by Wilbur Smith
Alongside the slaver, the whaler was moored, and she was almost filled with the wasted bodies in which some life still burned, while on the surface of the lagoon bobbed a hundred or more corpses with gas-swollen bellies like the corks on a fishing-net.
‘Take them to the ship,’ the Ensign shouted down to his oarsmen in the whaler, ‘and come back for more.’ As he spoke, another white-crested wave struck the dhow solidly and she heeled, but she was pinned down by the spikes of coral driven through her bottom timbers, otherwise she would have turned turtle.
‘Robyn!’ Zouga shouted at her from the hatch. ‘We need you!’
For a moment she did not even glance at him, but shook her head at the sailor beside her.
‘No, she’s gone.’ Expressionlessly the sailor picked up the frail body and dumped it over the side.
Then Robyn scrambled up to the hatch and dropped through it.
It was a descent into the pit, dark after the brilliant noontide, so that she paused for a moment to let her vision adjust.
The tilting deck beneath her feet was slippery with human waste, so that she had to cling for a handhold.
The air was so thick that for a minute she nearly panicked, as though she were being smothered by a stinking damp pillow. She almost fought her way back into the sweet sunlight, but then she forced herself to take a gulp of it, and though her guts heaved and she tasted the bitter flooding into the back of her throat, she kept it down.
Then her own discomfort was forgotten as she made out the chaos about her.
‘That last wave,’ Zouga grunted as he steadied her with an arm about her shoulder, ‘the decks have collapsed.’
Like a house of cards they had folded in upon each other, raw splinters of timber thrusting up out of the gloom, baulks crossed like the blades of a scissors, with small dark bodies trapped in the jaws, others crushed by the fallen beams, squashed so that they were no longer recognizable as human, others dangling head down on their ankle-chains, suspended in space, writhing weakly as crippled insects, or hanging quietly, swinging to the dhow’s movements.
‘Oh, sweet Mother of God, where to begin,’ Robyn whispered. She let go her handhold, starting forward and her feet shot out from under her on the slick coated deck, and she went plunging down into the hold.
She struck heavily and pain flared in her back and lower body, but she dragged herself on to her knees. Her own pain seemed insignificant in this terrible prison.
‘Are you all right?’ Zouga asked anxiously, but she shrugged his hands away.
There was one girl screaming. Robyn crawled to her. Her legs were crushed below the knees, trapped under a baulk of hand-hewn timber.
‘Can you move that?’ she asked Zouga.
‘No, she’s done for. Come, there are others—’
‘No.’ Robyn crawled back to where her bag had fallen. The pain was bad, but she forced it below the surface of her consciousness.
She had only seen a leg amputation performed once before. When she started the girl threw off the seamen who held her and attacked Robyn like a tortured wild cat. Her nails raked skin from Robyn’s cheek, but by the time Robyn had freed the first leg below the knee, the child was silent and limp. She died before Robyn had reached the bone of the second leg, and Robyn was weeping chokingly to herself as she left the body still hanging in the grip of the timber baulk.
She scrubbed her hands together, they were bloodied to the elbows, her palms sticky against each other. She felt consumed by guilt at her failure, without the strength to move. Dully, she stared about her now.
The hold was more than half flooded, the tide pounded remorselessly at the ship’s hull.
‘We have to get out,’ Zouga called to her urgently, and when she did not turn her head, he seized her shoulder and shook her roughly. ‘There’s nothing more we can do. It will capsize at any moment.’
Robyn was staring down into the stinking black waters which sloshed from one end of the hold to the other, a single hand broke through the surface directly below her, a child’s hand with soft pink palm and pretty tapered fingers spread in a gesture of appeal. The iron cuff seemed too large for the narrow wrist, and weighted it down so the hand sank gently disappearing from her sight. She stared after it with infinite regret, then Zouga hauled her roughly to her feet.
‘Come on, damn it!’ His face was savage, haunted with the horrors he had experienced in this fetid, half flooded hull.
The next wave hit the swamped hull, and this time it broke the grip of the coral. Timber squealed as it twisted and tore, and the dhow began to roll, the filthy waters rose up out of the darkness into a steep black wave and burst about them, shoulder deep.
The damaged slave decks broke free, sliding down over each other, tumultuous and lethal, releasing a fresh layer of tightly packed black bodies to tumble loosely into the flooded depths.
‘Robyn! We’ll be trapped.’ He dragged her up towards the square of brilliant sunlight, clambering over timbers and bodies.
‘We can’t leave them,’ Robyn resisted.
‘They’re finished, damn it. The whole thing is going. We have to get out.’
She pulled her arm free, stumbled, collapsed backwards, hit something so that pain flared through her lower body again and she cried out with the strength of it. She was lying on her side, couched on a pile of linked bodies, and there was a face a foot from hers. It was alive, she had never seen such eyes, cat fierce, falcon bright, the colour of boiling honey.
‘This one is strong enough!’ Robyn thought, and then she shouted. ‘Help me Zouga.’
‘For God’s sake, Robyn.’
She crawled forward and reached the black child, and the deck tilted viciously under her, fresh cold water bursting into the hull.
‘Leave her,’ shouted Zouga.
The fresh flood swirled up around Robyn’s head, and the chained girl disappeared below it.
Robyn lunged for her, groping blindly below the surface, feeling panic rise in her when she could not find the child.
Ducking her head under, choking as the pain in her belly made her gasp and she swallowed water, she at last got a grip on the girl’s shoulder, feeling her struggling as desperately as she.
Together they came out above the surface, coughing and gasping weakly, Robyn holding the girl’s mouth just clear of the surface, but when she tried to lift her further the chain anchored them both and she screamed.
‘Zouga, help me!’
Another surge of water, smelling like raw sewage, filled her mouth and both of them went under once more.
She thought she would never come up again, but stubbornly she held on, sliding one arm under the girl’s armpit, and with the other hand gripping her chin, forcing it up so that when they broke out again the girl’s face was lifted to take another precious breath of the stinking air, and Zouga was with them.
He took a double turn of the chain around his wrists and threw all his weight on to it. In the gloom of the hull he towered over them, the light from the hatch highlighting the bulging wet muscles in his arms and shoulders as he strained at the chain, his mouth opened in a silent scream of effort, sinewy cords standing out of his throat.
Another wave hissed over them, and this time Robyn was not ready for it, she felt the burn of it in her lungs and knew she was drowning. She need only release her hold on the girl’s head and shoulders and she would be free to breathe, but she held on stubbornly, determined suddenly that she would never let this little soul go. She had seen it in the girl’s eyes, the fierce will to live. This one she could save, this one out of three hundred or more was the only one she could be certain of saving. She had to have her.
The wave receded and Zouga was still there, his hair streaming with water, slicked down over his face and into his eyes, and now he shifted slightly, jamming his legs against one of the heavy timbers and he reared back once more against the chain, and a low bellow broke from his throat in the agony of effort.
The ring bolt that held the
loop of chain to the deck ripped out cleanly, and Zouga dragged both women clear of the water, the chain slithering after them for ten feet or more before coming up hard against the next ring bolt.
Robyn had never suspected Zouga capable of such strength, she had never seen his naked upper body – not since he was a child – had not realized that he had the lean hard muscle of a prizefighter. But even so, he could not repeat the effort, and the girl was still chained. They had won only a temporary respite. Zouga was bellowing now, and the young naval Ensign scrambled down through the open hatch. To re-enter the doomed hull was an act of courage in itself, Robyn realized, as she saw that the Ensign carried the cutting shears, lugging the heavy tool with him as he floundered towards the struggling group in the bottom of the hold.
The hull rolled through another five degrees, the water swirling higher towards them hungrily, it sucked at their bodies. Had not Zouga given them the extra few feet of chain they would be far below the surface now.
Zouga stooped over her and helped her hold the black girl’s head above the water, while the Ensign groped for the chain links and fed them into the jaws of the shears. But the blades had been blunted and chipped by the heavy work they had already done, and the Ensign was still only a lad. Zouga pushed him aside.
Again muscle bunched in his shoulders and upper arms and the chain parted with a metallic clunk. Zouga cut twice at ankle and at wrist, then he dropped the shears, picked the frail naked body up against his chest and climbed frantically up towards the hatch.
Robyn tried to follow him, but something tore deep in her belly, she felt it go, tearing like brittle parchment, and the pain was a lance that transfixed her. She doubled over it, clutching herself, unable to move, and the wave hit her, knocking her down, swirling her over the broken timbers into the dark waters, and the darkness began to fill her head. There was temptation to let go now, to let the water and darkness take her, it would be so easy, but she gathered her anger and her obstinacy to her and went on fighting. She was still fighting when Zouga reached her, and dragged her up towards the light.
As they crawled out through the hatch into the sunlight, so the dhow rolled all the way, flinging them as though from a catapult over the side into the shocking cold of the green waters.
As the dhow capsized so the last faint cries from within her were extinguished, and the hull began to break up under the remorseless hammer of the sea. When Robyn and Zouga surfaced, still clinging together, the whaler was hovering over them, the Ensign risking all to come in over the reef for the pick-up.
Strong hands reached down, and the overladen boat heeled dangerously as they were pulled aboard. Then the Ensign swung the bows to meet the next boiling line of surf and they climbed its steep side and crashed over the top, the seamen pulling frantically to hold her bows on.
Robyn crawled to where the black girl lay on a heap of other bodies in the bottom of the boat, her relief at finding her aboard and still alive outweighing the pain of her sodden lungs and the deep ache in her belly.
Robyn rolled the girl on to her back, and lifted her lolling head to cushion it from the pounding of the whaler’s hull over the steep swells that threatened to crack her skull against the floorboards.
She saw immediately that the girl was older than she had imagined, although the body was desiccated, dried out and wasted. Yet her pelvis had the breadth of maturity. She would be sixteen years old at least, Robyn thought, and pulled a corner of the tarpaulin over her body to screen her from the men’s gaze.
The girl opened her eyes again, and stared at Robyn solemnly. Those eyes were still the colour of dark honey, but the ferocity had dimmed to some other emotion as she looked up into Robyn’s face.
‘Ngi ya bonga,’ the girl whispered, and with a shock Robyn realized that she understood the words. She was transported in an instant to another land and another woman, her mother, Helen Ballantyne, teaching her those same words, repeating them to her until Robyn had them perfected.
‘Ngi ya bonga, I praise you!’
Robyn tried to find a reply, but her mind was as battered as her body, and it had been so long ago that she had learned the language, the circumstances so different that the words came only haltingly.
‘Velapi wena, who are you and from where do you come?’
The black girl’s eyes flew wide with shock.
‘You!’ she whispered. ‘You speak the language of the people.’
They had taken on board twenty-eight living black girls. By the time Black Joke got under way again and turned from the land, towards the open sea, the dhow’s hull had burst open and the planking and timbers swung and pitched end over end as they sawed across the exposed reef.
A squawking raucous flock of seabirds squabbled over the reef, hovering above the gruesome remnants that were mixed in the floating debris of the wreck, dropping to seize a tidbit and rise again on delicate fans of pearly wings.
In the deeper water along the seaward side of the reef, the shark packs were gathering, lashing themselves into a frenzy, the stubby rounded triangles of their dorsal fins crisscrossing the green sweep of the current, while every few seconds a long torpedo-shaped body would break clear of the surface in an ecstasy of greed, falling back heavily with a boom like distant cannon as it struck the surface.
Twenty-eight from three hundred and more was no great haul, Robyn thought, as she hobbled along the line of barely living bodies, her own bruised limbs protesting every step, and her despair deepened as she realized how far gone they were. It was easy to see which of them had already lost the will to resist. She had read her father’s treatise on the sick African, and she knew how important this will to resist was in treating a primitive people. A perfectly healthy man could will himself to die,and once he did so there was nothing that could save him.
That night, despite Robyn’s constant attention, twenty-two of the girls died and were carried aft to be dropped over Black Joke’s stern. By morning all the others were sinking into the coma and fever of renal failure, their kidneys, shrivelled and atrophied by lack of fluid, were no longer filtering the urinary wastes from the bodies’ systems. There was only one treatment and that was to force the patient to drink.
The little Nguni girl resisted strongly. Robyn knew that she belonged to the Nguni group of peoples, although she was uncertain of which tribe, for many of them spoke variations of the original Zulu, and the girl’s accent and pronunciation had been strange to Robyn’s ear.
Robyn had tried to keep her talking, keep her conscious and keep the will to resist burning in her. She had conceived an almost maternal possessiveness for the child, and though she tried to spread her attention fairly amongst the other survivors, she always returned to where the girl lay under a strip of tarpaulin and held the pannikin of weak sugar solution to her lips.
They shared only a few hundred words in which to converse, as the girl rested between each painful sip of fluid.
‘I am called Juba,’ the child whispered, in answer to Robyn’s question. Even the sound of it brought back to Robyn the memory of the cooing of the plump blue-grey ring-necked doves in the wild fig trees that grew above the mission cottage in which she had been born.
‘Little Dove. It is a pretty name.’ And the girl smiled shyly, and went on in that dry tortured whisper. Much of it Robyn could not follow, but she listened and nodded, realizing with a pang that the sense of it was going, Juba was sinking into delirium, that she was talking to phantoms from her past. Now she tried to resist when Robyn forced her to drink, muttering and crying out in fear or anger, gagging on the tiny mouthfuls of liquid.
‘You must rest yourself,’ Zouga told Robyn brusquely. ‘You have been with her for almost two days without sleeping. You’re killing yourself.’
‘I am quite well, thank you,’ Robyn told him, but her face was gaunt and white with fatigue and pain.
‘At least let me take you down to your cabin.’
By this time Juba was the only black girl still alive, al
l the others had gone over the stern to feed the following shark pack.
‘Very well,’ Robyn agreed, and Zouga carried the child down from the makeshift shelter on the aft deck which Robyn had used as a surgery.
The steward brought a canvas pallet filled with straw and laid it on the deck of Robyn’s tiny cabin. There was only just room for it, and Zouga laid the naked body upon it.
Robyn was tempted to stretch out on her own narrow bunk to rest for a while, but she knew that if she let go now, even for a moment, she would fall into a deathlike sleep, and her patient would die of such neglect.
Alone in the cabin, she sat cross-legged on the straw pallet, wedged her back against the sea-chest, and lifted Juba into her lap. Doggedly she went on with the task of forcing liquid between the girl’s lips, drop by drop, hour after hour.
Through the single port, the light turned to a ruby glow at the short tropical sunset and then it swiftly faded. It was almost completely dark in the cabin when suddenly Robyn felt a copious warm flood soak through her skirts into her lap, and she smelt the strong ammoniacal taint of the girl’s urine.
‘Thank you, God,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, thank you, God!’ The girl’s kidneys were functioning again, she was safe. Robyn rocked the girl in her lap, feeling no revulsion from her soaked skirts, welcoming them as the promise of life.
‘You did it,’ she whispered. ‘You did, with sheer pluck, my little dove.’
She had just enough strength left herself to wipe down the child’s body with a cloth soaked in sea water, then she stepped out of her soiled dress and collapsed face down on her hard narrow bunk.
Robyn slept for ten hours, and then the cramps woke her groaning. Her knees were drawn up against her chest by the severity of the pain, and her belly muscles were hard as stone and it felt as though she had been clubbed across the back, a deep bruised sensation that alarmed her seriously.