roamed the warm waters of the Indian Ocean: black-tip sharks, hammerhead sharks, the great white sharks that were known to swallow men whole, and the ever-present blunt-nosed tiger sharks which terrified all sailors because they were so voracious and insatiable. Hal had seen some that were twenty-five feet long from nose-tip to tail-tip. He had heard of tiger sharks attacking longboats, even biting off pieces of the hull and swallowing them.
He had seen one bite through the tough shell of an enormous sea turtle. What such a predator would do to his own body did not bear thinking about and yet he could think of nothing else, knowing that the creatures had the scent of his blood in their noses.
The African screamed with terror, for he too had seen the company they were keeping. But Hal had no advice for the man. There was nothing to be done now but hope and, if it came to it, fight.
The Madre de Deus was down to perhaps four knots through the water, which told Hal that Barros had struck some canvas from the foremast too. Or perhaps the wind had dropped. Either way it made Hal’s blood far colder than the water around him and he hoped that the Portuguese had had their fun and would haul them back up before the sharks attacked.
But the merchantman’s crew had not finished with them yet. Wagers had been made. There was money to be won and lost.
Hal did not even see the shark that attacked him. He felt the impact though, its great wedge-shaped head driving into his right thigh and spinning him over so that for a heartbeat he was on his back looking up at the sky through two feet of ocean. Then he righted himself, took a deep breath and let go his grip on the rope. The slack played out until the noose of it dug in beneath his arms, the knot holding, and now he expelled the air from his lungs and twisted until his face was beneath the water, his eyes searching the blue haze for the shark that had struck him.
He saw it. It had fallen back some thirty feet, its head moving from side to side as it swam beneath his wake.
They would pull him back aboard now. Surely. He had been the first to receive a shark’s crude enquiry. Barros’s men must have seen it and now they would haul him back up to the cheers of those who had won the wager.
But they did not pull him up, and then to Hal’s horror he saw another shark coming out of the gloom off his right hip, its tail thrashing as it put in a great burst of effort to catch up with him. Hal screamed underwater, twisting his torso over again and kicking his feet with every scrap of strength he could muster, and his left heel scuffed the shark’s snout, sending it careening off to the side, its yellow-white underside a flash in the blue gloom.
He saw another shark to his right and knew from its stocky shape and broad, flat snout that it was a bull shark. It thrashed its tail to keep up with him, then darted in close so that when Hal went under again he was looking into the creature’s evil little eye. Then the bull shark was gone and Hal arched his body, breaking the surface to take a gasping breath before putting his head
under again.
When the next shark came it opened its jaws and Hal saw its razor-sharp serrated teeth and even in his terror he thought of Judith because he expected to die then, torn apart for the amusement of madmen. Yet he would not be taken that easily. He screamed and he rolled, kicking for all his worth and somehow those wicked-looking teeth missed him and the creature fell back, its energy spent.
This terror lasted the better part of an hour, Hal fending the sharks off, kicking their blunt snouts and eyes, or somehow writhing clear of their jaws just in time, and he had been aware of the African doing the same, the two of them fighting for their lives. But when he saw a terrible thrashing off his right shoulder he knew with dread certainty that the African had been bitten. The man did not cry out. Perhaps he was too exhausted. Perhaps he had been unable to fight any longer and had given up. The first Hal knew of it was when he came up, gasping for breath, and heard a collective groan from the men at the Madre de Deus’s stern rail. Captain Barros was yelling furiously at his own crewmen on the end of the other rope for letting the African be taken. What did the fool expect?
Hal’s only thought was of himself. Sharks for miles around would be drawn to the fresh kill. The African’s blood and torn flesh in the water would send them into a feeding frenzy and he would be next. If he did not drown in the meantime, for he was bone-weary and feared he could not fight much longer. It was all he could do to keep his head above the churned water of the ship’s wake, and though terror was his strength, even that would fail him soon.
Then he realized that he was getting closer to the Madre de Deus’s hull. They were pulling him in. Up and up he went, hoisted like the day’s catch to the shrieking of gulls, and when they hauled him over the larboard rail he collapsed onto the deck.
He was vaguely aware of them clamping irons on to his numbing legs but did not fight them. Could not have even if his life depended on it. He was utterly spent.
‘Congratulations, Englishman, you are too much trouble even for the sharks to want to eat you,’ Barros said.
Hal had no strength to reply. But he was alive.
udith longed to see the sky. For too long now she had been trapped in a world of water, mud, mist and beds of reeds that pressed in from every side, stifling any trace of a breeze in the humid air and cutting them off from the light of the sun, though the heat of it weighed on them like molten lead.
There were ten of them making the journey: Pereira, the Portuguese second mate from the Pelican, and three other Portuguese sailors, all of them armed with muskets as well as their cutlasses; two African crewmen who had been designated as porters and were weighed down with supplies; Judith and Ann, and finally the masked man himself and the slave who tended to him. Judith tried to imagine what it was like for him to be trapped inside that leather carapace, for the padlocks that closed it and the ring at his neck made it plain that, for all his monstrous appearance and his command of this expedition, the masked man’s confinement was not of his choosing. And despite the strength of his sword-arm and the unrelenting harshness of his demeanour, he was utterly dependent on his servant for food and drink.
One evening, as they sat around the smouldering, smoking excuse for a fire that was the best that could be managed in that world of dampness, she had asked the Buzzard why, having defied Jahan, he had not removed the mask that the prince had placed upon him. ‘It must be unbearable in this heat. The air is so heavy. How can you even breathe?’
‘Oh aye, I could take this off, but then what would happen? With this mask I can terrify any savage from here to the Cape. Without it I’m just a faceless cripple.’
‘I pity you,’ Judith said, with an absence of sentiment that made the words all the more telling.
The Buzzard leaned forward and drenched every word in venom as he said. ‘Do not pity me, lassie. Keep your pity for yourself.’
They had made their way from the Pelican in the ship’s pinnace, sailing a network of tributaries that threaded through a coastal fringe of lush vegetation that lay between land and sea. The waterways were more intricate and convoluted in their twists, turns and intersections than any maze the human mind could devise, but the Buzzard and Pereira, a grey-bearded veteran who carried himself with the dignity of officer rank, navigated as best they could. They used strips of canvas tied to the branches of the mangrove trees that lined the river banks to mark their passage, so that if they saw the strips again, as they often did, they knew that they must have turned back upon themselves. Sometimes they argued over which way to go. At other times they pointed to one passage or another, nodding with remembrance and giving their orders to the man at the tiller.
Where the streams slowed and widened into pools, they saw the great, bloated bodies of hippopotami. At the Buzzard’s orders the sailors primed their muskets and lit their match cord before giving the fearsome creatures a wide berth. Judith knew them well, for she had often encountered them on the waterways of southern Ethiopia. However, Ann had never seen them before and she could not understand why the masked man took such precautions and the Africans looked so fearful.
‘Look at them,’ she giggled. ‘Just lying there with their heads bobbing up and down, half in and half out of the water. All that you can see is their eyes and noses poking out of the river. It’s so funny the silly way their ears twitch. And look! One of them has got a bird standing on his head!’
‘You would not laugh if one of those creatures ever attacked you,’ Judith said. ‘An angry bull, or a cow with a young calf, would think nothing of charging this boat. On land, few men can outrun them, and with those great jaws they can cut you in half with a single bite.’
Just then one of the hippos yawned, revealing huge lower teeth that were as curved and pointed as a headman’s axe and the smile disappeared from Ann’s face.
And yet the greatest risk to life came not from mighty, charging beasts, but from the hordes of insects that plagued them, particularly at night, stinging and biting so that any exposed skin was soon left covered in swollen, red bites.
At least they had eaten well. Fish, oysters and crab were abundant. The porters hunted water birds with bows and arrows and collected sweet mangrove honey. From the tall white mangrove trees growing nearest the sea Judith pulled the thick, leathery, olive-green leaves, crushing them and adding them to her evening meal for the relief of her stomach cramps. She gathered the unripe fruit and smeared their pulp on the insect bites that covered her body, particularly her lower legs, and she used the sharpened twigs as tooth-picks.
On the second day in the estuary one of the sailors shot a fat, grey-skinned creature that looked like a seal with a dolphin’s tail and a gentle face, with eyes as sad and sweet as a dog’s and a mouth upturned in a permanent smile. ‘It’s called a dugong,’ the Buzzard told them, in an uncharacteristically sociable moment. ‘They eat sea grass. I dare say you’ll find it makes good enough eating.’
It had taken five men to drag the wounded creature, which bore an expression of docile puzzlement, into the pinnace, where they beat it to death with a club. They butchered it and salted the flesh, which, just as the Buzzard had promised, kept them well fed for several days, the sailors arguing at every meal over whether it tasted more like beef or pork.
By the time the last of the dugong meat had been consumed, however, they had long since left the boat, for the water was no longer deep enough to be navigable and they were forced to continue on foot, crossing the tidal mudflats and more often than not wading up to their knees through brackish mud and water. From the small, sturdy, black mangroves in the deeper reaches of the mudflats the men cut branches that they burned to smoke and thus preserve the fish they caught.
Troops of white-throated monkeys chattered at their passing. Snakes and other reptiles slithered from their path, plopping into the water around them. Bats whirred overhead at night, while by day they frequently heard the flapping and honking of the herons, ducks and geese that had been disturbed by their passing. Now and then, a mang
rove kingfisher streaked by in an arrow-like blur of bright colour.
But as the days went by no clue was offered as to where they were going or what the Buzzard’s intentions were. All that Judith knew was that every plunging, strength-sapping step took her further from Hal. But at least she had gained something from the grim, sweaty trek through the mudflats. One of the Portuguese sailors had cut a straight branch from a tree for use as a fishing spear. Using his cutlass he had hacked the stick to a sharp point, when one mislaid chop cut too deep and the tip had broken off. As he trudged off to find another branch, swearing as he went, Judith had pulled the sharp little stake from the mud and tucked it away in her skirt.
It wasn’t much of a weapon. It would not defend her against the Buzzard’s sword or the sailors’ muskets. But it was something of her own. And it gave her a tiny ray of hope.
The Madre de Deus dropped her anchor in the bay off Quelimane and all the slaves were herded onto the deck where they waited in fear and uncertainty for their turn to be rowed ashore. They went twelve at a time, not in the merchantman’s own longboats, but in tenders rowed out from the shore.
Hal glanced over his shoulder at the Madre de Deus sitting serene on the shimmering water out in the bay. If I ever lay eyes on her again I will send her to the sea bed, he promised himself, fixing the merchantman in his mind. And though Barros may beg me for quarter, I’ll hoist the bastard to the yardarm and let the gulls pick his bones clean and white.
When they reached the shore, Hal and the others in his party were ordered to stand in line while they were formed into a coffle: a line of slaves with chains around their necks and hands and linked by more chains, from the neck of one man to the hands of the poor soul behind him. Two of the men in the middle of the line were not harnessed together with the same chains as everyone else, however, but by a heavy wooden beam, perhaps two paces long, which had yokes, also made of wood, at either end. The yokes were positioned on the shoulders of the two men: to the back of one and the front of the other. In this way a rigid distance was maintained between the unfortunate individuals who had been chosen as beasts of burden. As a result they were obliged to march at exactly the same pace, and that obligation was then extended to the other men ahead of and behind them.