by Wilbur Smith
Leave her, the unborn child inside her pleaded. There is nothing we can do for her now. But if we stay they will tear us apart.
‘Help me!’ Ann screamed.
The entire hyena clan was around Ann now like a seething, cacophonous black sea as Ann’s body was pulled this way and that. Judith had experienced enough horrors for any lifetime on the battlefields of Ethiopia, but none compared to this: a woman being dismembered before her very eyes. She felt a sudden, overwhelming shock of nausea, bent double and vomited into the grass. A hyena at the fringes of the mass must have smelt the disgorged contents of her stomach for it turned and loped over and Judith backed away, raising her makeshift club, but the beast was not interested in her as it began to gulp down her steaming vomitus.
Then a sword hacked into the hyena’s skull and it collapsed, shaking and frothing, its long teeth bared in a grimace of death. Judith spun and the masked man was there.
‘Help her!’ she said.
Sword in hand, the man stepped out in front of her, putting himself between Judith and the hyenas, and then the other men were there too, the Portuguese sailors and the two tribesmen, looming out of the darkness, taking up defensive positions around her. ‘Help her, damn you!’ Judith screamed. ‘For God’s sake, somebody help her!’
The masked man said nothing. He stood there, head tilted on one side, the single eye behind its hole fixed on the vile scene before them.
‘Give me your sword and I will help her!’ Judith said.
That leering face turned to her. ‘Shut your mouth and watch,’ it snarled, as one of the sailors snatched the musket from her hands.
A hyena jumped and clamped its jaws on Ann’s upper arm. She stumbled under its weight, her face bright in the starlit gloom, her eyes seeming to fix on Judith’s own one last time before she was pulled down into the growling maelstrom and lost from sight.
‘Please!’ Judith said, but even as she said it she knew there was no helping Ann now. The hyenas were eating her alive. She could hear their jaws snapping shut, hear them gulping down gobbets of flesh.
Even so, she watched, her eyes glutting themselves on the horror of it, until at last the masked man signalled at his men that they should be on their way.
‘Lucky for you one of the Negroes got a whiff of your fire on the air,’ the grey-beard officer said. ‘Otherwise those devils would be feasting on you and your babe by now.’
Judith said nothing. She had no words. She put both hands on her belly, fingers pressing into her own flesh that they might feel a little foot or hand, desperate as she was to touch the child and reassure it that they were safe now.
Yet she knew in her heart that her reassurances were false. For every instinct told her that, however much she had suffered up till now, it was surely nothing compared with the suffering to come.
al lost track of the days and could not say how far inland they had walked. At night though, he watched the moon cycle through its first quarter, to full moon, to third quarter, so that he guessed they had been travelling some three weeks, trudging on in silent monotony. Deeper they went, towards the giant granite outcrops and mountains rising majestically out of the bush in the west, into an Eden of golden grassland savannah, miombo forest and flood plain.
Some nights, if the rain was lashing down, they made rudimentary shelters by stringing up canvas from tree branches, and would sit with their eyes stinging and coughing from the trapped smoke, though they would never be without a blaze because all knew that wild beasts smelt fire from miles around and feared it.
‘Except for the lion,’ Aboli had told Hal once. ‘A lion will walk around the campfire to get a good look at what is going on.’
If the days were too hot, however, and there was enough moon and starlight to see by at night, they trekked then with the star-crammed vault of heaven dizzying in its magnificence above them, its unchained enormity like a promise of freedom in another, better world. One dawn found them walking along a spine of high ground overlooking a lake. The waters, whilst low following the dry season, were far from unoccupied, the most abundant and obvious residents being a pod of hippos that wallowed in the shallows. Crocodiles, too, lay basking in the rising sun. They seemed barely conscious, still as logs until some secret sign made a flock of white birds take wing and wheel into the south, at which point the crocodiles slid down the muddy banks into the water.
They rested through the heat in the middle of the day sleeping in the shade of tall borassa palms and it was almost sunset when they came back down to the plain. Capelo seemed on edge, constantly mopping his brow despite being the only man who was not walking on his own two legs. In the distance ahead of them families of warthogs scurried off into cover. Nightjars and bats streaked in the gathering dusk. The column followed the course of a dry riverbed, which funnelled them between two low hills into a valley whose steep sides bristled with spiny gooseberry trees and other thicket and scrub.
Finally Capelo decided to make camp for the night and the slaves, Hal included, were loosened from the chains around their wrists and put to work erecting thick spiny thorn bush fences to protect them from predators, and setting fires that provided further protection and kept them warm. The fat man’s mood was still very obviously unsettled and one of the guards asked him, ‘What troubles you, senhor?’
‘We are being watched,’ Capelo said.
‘Are you sure, sir?’ the guard replied. ‘I have seen no one.’
‘You do not have to see a man to know he is there. We are being watched.’
Aboli was barely ten paces away from the thorns that surrounded the slavers’ encampment. A day had passed since he and his men had struck the coffle’s unmistakable trail and they had caught up with it a matter of hours after that. It was tempting to attack now, for it would be a simple matter to overpower Capelo and the guards. But then what?
It was not enough to rescue Hal, he had to free Judith, too. He had already sent two men ahead and they had returned with the news that the mines were only a day’s march away. They had also found another trail: eight men and one woman, who had reached Lobo’s land this very day.
Within another day, then, Hal and Judith would both be in the same place. That would be the time to go and get them. And until that time, Aboli was keeping his presence secret, and allowing Hal to remain enslaved, however much it pained him to do so.
It was very seldom that Judith and the Buzzard had ever agreed on anything. But, though neither of them said a word, both knew that the other had precisely the same reaction: this is Balthazar Lobo?
Here was a man who had carved out his own kingdom in the heart of Africa, who’d discovered hills full of gold and brought armies of slaves to get it for him. Judith was expecting a crude, hard-hearted bully, but she had no doubt that he would be strong, dominant and virile too. Instead Lobo turned out to be a small, scrawny, dried up old stick of a man whose face was dominated by a long, underslung lower jaw that jutted out so far that his lower teeth were further forward than the upper ones. On her travels in Europe Judith had heard stories of the Habsburg dynasty that had dominated Spain, Germany, Austria and the entire Holy Roman Empire at various times. Its members had been infamous for their extraordinarily ugly lower jaws. Perhaps Lobo was some bastard son of the Habsburg line, exiled to Africa to avoid him embarrassing the rest of the clan.
‘So,’ he said, looking appreciatively at Judith – there was, she noticed, a thin trail of drool trickling down that grotesque chin – ‘you’re the pretty thing who wants to be my next wife? Well, I dare say you’re not looking your best after your long journey. Why don’t you go and rest, my dear, eh? Your chamber has been prepared. We’ve even found a wedding dress for you. It’s only been used twice before. You will sleep tonight and then tomorrow you can rest your weary legs, wash off the dirt, eat some proper food – my cooks will prepare whatever takes your fancy. In short, do whatever will best prepare you to look your prettiest tomorrow night. Then you will put on your magnificent gown, p
resent yourself to me and I shall decide what I want to do with you.’
He fixed her with a piercing stare and suddenly Judith felt the full force of Lobo’s will and understood how, as a younger man, he had been able to carve out his own corner of the wilderness for himself alone.
‘Hmm …’ He tilted his head to one side as he sized her up. ‘Nice plump breasts, rounded stomach, and yet the legs are quite thin. It’s almost as though … you’re not pregnant already are you, girl?’
Judith said nothing.
‘Would it matter if she were?’ the Buzzard asked. ‘Suppose, and I speak on an entirely hypothetical basis, but just suppose that this woman carried the child of a tall, young, strapping white man. Suppose she gave birth to this child when married to you. Why, that would make the child yours. Would it really matter if you had not planted the seed from which it had grown?’
Lobo looked Judith up and down. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not suppose that it would. Sleep well, young lady. I want you at your best when next I set eyes on you.’
he Amadoda looked down on the sprawling complex where Balthazar Lobo lived and made his fortune. His house was built in a hollow square, with windowless walls of whitewashed mud, more than twice as tall as a man and topped by battlements on the outside, while the inner part of the house opened on to an inner courtyard that was bright with greenery and flowers. Surely that is where they have taken Judith, Aboli thought to himself, pleased that he had possessed the foresight to bring the grappling iron.
He felt a tapping on his shoulder and saw one of his men pointing down to a line of men, led by a fat, white man on a donkey approaching the entrance to the complex. That was Capelo and there, sure enough, the one white man in the middle of the line of slaves was Hal.
‘I see you, Gundwane,’ Aboli said and the words carried extra weight, for ‘I see you’ was the formal greeting used by peoples across southern Africa. ‘Be patient now, Captain. We will not be long in coming.’
And then Aboli saw something else and he whispered a single word to himself: ‘Faro?’
When the sun had risen that day, Capelo had addressed the slaves, telling them where they were going, who their new master would be, and what brutal punishments they could expect if they dared to displease him. Now as the coffle approached the mines Hal, too, noted the small white fort that dominated the area and concluded that Lobo must use it as a residence and as a means of both imposing himself on his slaves and defending himself should they ever rise up against him.
Moving further into the complex, they passed an enclosure, ringed by a sheer-sided ditch at least twelve feet deep and twenty across, like an empty castle moat. There appeared to be two ways of crossing the ditch. One was a rope bridge, with a narrow walkway of planks that led from one side to the other, without even a gate on either end, and the other was a drawbridge that hung from a stone gatehouse on the outside of the ditch and could be lowered back down into the enclosure.
Hal frowned in puzzlement. Whatever was in the enclosure was sufficiently dangerous that it required a ditch to keep it in. Yet a hunting predator like a lion or leopard would be down one side of that ditch and up the other in no time, assuming it didn’t just trot across the bridge. Perhaps Lobo kept elephants. Hal knew that they had been used for both ceremonial and military purposes for thousands of years. But if so, they were nowhere to be seen.
Then Hal saw the inhabitant for whom the enclosure had been built, a huge, two-horned, grey-skinned mass of muscle and fury that trotted to the edge of the ditch, drawn by the scent of unfamiliar human beings, and stood just a few paces away from the coffle’s line of march, swinging its great head this way and that, as if eager to avenge itself on anyone or anything for the indignity of its imprisonment.
Capelo turned in the saddle and said, ‘Have you ever seen anything like that in your life, Englishman?’
Hal had, many times, but the less he appeared to know, the less of a threat he would be seen to be, so he shook his head in dumb ignorance.
‘It is a rhinoceros, though the people here call it “faro”,’ Capelo informed him. ‘Senhor Lobo is the only man in the world to have one in captivity. A dozen men died trying to catch it. But Senhor Lobo said that he had to have a rhino, and in this place, his word is the law.’
Lobo nodded towards the beast, which seemed to have armour-plating rather than skin. ‘Look at that front horn of his, the big one. It must be twice the length of a cutlass. You should see the damage it can do. I’ve seen men impaled on it like pieces of meat on a kebab. Take a good look and pray to God you never see it again, for if you do it will be because you have displeased Senhor Lobo.’
Capelo reined in his donkey and let Hal walk level with him before he started moving again so that they were side-by-side as he leaned down and said, ‘If a slave is disobedient, if he fails to respect his masters, if he does not work as hard as he should, then he is not just whipped. He’s thrown into that enclosure. And he does not come out alive. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, master,’ Hal said.
‘You’re not going to be disobedient, or cheeky, or proud, are you?’
‘No, master.’
‘Lick my boot, Englishman,’ Capelo said and stuck out one of his feet, like a bishop presenting his ring finger.
Hal leaned over as best he could, for the collar round his neck inhibited his movement and began licking the dust and filth of the overseer’s dirty boot.
Go ahead, humiliate me if it makes you feel bigger, Hal thought. I’ve survived far worse than this.
The sun was starting to drop towards the horizon as they were taken to a stockade of impenetrable thorn bush set up at the foot of a hill. Slaves were pushing wooden carts up and down metal rails which led into tunnels that disappeared into the hillside. The carts coming out of the mine were piled high with ore, which was taken to another area where more slaves with sledgehammers pounded the ore into a powder that could then be sifted under running water to search for specks of pure gold. While the work went on, other slaves were lighting braziers filled with wood and dried grass that would provide both light and warmth as the work continued into the night.
Everywhere there were men, both black and white, armed with whips, guns, clubs and vicious, broad-bladed panga knives watching over slaves, urging and whipping them to work harder, or simply watching to make sure that none dared pocket or swallow any gold for himself.
Inside the stockade stood a row of long wooden huts with thatched roofs. The coffle was brought to a halt in front of one of them. ‘This is where you will live,’ Capelo informed them. ‘It is the last home you will ever know, for you will work here until you die. Soon your shackles will be released. This does not mean that you are free. I shall remind you now, for the last time, that any attempt to escape is punishable by death. Soon you will have food. Eat well, for it is the only meal you will get until this time tomorrow. And in the morning you will be put to work.’
Then the chains were removed from their hands and necks and they were given small wooden bowls containing watery millet porridge in which floated inedible chunks of gristle. Hal had learned in his time at the Cape Colony that a man forced into hard labour should never refuse any food, no matter how repellent, and he wolfed it down, for the less time it took to consume the sooner one forgot how disgusting it was.
There were no beds or even bunks inside, simply two long, low wooden tables, roughly six feet wide that stretched the full length of the hut. As the dozen or so men from the coffle lay down to sleep the arrangements seemed almost spacious. It was only when another fifty slaves appeared, sweaty, rank and exhausted from their labours, and forced their way onto the tables, barging the newcomers out of their way as they did, that Hal realized that the crowding was as bad as on any slave ship. He found himself forced up against the wall of the hut, with just about enough room to sleep on his side, with his back against the man next to him and his face pressed hard against the mud wall. The squeeze was so tight that he could
barely move a muscle.
But it did not matter. He was finally in the same place as Judith. For now, the few hundred yards that separated them might as well have been a thousand miles, but he would find a way to bridge that gulf, find Judith and make good their escape. It might take him a few weeks, or even, God forbid, a few years. But he would do it.
And having placed that thought in the forefront of his mind, Hal closed his eyes. For if there was another lesson that the Cape had taught him it was that sleep, as much as food, was essential to survival.
The Buzzard was faced with a most reluctant bride. ‘Put on the damn dress, woman, or …’
‘Or what?’ Judith asked. ‘What will you do with your one hand? Hit me? I will evade you. Have some slave or other hold me down while you whip me? That would only spoil the goods before Senhor Lobo can get his hands on them. Kill me? But how much money can you make from my corpse?’
‘Prattle on all you like, you proud bitch, but you’re in no position to talk. Lobo’s got no use for a woman he can’t bed. But he’s always got a use for another slave. When that wedding bell rings, you’ll be down the aisle or down the mines. And to hell with the money, it would be worth losing every penny just to see you getting your comeuppance at the end of an overseer’s whip.’
He sat down on a silk-upholstered chair and snapped his thumb and forefinger for his slave to bring him more wine. ‘So,’ the Buzzard rasped. ‘An hour until you decide which you’d prefer, a long life of luxury as Senhora Lobo, or a nasty, brutish and short one as his slave. Personally, I cannot see why you’re having such a hard time making up your mind. If it were me, I’d let the drunken old lecher do what he damn well pleased if it meant I got a soft bed and a full belly. But what do I know, eh?’
The stockade where the slaves were kept was guarded by two men at its entrance and another two who patrolled the perimeter in opposite directions, crossing one another’s paths two times per circuit. As one of the guards walked by the position where the Amadoda were hiding in the moon shadow cast by a giant baobab tree, one of the tribesmen rose silently to his feet. He was holding a knobkerrie, a club cut from a single piece of hardwood with a narrow shaft that was easy to grip at one end and a bulbous round head at the other. He waited until the guard was directly opposite him and then threw the knobkerrie as straight and true as an arrow. It hit the guard on the temple and killed him instantly.