He was now in hailing distance of the cave, but he quelled the urge to shout out—the scream that leapt to his throat, ready to beg for help in walking and relief from his worst fears.
As he drew closer, the first sign that something was very wrong struck him like a gong to the temple. The lean-to structure at the mouth of the cave was ripped down and lying to one side.
Chikunda began to hop, wincing with each step, agony exploding in his brain.
But his brain barely registered the affront as reality threatened the worst possible outcome.
He reached the mouth of the cave and called into it urgently, sweat from pain and fear streaming down his temples.
Inside was bedlam, the cupboard pulled down, the table overturned, the bed thrown across the room.
The floor was strewn with the flotsam of the cobbler’s life, broken pottery and treasures from the sleeping cave he’d shared with Faith emptied into the main cave.
Chikunda found himself crying and repeating Faith’s Swahili name over and over in a mantra of manic desperation, as if the spell could wind back time.
The situation was obvious—the blunderbuss not on its hook above the door and Jack nowhere to be seen.
What to do next? What? How?!
The questions detonated in his head, sending devastating waves of terror racing around his body.
He limped out of the cave and called urgently into the valley up behind the cave, and only the morning chorus of birds was heard in reply.
He dragged his leg to the other side of the path to call down the valley, and the low rumble of the surf echoed back.
He was alone in the dungeon of his fear on this exposed mountain face in a foreign land. The weight of his predicament came crashing down like an avalanche descending from the peak way above, and his cries turned to sobs. And then the sobs gave way to soundless, wracking convulsions. The convulsions grew into animal howls that ricocheted around and around in his mind, tormenting him till he felt he could take no more. Were the cliff at this point steep enough or the blunderbuss available, he knew that this was the moment that he would end it all.
It was then that he remembered the gleaming steel weapons wrapped in canvass within the rear sleeping chamber of the cave.
He limped inside, pushing through the clutter, wondering what he’d do with the swords if he found them. It was a question the blind panic of the moment could not answer, as the raw instinct of the warrior began to surface.
While he searched, his mind played tricks on him—Faith’s tinkling voice emerging from the drips at the back of the cave, the occasional birdcall becoming his name in her tone.
Madness overtook him, and the swords were nowhere to be found.
They’d taken them, whoever they were.
They would be the garrison, the soldiers… or the Bosun’s search party.
They would have gone back to the town, to the five-pointed star fort he had looked down onto.
Chikunda gave up and retreated from the cave.
Out in the dirt at the doorway, not knowing which way to turn, he slumped to the earth and sobbed some more, imagining the worst that his wife was enduring at this moment.
Had the Portuguese turned her in? For a reward? Impossible! he thought.
Had the man pursued his promise and distanced himself from harbouring the runaway woman? Had he told the assailants which way Chikunda had gone?
All impossible questions to answer.
He would get up now and walk into town and give himself up. There was no alternative.
Knowing these strangers as he already did from his Arab captors and the cruelties aboard the ship that had brought him here, he would no doubt take a lashing for this at the very least, but perhaps they would be lenient.
Perhaps these people would yet have clemency. They were British, after all. Surely, they would see that his wife was pregnant and allow them to pass. Was it madness to think this way?
He didn’t know, but he also couldn’t tame his rampaging mind.
Hadn’t the Portuguese also said that the Dutch executioner couldn’t stomach the treatment that the English dished out?
He started to laugh now, laugh and sob. It was insanity overtaking him. He was sliding into the spirit world of possession and he knew it.
There, amid the mess, lying in the dirt was the biscuit tin and the last of its furry contents.
It had been a full day since Chikunda had eaten a meagre meal and more from a voice of deduction at the very back of his mind than hunger’s urging, he picked one up and put it joylessly into his mouth.
He began to chew.
It was the opening of a sluice as he swallowed that first mean mouthful. Ravenous hunger came upon him like a flood.
With both hands, he began to feed his mouth, the biscuits tasting better and better after the ravages to his depleted body.
As the sustenance hit his stomach and began to surge into his bloodstream, the fog of despair also began to lift.
Now is the time for a cool and calculating head, the hermit who lived in this cave repeated in Chikunda’s head.
“Now is the time for a cool head,” he repeated to himself aloud.
There would be better food, he reminded himself. The shoemaker had gone to harvest.
Into the cave he went, even his foot improving with the lift of his mood.
He couldn’t put weight on it, but he had learned now to lock his ankle and walk only on his heel.
He dropped to his knees and felt under the ledge where the icy drip-drip-drip kept the hessian cover over the lobster saturated.
Through the fabric, he could feel the knobbed and pointy armour of the two heavy beasts wrapped within and another odd shape.
The two spiny lobsters were still very much alive, flapping and clapping their wide red tails up against their chests, eight legs spread so wide they could span Chikunda’s chest, each leg thicker than his thumb. The other item was a tortoise—a skilpad as the cobbler had called it—its head removed.
One cooked lobster would be more than enough for a meal.
If they came for him while he cooked it, so be it; he resigned himself to fate.
There seemed no point in rushing now, since rushing was barely a crawling speed anyway.
Right now, he must eat—eat and think.
Having eaten most of the sweet flesh, Chikunda’s optimism bounced back.
He stowed the other lobster and tortoise, and wrapped the remaining cooked flesh to eat later or take with him.
This moment felt very familiar, an echo of that first terrifying sight of the slaver as the cutter that had carried Faith and him out from the shore bumped up against the hull of the schooner São José de Afrika.
That moment had been almost three months ago. His strategy then had been to identify the InDuna—the headman—of that wooden vessel and become indispensable to him.
As he’d told the Portuguese, it hadn’t worked out precisely that way, but it had worked out nearly as well. He’d won the Captain’s protection but riled the Bosun to torture his mind when his body was put off limits.
It had kept them out of the holds, a turn of good fortune that certainly spared their lives when the ship had wrecked.
And now the need to identify and appeal to another InDuna, to the Chief at the stone fort in the town, seemed likely to be upon Chikunda once again.
Armed with the knowledge that his Christianity might be his shield in this British colony, his mind cleared and the path of options before him focused on that supreme turn of fate that could win him his freedom. His mind already began to work on the possibilities of how to earn a passage back up the coast to his home in Portuguese Mozambique.
With his mind once more buoyed and sharp, it struck him that the little lip overhang where the lobster were stored might be duplicated elsewhere in the rear cave.
He limped back inside and began to crawl in the gloom, feeling for a recess… and there he found it. Instantly his hand fell on the stiff canv
as wrapping.
He brought the bundle out, and between its layers he felt the distinct shape and fluid curve of those magnificent weapons.
What to do now?
His mind cartwheeled for an answer.
It had been an instinct to lay his hands on the weapon, but having found them, these were not his possessions and he had no right to them, even in this dire situation.
He held them to his chest and prayed for the answer. They were an insurance policy, but not his insurance policy.
Even if they were, and he walked into town carrying them, they would be forfeit or he would be dead—that was the answer to his prayers.
Re-stow them.
So, he did.
Now with a plan, nuance of execution needed to be considered. He needed to play it out on his terms.
He needed to walk into the town of his own volition, to surrender himself to the chief personally, if possible.
He couldn’t afford to be trapped here in this cave, cowering and dragged from it like a common criminal on the run, then taken in for reward.
This was now a mind game. He could no longer believe himself to be on the run.
But the time wasn’t right yet to surrender himself.
Whether he went into custody today or in three days’ time would have no effect on improving Faith’s lot, but it would allow him to walk proudly and surely and try to identify where or how to target the man in charge.
His mind crisp and clear with objectives, he dared not risk being trapped now, and he dared not be caught on the roads. From here on out, he would only be venturing where nobody else would, off the beaten track and below the skyline.
He went back into the cave and began selecting survival items that wouldn’t impair the Portuguese’s lifestyle if he returned.
Then he began the arduous effort of backtracking the path up the mountain that he’d taken in the dark and the rain.
Chapter 5
In the bush, overlooking the most deserted part of the coast that he had seen during his circuit a day earlier, he made camp in a small crawlspace under the overhang of a granite rock.
The location was a watershed promontory that gave him two views within paces of each other.
One lookout was south, over Schoenmakers Gat bay and the path the cobbler had led them along from their original camp. The other was north, above the junction of the white and dark rocks and over the plain where cattle grazed in the very far distance.
He set out the survival kit he’d salvaged from the wreckage of the cobbler’s cave and cleared a space big enough for a small fire that he’d make when the time was right.
While engaged in these small and painful preparations, he heard a sound—movement through the bush, footfalls, something traveling fast, closing in on him from below, following the path he’d shoved through the thicket.
He picked up the machete and readied himself to defend as best he could against whatever it was that was tracking him.
A branch in the bush shivered, betraying whatever it was approaching inbound through its lower reaches, and there was a flash of colour through the foliage, of fawn brown, and then Chikunda heard the sniffing.
It was a dog trailing him. An instant later he realized it was Jack, the hound’s snout to the ground tracing Chikunda’s path.
Jack saw him at the same instant and flew forward in two bounds, hitting Chikunda in the chest, knocking him over his injured ankle.
“Damn it, you fool,” Chikunda scolded him, the improving ankle sending lightning bolts of pain piercing into his brain.
But the dog on top of him frantically licking his face made him laugh as his arms folded around the animal, partly to stop him, and partly to hear if there were perhaps footsteps following.
With that warm body to his chest, Chikunda’s laughter turned to tears and then to sobs once more. Sobs at having something living that cared about him, something that, through its desperate whimpers and excited relief evidently needed care.
“Where are they boy? Your master? My Faith? Where have they gone?”
The stupid questions brought fresh tears as his own words distilled into his brain, becoming crystalized reality of circumstance.
“Where…?” he kept repeating between the sobs, “where?”
Chikunda inspected the dog. It had lost a dewclaw and its pads were badly tattered. Evidently it had been running unaccustomed distances over rough ground.
The evidence was coming together. The torches on the path, the ransacked cave and now the dog’s trail-weary appearance. It suggested that the dog had trailed its master to a point it could follow no further, and then it had run home, and perhaps back again.
It had certainly then picked up the trail of the next closest ally, the most recent lodger at that cave, Chikunda.
Chikunda wanted to tend the hound’s paws, but he knew not how. Jack, too, was frantic in his perpetual search, his ears swivelling towards the slope and back behind him.
Away he charged on a descent through the bushes, on an errand only his ears had detected.
Was this meaningful? Chikunda asked himself.
Should he follow or flee?
Was the dog here to tell him to return to the cave, to tell him that all was restored and well?
Was it abandoned and trying to find a friend but second-guessing itself?
Was it warning of a posse giving chase?
Where one dog had found him, another could also pursue.
What if Alfonso, the Bosun had a dog?
No doubt the Bosun now had Faith in his clutches or was influencing whoever did have her. And that man certainly had ways of discovering which way her husband had gone.
Where was safe?
Chikunda needed another day—maybe two—to approach the town and the fort over this ridge. He’d probably close the final distance by night, to manage as few intermediaries between himself and the headman as was possible.
Jack was gone long enough to have galloped to the cave and back.
Right on cue, the dog reappeared panting furiously, his young belly pumping like bellows.
“Slow down boy,” Chikunda cautioned him. “Come sit.”
But the animal was on hot coals.
Down the track he went again, but was back in a briefer length of time, his wincing in pain unceasing. Pain from his damaged body, certainly, but also the agony of loss deep within, and Chikunda felt the same, too.
“It’s okay, boy. We’ll find your boss soon enough.”
The dog’s ears pricked up and he almost seemed to nod acknowledgement.
Off he scampered to the southward view, where he sat attentive as a statue, only his ears cupping every fragment of sound from every direction, and his eyes trying to shorten the distance.
Down the embankment he trotted, then back up and off to the southerly lookout in a frantic pattern of angst.
The dog’s persistence with loyal attention delivered pangs of shame to Chikunda’s mind. He felt that he should match the animal’s passion with his own panicked haste to be reunited with his wife and save her from whatever fate…
The thought of it sickened him.
“Now is the time for a cool head,” he reminded himself aloud and nodded his thanks inwardly to the shoemaker for capturing such good advice into such a crisp reminder.
The plan needed to unfold deliberately.
Chikunda woke in the dark, the warm body of his wife in his arms. His right arm pinned under it complaining of pins and numb deadness.
But the smell in his nostrils an instant later reminded him of the truth. This was Jack, snuggled under the rock overhang for warmth and comfort.
The relief of having Faith back and then the lie plucked from his reality all in the same instant plunged Chikunda’s emotions off an emotional cliff. She was gone, Faith was another man’s prisoner. Not very far away, but very far out of his reach.
He started to sob again into the dog’s coat, and Jack reciprocated, licking his head.
&
nbsp; When dawn came, Chikunda ate another of the lobster that he’d cooked the night before.
Jack sat watching silently, his head canted over askance, drool hanging from his mouth in long clear strands.
Chikunda huffed. This was precious nutrition that had to last him until… well, until he was captured, most likely.
“Here,” he tossed the Jack the carapace with the feathery gill and other organs of the innards still attached.
Jack devoured it with crunching delight, swallowing the gloopy green and yellow body parts with relish.
“You’re a good boy.” Chikunda patted the dog’s head and huffed. The dog lay his head on Chikunda’s foot as if to impose no more plea on the man’s limited rations.
“But what to do with you?” Chikunda asked.
“Is your boss back? And my wife? How will we know?”
The dog’s eyes looked mournful, as if he understood.
“Did they go to town? Did men take them, boy?”
The dog sighed heavily as if to answer.
“You can’t stay with me boy. I don’t have food for the both of us, and where I’m going, you can’t come.”
Jack got up and went to the southern viewpoint.
“I’m going to have to get going.” Chikunda had been massaging his own injured ankle, sensing that there was healing in practice—a moving of whatever made up that angry yellow and black bruising pattern that was laced all over the swollen limb.
He battled to his feet with small involuntary yelps and Jack’s ears focused on him for a moment, but the dog’s eyes never left the direction toward the path that led to the cave.
Chikunda began to lash the few possessions he had together with twine so that he could loop it over his shoulder and continue the battle against the slope with his makeshift crutch.
Something in Jack’s whiny sound changed.
Chikunda looked up from his final preparations.
The dog was standing, trembling, his eyes and ears straining towards something far in the distance.
Cautiously, Chikunda limped forward.
The Reckoning (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 2) Page 5