Through tempests he went out and on days when the sea mist came down so thickly that he could barely see the transom of his boat as he leaned on the oars. When socked in by silver mist, the entire fleet would throw anchor, invisible to one another, and talk loudly until the blue sky returned once more.
Vermaak, the old executioner, rarely made an appearance, and it was always a welcome relief to Chikunda when he could get to sea before the inebriated old man staggered onto the beach.
If the old soak did make it, Jack would be clouted off the vessel and stand forlornly on the shore watching Chikunda pull the ruddy old man out to sea on powerful strokes.
On those rare occasions when Vermaak did make it, Chikunda always knew he’d be in for a tough day. The fleet of experts would abandon him and make their distaste for his cargo most obvious if he tried to join them.
On days like these, unable to follow the fleet, his pickings would be small and the Bosun would furiously make his usual threats with Faith’s tender flesh as their focus.
Of the limited English that both Vermaak and Chikunda spoke, neither of them shared many actual words, so conversation while at sea was near-on impossible.
Time and again, Chikunda set the man up to go overboard and, unable to swim as he was, to the bottom.
A simple tug on the oars when the man was standing would send him reeling into the gunwale and cartwheeling into the water. But, try as he might, Chikunda could not murder the man in cold blood. Not even when the price for failing to do so was a mounting tally of licks by the sjambok on his wife’s flesh.
Each time he arrived back with the man still aboard, the Bosun would remind him in graphic detail of how he would soon be stripping flesh from her back.
And yet, Chikunda could not do it.
The old rum-addled Vermaak would sit grilling and turning pink in the sun, muttering to himself and doing precious little fishing.
The upside was that each trip to sea would turn him off the whole enterprise for a week or more until those brain cells that might have remembered the unpleasant episode were killed off by rum, and he’d fold to the Bosun’s urgings and try it out again.
With each passing day and with each ride that Vermaak made to sea, the Bosun became ever more furious and Chikunda’s insistence that they were being watched by the fleet wore ever thinner.
Much as the pressure built for Chikunda to perform the simple task of seeing the man overboard, the picture of Vermaak’s emaciated and already neglected delinquent son becoming an orphan would not let him do it.
And then, one day, as they got beyond the waves with the Bosun on the beach glaring a final warning at their departing, Vermaak turned and vomited copiously into their wake.
It was a scorching-hot day with an unpleasant dry wind coming off the distant mountains out of the northeast and the ocean was as flat as a lake.
Without looking at Chikunda, Vermaak circled his finger about, the universal signal to return to the beach.
“What’s the problem?” The Bosun glowered as they surfed up the beach.
“I think he’s ill, sir,” Chikunda shrugged.
“Still drunk as a pig,” the Bosun growled in Portuguese. “This was the perfect day for it, huh. Why did you turn about?”
“Not today,” Vermaak gurgled in his poor English, on his knees. “I have eaten something bad.”
“Eaten?” the Bosun repeated in Portuguese. “He stinks of cheap booze. Only got out of the whorehouse at sunrise, I heard. I’ve about had it with you,” he rounded on Chikunda in Portuguese. “There would be no better day than today, and you turn back?!”
“I… I…”
“You? Nothing! That wife of yours…” the Bosun stammered in rage. “Every kindness I’ve shown you…”
His scowl was puce and a vein throbbed angrily as it snaked through his thinning hairline and across his forehead, amplifying the pox of wet festering skin rash that Chikunda had noticed over the months, slowly corroding the man’s face,
“…Every forgiveness for your errors and insolence,” he raged at Chikunda. “Every bit of decency and friendship, and you repay me, how? With a dereliction of…”
“Leave the man alone,” the old executioner demanded in broken English, down on his knees, sliding beach sand with his hand over a new puddle hurled up. “I told the man to bring me back. Whatever you say to him in that monkey tongue of yours, you can do just as well in a common language, no? You make me wonder.”
“I was only telling this fool that you were clearly not well from the outset, Mijnheer. He should never have taken you out, and now he’s wasted precious time. I’ll deal with him later.” He turned to Chikunda. “Go on…” In English, he spoke, “Get…!”
As Chikunda heaved on the boat, a small wave lifted its stern, allowing it to be pulled back into the water.
The Bosun added, “And you better return with a full load, or don’t come back at all.”
As the two white men made their way from the shore, Jack spied his gap and darted forward, leaping into the boat.
Chikunda swung the bow into the shin-high white water, before giving the craft a shove and leaping in over the stern. A moment later he was on the rowing seat, leaning on the oars.
The small town slid slowly into the distance with each oar stroke.
Chatter among the fleet had been that no birds were working the ocean again.
This meant that the prized shoals of barracuda-like snook were absent. Everyone was loaded with traps and would be targeting lobster that were to be found in profusion off the kelp reefs southwest of the headland, beyond the wharf and Gallow’s Hill.
Chikunda leaned on the heavy oars, wondering how long he could avoid the inevitable with Vermaak as the boat gurgled forward on a most peaceful ocean.
With the sun well up, he arrived at a small collection of boats where everyone seemed in a jovial mood with long-distance conversations echoing over the calm conditions with plenty of catch to be had.
The traps went over the side at regular intervals into the afternoon, full and creaking with red flapping life.
With not quite a half-load, the warm breeze that had steadily shifted to the north suddenly puffed its first icy gust. The change in direction brought with it a steady increase in strength.
By the time Chikunda tied off the excess retrieval rope of a crayfish trap just sent to the bottom, and had rowed to the next trap to empty it of contents and reset, the wind out of the north was driving wavelets and flecking fine spray.
Most of the fleet that had arrived earlier with a two-man crew to work faster, were already done for the day and had turned for home.
And you better return with a full load, or don’t come back, kept echoing in his mind, the snarling face burned into his memory.
The fresh set of traps had just gone down and he needed to leave them a while, so he held station against the wind blowing him southward down the wild coast.
By the time the last heavy load came flapping life aboard, the wind was beginning to whistle.
He turned and pulled for home, standing against the oars and losing two yards of distance for every one that he gained.
As the sun inched across the sky, the only beach hospitable to a rowing boat in these deteriorating conditions, De Waterkant of the town, grew steadily more distant.
Picking up Gallows Hill in the close distance and watching it move in the wrong direction against the background of the signalling hill, he realized that the fight was lost. The wisest thing would be to cut his losses and run to save himself and save the boat.
To the south, that old lion’s head of a mountain was wearing a thick mane of clouds.
Two days of storm would follow, the old cobbler had warned, and he’d confirmed these predictions several times since.
The northwest storm wind now had him fully in its grip.
He’d seen the lay of this coast on that first day up on the signalling hill. Ahead of the wind, in the direction it was blowing him, lay the a
wful black fangs of rock. They stood in military row out to sea all along the coast between him and the shoemaker’s bay where he had first encamped.
There would be no safe port now, not until the angular black rocks gave way to the rounded white granite boulders to the south. Time was running out fast.
From the rowing seat, he looked over his shoulder and the bow, back toward the town and its very distant beach. It was clear that he’d crossed the threshold of possibility to make landfall there.
The time for hope was gone. Now was the time for action.
Chikunda shipped the oars and leapt up.
He invested precious moments dumping his catch back into the ocean—to buy freeboard for his boat from the wind-driven chop and make it easier to handle.
With a lighter boat, he was able to get out ahead of the wind, cutting a course across the wind and out to sea, making for the horizon to avoid the headlands of reef and rocks that stood between him and safety.
Inshore of him, angry surf was already beginning to burst over hidden reefs.
With the wind at his stern, the wooden boat of clinker design repeatedly yawed and broached with the speed he gained as he pulled steadily toward Schoenmaker’s Gat bay.
Up above and beyond the signalling hill in the foreground, the distinctive wide profile of Table Mountain began to change as he ran fast along the coast, approaching the lion’s head mountain from the sea.
The ridge he’d crossed on that first day when Jack had found him was now abeam of his starboard side.
This was the mark he was waiting for—and inshore he saw confirmation that the rocky shoreline was now all rounded white granite boulders.
In the far distance ahead, the four white beaches and the headland where he and Faith had camped for months until the shoemaker had found them was approaching fast.
Like welcoming arms, the headlands that defined the north and south boundaries of Schoenmaker’s Gat bay welcomed him in.
A short time later, careful to avoid the offshore shoals where tall waves already thundered over angry water, he was quickly nestling into the protected southern corner of the bay where the ridge ran out to his old encampment.
This was known territory, and Chikunda felt relieved. Jack jumped out into the shallows and barked excitedly, recognizing the territory and his old haunt.
Chikunda dragged the boat high out of harm’s way, tipped it over in the bushes and stowed the oars some distance away.
Then he considered his options.
It would be a hike up and over the Kloof, through the Nek, a pass in the mountain that divided Table Mountain from the lion’s head mountain and down to the town to report himself and his boat as safe.
To fail to do so would only bring censure and sanction once more.
But the freedom of being away from the town and its oppressive overlords called to him like demons in the depths of his soul.
His urge was to run and keep running. To use what he’d learned about the land, about where authority had spread to, and about how to avoid all of that.
But there was Faith.
The promise from the Bosun that he may see her had never materialized.
His heart broke for her every time he allowed himself to imagine her face. She was in his every dream. As absent as she was, she remained ever present and the centre of his every decision.
She was over that hill and now not more than weeks from giving birth to his child.
But while he had this small freedom he wanted to celebrate it to the full.
His ankle had fully healed and he moved swiftly on long legs with an easy gait up and over the ridge, Jack running ahead then lagging as they went.
Over at von Kamptz’s bay he could see the garrison hunkering down to ride out the storm.
He went down to enjoy a selfish moment, to a place where he’d found a fleeting and precarious peace with his wife some months before.
He drank again from the sweet water of the brook and sat a moment on the downy grass, listening to the frogs calling to their rain gods for a larger territory.
He looked into the cave on the beach where they’d slept and walked again on the mussel-shell infested beach, their brittle clinking sound when shattered under the heel of his boot yanking him through time to that moment when his delusion of safety had evaporated in a moment.
And what of the shoemaker now? he asked himself, regret crushing his heart.
The spectre of the man, Chikunda could see in the theatre of his own mind, coming down to forage as he had done a thousand times before in these very rock pools.
He was by now certainly returned to some savage retribution in his homeland, and Chikunda felt the weight of that guilt.
Had the man just ignored them, he would still be here, and they would be in precisely the position they were in—slaves to fate.
It was then that Chikunda had the urge to visit the old cave one more time.
“Come on, Jack.”
He turned his back on this little encampment and quickly retraced those steps up the ridge and onto the contour path that would take him to the shoemaker’s cave high above the site of the shipwrecked slaver.
It was as if nobody had been along that path and to the cave since Chikunda and the Redcoats had last left it.
Aside from unwashed containers ransacked by the wildlife and some debris blown about into the nearby bushes, everything still lay in the disarray he’d found it in, in the wake of the cobbler’s departure.
There was nothing for him here but to visit old ghosts and bid his thanks to the departed man for sacrificing so much for so little gain.
He was about to leave when the fact that the cobbler would likely never return struck him, and that a treasure lay hidden.
Into the cave he went and through to the loftily named atrium.
Under the ledge, he felt the living thing he was seeking.
Out into the darkening drizzle he brought it and carefully unwrapped the length of it.
The two swords were pristine.
Chikunda felt the warrior spirit of long dead ancestors rising within him, wanting to see the glinting lengths of silver beauty once more.
With a snicker of sound and a gentle sigh the sword broke the embrace of its scabbard and slid a threatening hand’s breadth open.
Unable to curb his curiosity, Chikunda gingerly drew his thumb across the cutting edge with the delicate touch of a butterfly. The deadly rasp of the metal seemed to whisper its sharpness and lethal capacity to slice in a way that no blade had ever done before.
The touch of it was almost mystical, and Chikunda checked his thumb pad to be sure that the skin was not peeled painlessly away at that light caress.
He closed it, but those ancestors deep within were curious beyond all rational thought, so he slid it open fully and gave the thing its freedom in the open air.
There was a curious balance to it, a life within that wanted to leap from his hand and twirl in a precise dance. It wanted to haunt the air with its droning sounds of menace.
This was truly a thing of great beauty.
It had a sway to its length and those handsome gun-blue undulations swimming all the way to its snub end. Even that truncated termination of the sword, where all other similar weapons he’d ever seen always came to a needle point, seemed somehow to boast of a pedigree in the art of killing more wicked than the sleekest fine point could.
Jack looked unsettled, wincing as he went from place to place, sniffing old familiar jetsam.
Chikunda felt eyes on him and shuddered. The eyes of his long-dead ancestors who had wanted to see the thing through his eyes, or the eyes of the shoemaker whose ghost might very well have returned to this small piece of paradise that he’d temporarily found and lost. Or perhaps it was the eyes of the sword’s maker, for Sebastião had told him that when these swords left their scabbard, they always thirsted for blood before being returned.
It seemed a peculiar thought, but Chikunda felt an urge to pay a tribute t
o his trespass here and his mishandling of a possession that he did not own—albeit now only the legacy of an all but dead man’s last worldly possession.
He took the sword and drew it gently over his forearm, watching fine hairs fall away and then his skin part open at the breath of its touch—white beneath the blackness until the blood washed the white away in a bright and stinging trickle.
With just the very gleaming edge having tasted a lick of him, Chikunda let his blood drip all about the camp in the manner that a witch doctor, a sangoma, would bleed a chicken to bless a home or kraal.
It was a ritual he made up as he went, but it felt as if it was a closure of a chapter and the paying of a debt.
“I am sorry for what we caused to you my friend.”
Chikunda spoke aloud in Portuguese, his skin prickling in fear that an answer may emanate from some quarter.
“You are a man who stood tall above all other men for your humanity. May God be with you wherever you may be, shoemaker. May our paths one day cross so that I can recompense in whatever small measure I can for your sacrifice,” he paused, “I trust that I may borrow these. One never knows when they might be useful, eh, cobbler?”
He echoed the man’s words said to him in this very spot just months before.
High up the slope above, the wind droned in the trees and sheets of icy rain arrived in the lee of the mountain.
And then he left without turning back, the two swords wrapped in the length of canvass, the cobbler’s dog quickly making haste to catch up.
He carried the weapons but knew not where to, nor why.
He knew not what he’d do with them when he got to wherever it was they were taking him.
Chapter 8
Approaching the Nek, the saddle between the mountains that divided the bays from the town, Chikunda was met by a haunting dirge of sound.
The day was almost over with angry bleak clouds making it almost twilight and phantoms of lower cloud, ethereal and fleeting, whipping through the gap.
The barrage of wind out of the north, funnelling through the pass, sung a cacophony of many voices.
The Reckoning (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 2) Page 9