The Reckoning (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 2)

by Michael Smorenburg

  There they were, a band of five men.

  Black boots, white breeches, red tunics and the white slash of bandoliers across their chests. Felt hats bragging wildly of an empire.

  One was on horseback and four were bearing long barrels pointing at the sky high above their shoulders.

  They were on the cave path moving steadily northward toward the cave and on to his position.

  Their presence spoke volumes about what had transpired. It confirmed there had been unusual activity. It obviously betokened that the regiment was backtracking to see if the one who had slipped through their net twice had returned.

  On impulse, Chikunda ducked back below their line of sight.

  What to do?

  To run, or limp, as best he could higher and further away?

  No.

  Time for a cool head!

  Stay.

  Movement would draw attention.

  Jack got up and made to gallop down the slope.

  “No! No Jack! Sit… quiet…!” But the dog was beside himself with excitement.

  He slipped from Chikunda’s grasp and was gone, the sounds of his headlong plunge away down the slope and toward the contour path that the soldiers were making their way along melting into silence with the exception of the distant ocean below and birdsong.

  Now what?

  What calamity would the dog direct back to him? Would it reach them, not find its master, and give them the clue by charging back to his position?

  If he got up to move, it would only track him once more by scent.

  The smart move was to stay put.

  Time moved like tree sap. Every small sound jangled Chikunda’s nerves, every movement in the bush below set his heart on fire.

  After an excruciating wait, while the sun clawed its way toward the zenith, the bush below started to tremble, and up came Jack, his pads torn anew from the exuberance of his departure.

  “What, Jack… did you leave them? Are you leading them to me?” Chikunda asked of the dog, feeling fate with its icy grip once more about to rip his flimsy plans asunder.

  The dog came to lie down looking defeated and scolded, its head hanging low, its eyes swimming with loss.

  “Boy?” Chikunda asked warmly and Jack lay his chin on crossed front paws, his eyes blank.

  “Where are the men?”

  Chikunda had the spyglass ready and with a wash of relief he counted four on foot and one mounted soldier retreating down the path carrying with them odds and ends.

  Carrying odds and ends?

  What could this mean?

  It couldn’t be good. That Jack had returned meant Sebastião was still absent. The timing of the dog leaving and returning and the soldiers coming and going, carrying goods meant one thing and one thing only—they had intersected at the cave, and the dog had been driven off. The soldiers were on a mission and they were leaving with the objective of their efforts completed.

  The whereabouts of Sebastião and Faith was clear now too—the answer to that question now painfully obvious.

  A tear left Chikunda’s eye and raced down his cheek. He mopped it away. This was not the time to be sentimental. It was the time to plan and be precise.

  He hefted his small survival kit onto his shoulder and wondered for a brief moment if he should chance going back for those swords, but decided against it.

  “Okay, go… Get out… AWAY!” he scolded Jack. The dog jumped up, confusion in his eyes. “Go on, off with you! You can’t stay with me. I don’t have food and you’ll give me away at the sight of strangers.”

  The dog skulked out of range of any potential abuse from the castigating man, his head and tail sunk to new lows, the whites of his now bewildered eyes half-moons.

  Chikunda turned his back on this stinging betrayal that fate had forced him to make, his gut twisting at it.

  He hobbled diagonally along the slope, gaining altitude slowly, making for the distant skyline of the saddle he must traverse.

  After ten paces, he turned to check and Jack was five paces behind him, the hound maintaining a stance of readiness to bolt in retreat.

  “Go on Jack…” He could not pretend at anger again. “Go on, get away. Back to your cave.” The dog halted and backed away half a pace. “Move it!”

  It looked as if the dog might at least remain and not follow, so Chikunda turned and counted twenty paces, then turned again and found Jack still five paces behind him.

  Jack backed up a half a pace.

  “There is nothing I can do for you Jack. Follow me to the town and you’ll be abandoned. Push off… GO!”

  The dog turned and walked away slowly, his body howling grief and a broken heart.

  Tears were in Chikunda’s eyes as he turned back to continue the arduous trek into slavery.

  He didn’t look back again. He forced himself to look only ahead.

  The noon cannon had long since reported the sun at its maximum.

  Perhaps two thousand more hopping paces through the bush had brought Chikunda onto the ridge, and the little town beside the bay with the fort dipping its toes onto the beach emerged into view.

  It was a glorious sight—just as Chikunda had imagined it might look when the sky was blue and the light played golden hues on the tall slab of Table Mountain.

  It was only then that Chikunda allowed himself to look back, and there, five paces behind him slunk the dog. It immediately spun around to retreat two paces.

  Chikunda sank down from exhaustion—fatigue of body but mostly of soul.

  “Come here boy,” he relented, and raised his arm in an arc. The dog trotted in with his head still low but his tail recovering.

  Jack pushed in under Chikunda’s armpit and his tears began to flood out of his eyes once more.

  “You have to stop this, Jack. You have to stop doing this. You can do me no good and I can do nothing for you.”

  The dog licked his face, washing the tears away.

  Chikunda put his arm about the dog’s shoulders and the two of them sat, unlikely friends, gazing out over the vista of beauty that contained so much ugliness within its heart. Down below, somewhere, were the loves of their lives.

  A cutter was being rowed out to one of the ships at anchor just off the shore.

  Chikunda watched it pull up alongside and through the spyglass, he saw redcoats flanking a man with lanky black hair and it made his stomach turn. Many men had long black hair, he reminded himself.

  The man was bundled up over the side, and something sickly slid through Chikunda’s gut.

  “You should go back, boy,” he told the dog. “God knows, I would if I could. That place holds nothing for you and only one thing for me.”

  To his right, the soaring three-thousand-foot rampart that was Table Mountain made an amphitheatre, and Cape Town languished there on its stage.

  As he watched, the shadow cast by the signalling hill where he was encamped began to tickle the fringe of the town, and though it was a warm evening, Chikunda felt ice cold, both within and without.

  As dusk crept in, the two feathery wisps of smoke that had been rising at separate points high up among the rocks of the mountain gave way to twinkles of light that confirmed they were campfires.

  Chikunda peered again through his spyglass and interpreted the sporadic dimming and re-ignition of those lights to be people moving about them.

  Who could they be, he wondered?

  The answer was more than rhetorical—it would be a crystal ball into his own future and how to plot its trajectory at this critical juncture of decision.

  Were these renegades? Runaways like him? Or, soldiers patrolling there to prevent them?

  If the latter, were there more below him?

  There was no way of telling.

  The stars slowly awoke, the familiar Southern Cross up above the mountain and the unfaltering rash of the Milky Way, a slash in the roof of the sky.

  In the best of times, these unchanging beacons always raised melancholy within Chikunda.<
br />
  In melancholic times like this, they threatened to raise much worse.

  Looking at the stars always took him back to his childhood and his father pointing to them as campfires of his ancestors looking down on him. They were a time machine that could pluck him out of his miserable circumstance, but not relieve him of the anguish that had increasingly stalked him with nothing but pain and loss during the last two seasons.

  He sat now with only hours of dangerous freedom left, slowly dripping to their end.

  By the time the sun rose, he would be a prisoner once more, probably within that stone fort that now had torches lit above its battlements and ghostly activity visible in the murky light that they effused.

  Somewhere within the range of his sight was his Faith and his unborn child.

  Would it be too much, he asked of his ancestors at their encampments looking down, if they saw to it that the place of her capture might somehow be illuminated?

  Would this small miracle be granted by the Christian God to whom he had given himself so fully?

  Could no ray simply shine down and allow him one last fleeting chance to find his wife? To abscond away with her into the depths of his own dark continent out there, and take his chances with nature away from these savage strangers?

  Jack felt the heavy blanket of despair too, the sighing whistle of periodic exhalations reciting his own sad tale.

  The dog lay with his paws pointed toward the town but his snout crossed toward his left, toward Chikunda and the ocean, as though there was something out there that he longed for.

  Eventually, Chikunda stood, and Jack rose too.

  Through the long night, the pair picked their way slowly down.

  The sliver of moon provided just enough light to see by.

  Leaves of a wild tobacco plant that Chikunda had bandaged to his injured ankle the night before had worked wonders. He could put no force into a thrust off that leg, but he could now at least get his full weight onto the heel if he did so cautiously.

  Long before the sun began to blush the eastern horizon, Chikunda was already on the first manmade track through the arid dry bush at the mountain’s lower slopes.

  He crossed over a gutter carrying a trickle that must have once been a river.

  He turned to Jack, feeling a rock in his heart as heavy as shot and as cold as the steel of those fine blades still hidden in the cobbler’s cave.

  “It’s time to part, my boy,” he patted the dog’s head. “Off with you now!”

  The dog detected the change in the man’s hissing command. He receded a few paces, his ears matching his tail in a collapse of trust.

  “Go on!” Chikunda scolded, keeping his voice low and urgent, “…go!”

  He pretended to pick up a stone and the dog skulked out of range.

  With tears coursing down his face, Chikunda turned from the last friend he had and began to limp towards the fort.

  Down at sea level, the lay of the land changed character. Small sand dunes topped by reeds lay to his left—he still remembered how it must have been before the tracks and buildings had come to flatten and swallow them.

  Over roads compacted by cart wheels and horse hooves that ran in a grid between low buildings, he made his way toward the fort, its buttress of stone walls looming taller and taller.

  The sound of his feet softly sighing with each step and the waves gentle and languid on the beach over his left shoulder were the only sounds.

  “HALT! Who goes there?” came the challenge from high above on the battlement.

  Chikunda had prepared for this moment, for what he would say to a guard at the gate: a formal request to speak with the InDuna—the headman—about a serious and confidential matter.

  He had not expected a public hailing contest overheard by any number of potential foes, with Jack lending voice to the confrontation.

  “My name is Chikunda,” he stammered in broken English, a language he could only relay a handful of words in before translating the next batch as best he could. “I have big problem must talk to top boss man of building.”

  “What do you want? Who are you? Who is your master?” the man called back, the white sash crossing diagonally over the dark red tunic giving the man vast authority.

  Chikunda’s English abandoned him under pressure.

  “STAND WHERE YOU ARE!” the soldier ordered. “Guards!”

  He began to frantically ring a bell.

  Chikunda stood swaying, more from the unravelling situation than the exhaustion and lack of food during the last day of exertions.

  He looked about himself, hopelessness overtaking him. Jack had retreated but was still barking some distance away.

  The vast wooden slatted doors of the fort creaked open and a phalanx of uniformed men poured out brandishing long-barrelled smoothbores with bayonets affixed.

  With ruthless, drilled efficiency, they encircled him.

  “Get your hands on your head!” a man with a cruel mien to his voice shouted.

  Chikunda understood only the tone, not the instruction, in the fear of that moment.

  To enforce it, one of the men slammed the butt of his muzzle loader into Chikunda’s kidneys, and everything went black.

  When he awoke, Chikunda found himself on the icy dank floor of the cobbler’s cave.

  In the blackness, he rolled from his belly to his back but the pain of it made him whimper and roll back onto his face.

  It felt like a huge, cold rock had been inserted through his flesh on that side and was chained to him. He felt in the dark as best he could and discovered the damp rock wall of the cave that he’d become accustomed to next to Faith.

  But now the truth of his circumstance came trickling into his mind.

  This wasn’t the cave.

  The rock in his back was the pulverized muscle and kidney where the musketeer had slammed him.

  Every breath was a new agony so severe that his destroyed ankle evaporated to insignificance.

  The old nightmare was upon him. The same icy manacles he’d worn from the instant the Arab slave traders had set upon him and Faith in their travels, the same chains his new Portuguese owners had exchanged for their own. The weight and clinking of them were a torture in themselves beyond any he’d ever imagined he’d meet in his life.

  But they were the least of his troubles.

  There were echoes within this chamber, echoes coming from beyond its walls. Metallic sounds of similar chains being dragged past. Rough voices spitting orders. The familiar whistle and schlock of a lash punctuating the instructions. The quavering howl of compliance. Heavy wood reverberating against stone doorways with the thunder of closure, attesting to the imprisonment.

  There in the dark Chikunda lay, the theatre of his collapsing mind tortured with these things until he thought he may lose his wits altogether.

  And when that point of despair was reached and surpassed, new layers of sorrow within him yawned open.

  After an eternity of this passive torture, his chamber suddenly clattered with the sound of a bolt shot back and the rumble of its door thrown open.

  Light streamed painfully in and an apparition stood there in relief against the glare.

  “UP!” was all he understood from a guttural drumroll of instructions.

  He tried to rise and was helped by a boot in the ribs.

  Manhandled under each armpit, he was dragged down the echoing short corridor and into the fierce glare of the African sun.

  Across a well-pounded dirt parade ground where soldiers, slaves and others toiled or went about their business.

  His eyes slowly accustomed to the light as his feet tried as best they could to carry him and earn less painful encouragement from his guards who dragged him towards a whitewashed building with an elevated doorway and elaborate stairway.

  Up and up he was yanked, step by bruising step, and slid into a vast hall with rich wall-hung tapestries and acres of lustrous timber flooring.

  “So,” announced a man with a d
rawn face and a complexion like death behind a vast desk as he looked up, laying the feather quill he was scribing with aside. “The prodigal returns.”

  Prodigal—it was one English word known to Chikunda.

  The prodigal son returning. The lost welcomed without sanction by the authority figure, in spite of underlings calling for censure.

  Through the fog of his agony, the use of that one word carried Chikunda’s mind into a storm of hopeful confusion.

  Was this man being literal or figurative? The answer to that question plotted two entirely opposite courses for how his life may play out.

  “I…” Chikunda stammered, trying to find English words to respond with. “We have be tried to survive for our lives,” he offered.

  “You make no sense, boy,” the old man grumbled just as a door opened into the room to one side of him and in glided a woman of majestic bearing.

  The old man turned to her and his mournful face showed a wash of life.

  “Jane my dear,” his voice cooed with warmth and deference.

  “Is this the slave? The runaway?” she inquired, a filament of concern in her tone.

  “Yes, my dear. Limped up to the battlements this morning without fuss or ado.”

  “His face suggests discomfort.” She came quickly to Chikunda, a maternal tenderness in her eye. “Do you understand English?” she asked directly.

  “A little,” Chikunda replied, quaking, reeling.

  “Ma’am…!” The old man emphasized. “You always call a white woman Ma’am.”

  “I’m a little sorry, sire… Ma’am,” Chikunda added. “I understand English but am badly talking.”

  “George,” the woman implored, looking at the old man fiercely, “this man is in dreadful pain and anguish; we may forgo the formalities for the time being.”

  “As you please,” the man said defensively, waving the guards out of earshot, evidently concerned that they not witness a further down dressing from the woman. “This is a fugitive from the law,” he reminded the woman. “His sorry state is his own doing.”

  “His incarceration was evidently not,” she snapped back, sinking her haunches for a closer look at the leg Chikunda favoured. “Did you twist it?” she asked the manacled man.