Wilbur Smith - C11 Blue Horizon

by C11 Blue Horizon(Lit)

  "I agree to that," said Kadem, and the mad glitter he had so carefully masked returned to his eyes. Koots found it unsettling, more menacing than the cutlass and dagger in the Arab's hands when they had fought that morning.

  They took the oath beneath the towering branches of a camel-thorn tree, in which new growth had already burgeoned to replace that which had been devoured by the locust swarms. They swore on the blade and the haft of Kadem's Damascus-steel dagger. Each placed a pinch of coarse salt on the other's tongue. They shared a slice of venison, swallowing a morsel each. With the razor-sharp Damascus blade they opened a vein in their right wrists, then massaged the arm until the blood was flowing bright and warm down into their cupped palms. Then they clasped hands so that their blood mingled, and maintained the grip while Kadem recited the wondrous names of God. At last they embraced.

  "You are my brother in blood," said Kadem, and his voice trembled in awe at the binding power of the oath.

  "You are my brother in blood," Koots said. Though his voice was firm and clear and his gaze into Kadem's eyes was steady, the oath sat lightly upon his conscience. Koots recognized no God, especially not the foreign deity of a dark-skinned, inferior race. The profit in the bargain was all his for he could turn away from it when the time came, even kill his new blood-brother with impunity if it were called for. He knew that Kadem was bound by his hope of salvation and the wrath of his God.

  Deep in his heart Kadem recognized the fragility of the bond between them. That evening as they shared the campfire and ate meat together, he showed how astute he was. He gave Koots an undertaking more

  poignant than any religious oath. "I have told you that I am the favourite of my uncle, the Caliph. You know also the power and riches of the Omani empire. Its realm encompasses a great ocean and the Red and Persian Seas. My uncle has promised me great reward if I carry his fat wa to a successful conclusion. You and I have sworn, as brothers in blood, to dedicate ourselves to that end. Once it is done we will return together to the Caliph's palace on Lamu island, and to his gratitude. You will embrace Islam. I will request my uncle to place you in command of all his armies on the African mainland. I will ask him to make you governor of the provinces of Monamatapa, the land from which come the gold and slaves of Opet. You will become a man of power and wealth uncountable."

  The spring tides of Herminius Koots's life were beginning to flow strongly.

  Now they moved along the wagon trail with renewed determination. Even Xhia was infected with this enhanced sense of purpose. Twice they cut the trail of herds of elephant coming down out of the north lands. Perhaps in some mysterious way the elephant were aware of the bounty the rains had brought upon the land. From afar Koots surveyed the massed herds of these grey giants through the lens of his telescope, but he showed only a passing interest in them. He would not let a hunt for a few ivory tusks deter him from his main quest.

  He ordered Xhia to detour round the herds and they went onwards, leaving them unmolested. Both Koots and Kadem grudged every hour of delay and they drove horses and men hard along the tracks of their quarry.

  They passed out of the wide swath that the locusts had cut through the land and left the great plains behind them. They entered a lovely land of rivers and lush forests, and the air tasted as sweet as the perfume of wild flowers. Scenes of great beauty and grandeur surrounded them, and the promise of riches and glory led them onwards.

  "We are not far behind the wagons now," Xhia promised them, 'and each day we draw closer."

  Then they came to a confluence of two rivers, a wide, deep flow and a smaller tributary. Xhia was amazed by what he found there. He led K-oots and Kadem through the field of rotting, sun-dried human remains, which had been chewed and scattered by the hyena and other scavengers. He did not have to point out to them the discarded spears and

  assegais and the rawhide shields, most of them shot through by musket fire. "There was great battle here," Xhia told them. These shields and weapons are those of the fierce Nguni tribes."

  Koots nodded. No man who had lived and travelled in Africa as he had could have been ignorant of the legend of the warrior tribes of the Nguni. "Good, so!" he said. "Tell us what else you see here."

  "The Nguni attacked the wagons Somoya had drawn up here, across the neck between the two rivers. That was a good place for him, his back and both his sides protected by the water. The Nguni had to come at him from the front. He killed them like chickens." Xhia giggled and shook his head with admiration.

  Koots walked across to the crater in the middle of the area of devastated ground in front of which the wagons had stood. "What is this?" he asked. "What happened here?"

  Xhia picked a short length of charred slow-match out of the dirt, and brandished it. Even though he had seen fuse and explosives used before, he did not have the vocabulary to describe it. Instead he mimed the act of lighting the slow-match and made a sizzling sound as he ran along the path the flame must have taken. When he reached the crater he shouted, "Ba-poof!" and leaped high into the air to illustrate the explosion. Then he fell on his back and kicked both legs, shrieking with laughter. It was so expressive that even Koots had to laugh.

  "By the pox-ridden vagina of the great whore," he guffawed, 'the Courtney puppy let off a mine under the imp is as they stormed the wagons. We will have to take care when we catch up with him. He has grown as crafty as his father."

  It took Xhia the rest of the day to unravel all the secrets of the battlefield, spread out as it was over such a vast stretch of the veld. He showed Koots the path the routed imp is had taken, and how Jim Courtney and his men had chased them on horseback and shot them down as they ran.

  They came at last to the abandoned Nguni encampment, and Xhia became almost incoherent as he realized the extent of the cattle herds Jim had captured. "Like the grass! Like the locusts!" he squeaked, as he pointed out the spoor the herds had trodden as they were driven away eastwards.

  "A thousand?" Koots wondered. "Five thousand, or maybe more?"

  He tried to form a rough estimate of the value of these cattle if he could get them to Good Hope.

  There are not enough guilders in the Bank of Batavia, he concluded. One thing is certain. When I catch up with them, Oudeman and these stinking Hottentots will not see a single centime. I will kill them first,

  before I hand over a guilder. By the time I am finished here I will make Governor van de Witten look like a pauper in comparison.

  That was not the end of it. When they entered the camp Xhia led him to the far side of the encampment where a stockade stood, made of stout timber poles lashed together with strips of bark.

  Koots had never seen such a sturdy construction, even in the permanent villages of the tribes. Is it a grain store? he wondered, as he dismounted and entered. He was further puzzled when he found that it contained what seemed to be drying or smoking racks. However, there was no sign of ash or scorched areas beneath them. As with the construction of the walls, the timber used seemed too massive for such a simple purpose. It was clear that the racks had been designed to support a much greater weight than strips of meat.

  Xhia was trying to tell him something. He jumped up on the racks and repeated the word 'chicken'. Koots frowned irritably. This was no hen coop, nor even an ostrich coop. Koots shook his head. Xhia began another mime, holding one arm in front of his face like a long nose, and flapping his other hand from the side of his head like an ear. Koots puzzled over the meaning, then remembered that the San words for 'chicken' and 'elephant' were almost identical.

  "Elephant?" he asked, and touched the elephant-hide belt at his waist.

  "Yes! Yes! You stupid man." Xhia nodded vigorously.

  "Are you mad?" Koots asked in Dutch. "An elephant would never fit through that doorway."

  Xhia leaped down from the rack and ferreted around under it. Then he crawled out again. He showed Koots what he had found. It was an immature tusk, taken from an elephant calf. It was only as long as Xhia's forearm and so slim
that he could encircle it at the thickest point with thumb and finger. It must have been overlooked when the storeroom was emptied. Xhia waved it in Koots's face.

  "Ivory?" Koots began to understand. Five years previously, when he was acting as aide-de-camp to the governor of Batavia, the governor had made an official visit to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The Sultan was proud of his collection of ivory tusks. He had invited the governor and his staff to tour his treasury and view the contents. The ivory had been laid out on racks much like these, to keep it off the damp floor.

  "Ivory!" Koots breathed hard. These are ivory racks!" He imagined the tusks stacked high, and tried to estimate the value of such a treasure. "In the name of the black angel, this is another great fortune to match the Plundered herds of cattle."

  He turned and strode out of the shed. "Sergeant!" he bellowed. Sergeant Oudeman, get the men mounted up. Kick the brown backsides

  of our Arab friends. We ride at once. We must catch Jim Courtney before he reaches the coast and comes under the protection of the guns on his father's ships."

  They rode eastwards along the spoor of the cattle herds, a beaten roadway almost a mile wide, along which the cattle had grazed and trodden down the grass.

  "A blind man could follow this on a moonless night," Koots told Kadem, who rode beside him.

  "What a fine bait this piglet of the great hog will make for our trap," Kadem agreed, with grim determination. They expected to come up with the wagons and the herds of plundered cattle at any moment. However, day succeeded day, and although they rode hard and Koots took every opportunity to spy out the land ahead through his telescope they caught no glimpse of either cattle or wagons.

  Each day Xhia assured them that they were gaining rapidly. From the sign he was able to tell Koots that Jim Courtney was hunting for elephant while his caravan was on the march.

  "This is slowing him down?" Koots asked.

  "No, no, he hunts far ahead of the wagons."

  "Then we can surprise the caravan while he is not with them to defend them."

  "We have to catch up with them first," said Kadem, and Xhia cautioned Koots that if they approached Jim Courtney's caravan too closely before they were ready to attack it, Bakkat would immediately discover their presence. "In just the same way as I discovered that these brown baboons," he indicated Kadem and his Arabs disdainfully, 'were creeping up on us. Although Bakkat is no match for Xhia, the mighty hunter, in stealth and wizard-craft, neither is he a fool. I have seen his footprints and his sign where he swept his back trail every evening before the wagons went into camp."

  "How do you know it is Bakkat's sign?" Koots demanded.

  "Bakkat is my enemy, and I can pick out his footprints from those or any other man that walks this land." Then Xhia pointed out other circumstances that Koots had not taken into consideration before. The signs showed clearly that Jim Courtney had made other additions to his retinue apart from the herds of captured cattle: men, many men Xhia thought there were at least fifty and that there might be as many as a hundred additional men to face them when they attacked the wagons. Xhia had employed all his genius and wizardry to determine the character and condition of these new men.

  "They are big, proud men. That I can tell by the manner in which they carry themselves, by the size of their feet and the length of their

  stride," he told Koots. "They bear arms and are freemen, not captives or slaves. They follow Somoya willingly and they guard and care for his herds. It comes to me that these are Nguni who will fight like warriors." Koots was learning from experience that it was best to accept the little Bushman's opinion. So far he had never been wrong in such matters.

  With such quantity and quality of reinforcements added to the hard core of mounted musketeers, Jim Courtney had now mustered a formidable force which Koots dared not underestimate.

  "We are outnumbered many times over. It will be a hard fight." Koots weighed these new odds.

  "Surprise," said Kadem. "We have the element of surprise. We can choose our time and place to attack."

  "Yes," Koots agreed. By this time his opinion of the Arab as a warrior had been much enhanced. "We must not waste that advantage."

  Eleven days later they came to the brink of a deep escarpment. There were tall snow-capped mountain peaks to the south, but ahead the land dropped away steeply in a confusion of hills, valleys and forest. Koots dismounted and steadied his spyglass on Xhia's shoulder. Then, suddenly, he shouted aloud as he picked out in the blue distance the even bluer tint of the ocean. "Yes!" he cried. "I was right all along. Jim Courtney is headed for Nativity Bay to join up with his father's ships. That is the coast less than a hundred leagues ahead." Before he could fully articulate his satisfaction at having pursued the quest so far, something even more compelling caught Koots's eye.

  In the wide expanse of land and forest below him he descried drifts of pale dust dispersed over a wide area, and when he turned the glass on these clouds he saw beneath them the movement of the massed herds of cattle, slow and dark as spilled oil spreading on the carpet of the veld.

  "Mother of Satan!" he cried. "There they are! I have them at last." With a mighty effort he checked his warlike instinct to ride down on them immediately. Instead he cautioned himself to consider all the circumstances and eventualities that he and Kadem had discussed so earnestly over the past days.

  They are moving slowly, at the speed of the grazing herds. We can afford the time to rest our own men and horses and prepare ourselves for the attack. In the meantime I will send Xhia ahead to scout Jim Courtney's dispositions, to learn his line of march, the character of his new men, and the order of battle of his horsemen." ( Kadem nodded agreement as he surveyed the ground below them. We might circle out ahead and lie in ambush. Perhaps in a narrow pass through the hills or at a river crossing. Order Xhia to have an eye for a Place such as that."

  "Whatever happens, we must not let them join up with the ships that might already be waiting for them in Nativity Bay," said Koots. "We must attack before that happens, or we will be facing cannon and grapeshot as well as muskets and spears."

  Koots lowered the telescope, and grabbed Xhia by the scruff of his neck to impress upon him the seriousness of his orders. Xhia listened earnestly, and understood at least every second word that Koots growled at him.

  "I will find you here when I return," Xhia agreed, when Koots ended his harangue. Then he trotted away down the escarpment wall without looking back. He did not have to make any further preparations for the task ahead of him, for Xhia carried upon his sturdy back every possession he owned.

  It was a little before noon when he set out, and late afternoon before he was close enough to the cattle herds to hear their distant lowing. He was careful to cover his own sign, and not to approach any closer. Despite his braggadocio he held Bakkat's powers in high respect. He circled round the herds to find the exact position of Somoya's wagons. The cattle had trodden the tracks and confused the sign, so it was difficult even for him to read as much from them as he wanted.

  He came up level with the wagons but a league out to the north of their line of march when suddenly he stopped. His heart began to pound like the hoofbeats of a galloping herd of zebra. He stared down at the dainty little footprint in the dust.

  "Bakkat," he whispered. "My enemy. I would know your sign anywhere, for it is imprinted on my heart."

  All Koots's orders and exhortations were wiped from his mind and he concentrated all his powers on the spoor. "He goes quickly and with purpose. In a straight line, not pausing or hesitating. He shows no caution. If ever I can surprise him, this is the day."

  Without another thought he turned aside from his original purpose and followed the tracks of Bakkat, whom he hated above all else in his world.

  In the early morning Bakkat heard the honey-guide. It was fluttering in the treetops, chittering and uttering that particular whirring sound that could mean only one thing. His mouth watered.

  "I greet you, my sweet friend," he call
ed, and ran to stand beneath the tree in which the drab little bird was performing its seductive gyrations. Its movements became more frenzied when it saw that it had attracted Bakkat's attention. It left the branch on which it was displaying and flitted to the next tree.

  Bakkat hesitated, and glanced round at the square of wagons laagered at the edge of the forest on the far side of the glade, a mile away. If he were to take the time to run back merely to tell Somoya where he was going, the bird might become discouraged and fly away before he returned. Somoya might forbid him to follow it. Bakkat smacked his lips: he could almost taste the sweet, viscous honey on his tongue. He lusted for it. "I will not be away long," he consoled himself. "Somoya will not even know that I am gone. He and Welanga are probably playing with their little wooden dolls." This was Bakkat's opinion of the carved chessmen that so often occupied the couple to the exclusion of everything around them. Bakkat ran after the bird.

  The honey-guide saw him coming and sang to him as it flitted on to the next tree, then the next. Bakkat sang as he followed: "You lead me to sweetness, and I love you for it. You are more beautiful than the sunbird, wiser than the owl, greater than the eagle. You are the lord of all birds." Which was not true, but the honey-guide would be flattered to hear it.