“We have three guilty verdicts.” The Bosun was in an almost effervescent mood. “Hangings at last.”
He acted as if fate had purposefully withheld his most beloved hobby for no good reason.
“It is of course a show for the townsfolk and those ships fortunate enough to be anchored in the lee of the hill. Let us remember this and make the best of it, by which I mean… make the show last.”
It proved to be a terrible affair full of farcical pomp and macabre fanfare. The judges with black caps donned led the procession, a clergyman in tow reading ceaselessly from a black Bible.
No more than four-cornered pieces of black cloth tossed atop a white curled wig, they were still called “black caps”, though they were not caps at all Chikunda was informed by the Bosun with hideous excitement, buoyant on the occasion.
The wind was up and the crowd was kept in peals of laughter as gusts played havoc with the grave air of stoicism that the craggy old judges, men wearing red cloaks and white neck scarves of a fashion, tried to maintain.
Drums and trumpets heralding the oncoming death wagon made slow progress up Strand street, so named as it bounded the beach or strand in the native Dutch.
The three condemned sat chained on hard boards heading west out of the town, over the Buitengraght.
The Buitengraght was the western-most boundary marked by the deep gutter channel that Chikunda recalled on his approach to the town that first night. It drained the valley pass between the mountains over to Baai van von Kamptz.
Along the rough path the wagon went, the mule walking solemnly through the heat. To the left was the signalling hill, to the right were small reed-covered dunes above a wharf with the ships at anchor beyond.
At the last tavern of the town, the procession halted and “One for the rope?” was called to the condemned.
They each drank a flagon of grog to steady their nerves.
Gallows Hill came into sight. It was a mound with the death apparatus atop.
“Vermaak, the old executioner wants me to use the new rapid drop,” the Bosun was babbling to Chikunda as he limped alongside. “He is going soft in his old age. That’s too quick. We’ll give the audience their money’s worth, eh?” He paused. “No wonder they need me to do the job properly!”
In the excitement of it all, the Bosun was a changeling. It was like he’d forgotten everything and was treating Chikunda like an old friend and comrade in arms, buoyant and full of vigour.
Two of the judges looking his way spoke earnestly and shook their heads, making their disgust plain.
But the bull-like man saw none of it.
The cart arrived at the gallows—a heavy cross beam with multiple rings set in a row along its lower face and supported on either side by columns of timber.
Gallows Hill was a chalky rise as high as a building’s parapet roof. Its upper surface was paved with blue slate flagstones.
“Up you go,” the Bosun ordered Chikunda, “make the ropes fast through those iron hoops.”
Chikunda did his bidding, wondering how it had come to this in his passive life, playing assistant to an assistant murderer.
He had no option, was his answer. These were dead men regardless, and this obedience was merely play and pay to win his life back some day.
He climbed pegs set into a column to one side and then, seated with legs either side of the cross member, scooted out, fixing three ropes through the eyes and dropping their ends back down.
Jack the dog was there of course, lying a safe distance away in the shade, chin on his paws, watching.
Charges were read, repentance called for, heads bagged and struggling figures hoisted up as the cart creaked away with the ends of the ropes tied to it.
“A little too quick for my liking,” the Bosun groused, “but neat for a first effort.”
He slapped Chikunda on the back, his face dancing with a delight that Chikunda could scarcely believe he was capable of.
“You clean up here, dig the holes over there,” he directed, pointing to a clearing in the small dunes where a domino pattern of recently disturbed grave-sized rectangles was in rows.
The crowd melted away and the Bosun sat with Vermaak the executioner on the hinged tail of the empty death wagon, sharing a murky green bottle of swigs and laughing with increasingly dark expressions.
Between shovels, Chikunda noticed a man with a shifty demeanour who had been hanging around the periphery of the crowd, gesturing surreptitiously to the Bosun from behind a tree.
Eventually, the Bosun saw the man and loudly announced that he needed a piss.
Behind the tree he went, and from his position, Chikunda detected the unmistakable haggling of a deal being struck.
The man bled away and walked on a trajectory so that the official executioner could not see him. The Bosun wandered over, club under his arm, farting impressively as he tied up his codpiece.
“Everything that leaves the body makes a man feel good, eh?” he said in English to the few lingering from the crowd to watch the burial. “No doubt the soul leaving gives equal ecstasy… if these black hearts had a soul,” he declared, gesturing to the three corpses laid out in a row. “If so, we did them a tremendous service today. I’d prefer to keep them hanging there a few days as a reminder. But, we must follow the new rules I’m afraid.”
The people moved aside from the bull-like man, and crossed themselves.
Out of earshot, he reached Chikunda and looked down into the pit being dug. It was waist deep.
“That’s deep enough, he won’t be here long,” he instructed Chikunda. “Dig two more to the knee. You return tonight to dig them up for that man, and not a word of it. There’s a bonus in it for you and a reduction of the debt your woman owes me. Now, I am coming to trust you. I will lead that drunken fool away, and when you are done, bring the wagon and equipment to the tavern.” He turned to Vermaak. “Let’s get out of this heat. My boy can finish up, I’ll buy you a flagon.”
As they walked, Chikunda heard the Bosun brag how his “boy had come to heal. He will do anything I tell him to do.”
Chikunda sighed and seethed in silent agreement.
So long as his woman was in this man’s grip, obedience was the only course. But, one way or another, Chikunda promised himself, the day would come….
By the time Chikunda arrived at the grog house and stood in the twilight outside, his master was raging drunk.
His only friend there was Vermaak, who had long since put the last of his conscious brain out of commission and was propped in a corner swaying gently to voices in his own head, oblivious to the Bosun’s dark, incoherent rambling.
There was a wide moat of empty space around the pair, nobody paying them any attention beyond occasional disdainful or fearful looks.
It was already dark when the Bosun came through the door muttering about taking a piss when he saw Chikunda and his face lit up in a most extraordinary way.
“Ahhh! My boy is done!” He slapped Chikunda heartily on the back and bid him to wander with him as he stumbled toward a nearby tree to relieve himself.
The affair was unsettling.
The sudden change of character in the man, his camaraderie and friendliness—a fraud.
“I have been planning big things for you,” he announced as his stream of urine hit the tree too high up and rebounded all over his breeches and boots. “You did me proud today,” he enthused, “put on a fine show for which I gained much praise. This puts me in a mind to reduce the debt your woman owes to us. Was it eighteen strokes at last count?”
Chikunda felt the rancour rise in his throat.
Out here, in the dark, he could sling an arm about the man’s throat and throttle him, interring him into one of those freshly dug graves without a soul noticing.
The urge to do so made his body go forward and retreat in a shudder of inner conflict and confusion.
“Boy?”
The word snapped him out of it.
“I asked you a question? D
on’t disappoint me now, just as I have become so pleased!” the ugly monster warned in a brittle tone.
“Forgive, sir,” Chikunda heard his own voice speak, his mind still on murder. “It has been a day of fatigue.”
“I was saying that I am pleased with you. You are proving to be a good asset.” The wretched stench from the sewer that was the Bosun’s mouth struck Chikunda in the face as the man shook off his business, speaking toe to toe. “Your woman owes us that debt. She will repay it on the fourth Sabbath day after she gives birth to your whelp… and I must add some strokes for the little black bastard that he’ll be—proving that she has cuckolded me and my claim to it. But for now, I am offering a reduction from the eighteen we’d agreed on. I'm a kind man and you are a good worker. I offer it down to just ten. Now, isn’t that fair?”
“It is,” Chikunda answered, trying to keep the hatred out of his eyes. Dark as it was, he felt certain that the ferocity within would burn through the night and give the Bosun reason to rescind on this new and magnanimous offer.
“Good. Now. It is getting on in the hour and is about time that you went along to do my earlier bidding. I will take another drink. Beware not to be caught by the Watch in this matter, for I will swear no knowledge of it and you will be considered as breaking a curfew and a taboo, the sanction for which, I need not emphasize, is extreme. When you are done, you will bring me the bag of coins from the man who waits there. Understand?”
“Sir.”
“Well, be off then,” the Bosun staggered toward the alehouse’s door where there was a crashing of heels and raucous laughter of a sea shanty struck out into the night.
With the full moon almost at its zenith, Chikunda found himself supporting the staggering weight of the solid blockhouse of the man down toward the strand street and on to his home and dungeon near the fort.
The bag of coins had felt weighty. With much glee and a promise of reward, the Bosun had pocketed it and been good as his word—a tankard of ale had been sent out to the street where Chikunda had waited under the stars for his master.
Unaccustomed to any alcohol, but motivated to swallow it on an empty stomach if only to wash the bitter taste of despair from his mouth and mind, Chikunda felt its buoyant effects immediately buckling his legs.
For the time that it lasted, the alcohol loaned to him a sense of relief from months of trial and tribulation.
“You have been a good boy today,” the alcohol lubricated the Bosun’s tongue. “And a further reward is in order. I was thinking that you may wish to see your woman?”
Chikunda felt like the man hat hit him with a shovel in the face. The words rang in his ears and he could scarcely believe it had been said.
“I would, sir,” he spoke carefully so as not to upset this happy turn of events. “I would be very grateful, sir.”
“I will arrange it,” the Bosun assured and stumbled into Chikunda along his path.
Chikunda held him up and the man threw his full dead weight into that support.
Chikunda felt sick at the touch of this man, and wrestling with his vast solid bulk to keep him upright or pay the price for failing to do so played terror within him.
It felt as if a hog, stinking and smeared with the grime of an ugly life had reared up and was tottering down the road pushing itself onto him.
As they went, the Bosun spoke more, his voice warming, leaning against Chikunda ever more like an old friend, his tongue weaving scenes of wickedness and massacre scenes recalled from an embattled lifetime.
He spoke of how he and his family had been dreadful victims of fate and how he had sworn to make others pay the price for it.
“My father died of consumption before I was in my teens,” he blathered. “Left my mother penniless and a drunken whore to sailors. I would hear them and hide my face from the shame of it. Grunting and sighing until I wanted to vomit. One day I could take it no more and plunged a dagger into a man’s back as he had my mother on her knees.”
They stumbled on over the stagnating and stinking Buitengracht boundary gutter that sluiced the offal and blood of slaughtered animals, garbage and sewage from the town to the sea.
“I put to sea that very day. It was that or face the noose. And it was there that I truly learned the meaning of suffer. And for every moment I suffered, I returned the debt of it ten-fold. But now my life is here, in this place. I have a good job and fine prospects, and only one man between me and a very fulfilling life…”
He laid out his plans.
Murder!
Chikunda was drunk for the first time in his life, stumbling along a street trying to keep a man that owned him from falling. A man who had stolen his woman, had embroiled him in perpetrating tortures and the sale of executed corpses for use in unknown purposes.
And now this man proposed making him a mercenary to do his own private killing—the murder of his own boss.
“I already purchased the boat,” the Bosun was explaining earnestly, as though the news of it heralded a great boon to both of their fortunes. “It lies at the fishmonger in Woodstock. You are to collect it and row back down the coast to the fort on the morrow. I have promised Vermaak that in your former life you were a man of the sea. He will be my partner in this venture, you ken? Fifty-fifty… you understand what this means?”
Chikunda heard himself agreeing that he did.
“But of course, he’s a tight-arsed Dutch bastard, he won’t put up a penny for his partnership share. In lieu, he will regularly put to sea with you when needs be and pay for his partnership thus. It is really his silence that I am buying, and he knows it—hence the heavy price; his silence to allow me to work outside the service of the new overlords while we draw a salary from it. With the British garrison in the town, there is a demand for fresh fish, so you will go out on the sea daily, except for those happy occasions when there is work to do at the scaffold or whipping post. And, one of these days, not too distant, Vermaak—who cannot swim, you understand—will have an unfortunate accident. Of that I am sure.”
Chikunda stumbled on in numb silence, Jack the hound, now with his ribs showing and his coat full of mange, shadowing them.
It was plain. He was to murder his boss’ boss.
“Do you understand me, boy?” The Bosun was suddenly lucid of voice, the devilish plan he’d devised sobering him with excitement.
“Sir.”
“That’s a yes sir?”
“Aye, sir.”
“You’re a good boy. If you do this well—well, who knows? A kind master might forget all, or at least most of your debts, you understand? Indeed. It may be time for you soon to have a little time with that woman of yours.”
“I understand,” Chikunda was suddenly very sober too.
Chapter 7
The Bosun’s hangover proved to be an evil one.
Not a physical illness from alcohol.
No.
The man was far too pickled in the stuff over a lifetime to suffer that malaise. It was a different kind of hangover, a rebound in mood away from the glimmer of humanity that had soaked through his bitter personality. He seemed to be reeling from it.
In the mid-morning, the bolt on the door to Chikunda’s dungeon clapped back for the first time, the door opened wordlessly and a plate of slop glued by the character of its own unfortunate contents to the chipped thing came clattering in.
The door slammed and bolted again.
It was done with a rapid caution, as if the insight doled out so freely to Chikunda the night before might escape to besmirch and even convict the master if he wasn’t brusque.
For three days, Chikunda paid this price in silence and solitary confinement for seeing behind the monster’s mask and hearing the master’s plans.
On the fourth day, the door opened and stayed open.
When Chikunda did not emerge, “Lying sleeping all day, you lazy black bastard,” the Bosun growled, unseen outdoors, in the gloom. “There’s work to be done.”
Chikunda appeare
d, blinking, into the sunlight.
“I have purchased a fishing vessel from the monger up at Woodstock beach,” he said, as if mentioning it for the first time. “I require you to fetch it and get it beached at the bottom of Long Street before the cursed southeaster wind rises. You will use it daily when we have no other business to attend to.”
“Thank you, sir.” Chikunda scanned the courtyard as he always did, hoping to catch a glimpse of Faith.
Over the weeks, Chikunda fell into a routine, heading for the boat down at the shoreline below Strand Street—De Waterkant. It was pulled up at the beach between Long Street and Heerengracht Road, named for the ladies and gentlemen who strutted their finest on a Sunday.
Out through the small surf he’d pull the craft on heavy oars, Jack always his companion, wolfing down whatever offal Chikunda could find or spare for him of the bait.
He’d then follow the lead of the experienced fishermen, mostly slaves or freed slaves of Philippine and Malaysian extraction.
They were an excitable mob who talked loudly and lived wildly, but they had an uncanny instinct for what fish were about and where they could be found.
A variety of snook, cousins of the formidable barracuda would shoal, and then the strategy would always be for the boat that struck a shoal to holler “VAS!” as loudly as they could to the whole fleet that would pick up the cry and rapidly descend on the spot to frantically work dollies, shinned-up lead lures trailing a skirt of colourful leather tassels.
Over the side, would come flashing silver streaks of fish as long as Chikunda’s leg, with snapping jaws of cobra-like teeth set like fangs at the front of their sleek pointed snouts.
On a good day, all on his own, Chikunda could almost sink his boat under the dead weight of these monsters from the deep.
On other days, he might almost sink his boat with spiny red lobster that almost nobody wanted to buy as they lived on carrion and drowned sailors.
The Reckoning Page 8