by Wilbur Smith
The new topic of discussion on the island became the cessation of the kaskazi winds, the beginning of the kusi, and the opening of a new trading season. Also, the imminent departure of the expeditionary army of Sheikh al-Salil for the mainland diverted interest from three missing eunuchs.
Among the sheikh’s large retinue few took much notice of the new slave-boy, Yassie. Though the lad was remarkably pretty and graceful of body, even in his ankle-length robes, at first he seemed in ill health, shy and uncertain of himself. However, the servant-woman Tahi, the childhood nurse of the sheikh and herself a newcomer to the household, took the boy under her protection. Yassie shared her quarters, and soon his beauty and pleasant ways won over all the other servants and slaves.
Yassie had a trilling unbroken voice and played the sistrum with rare skill. When Sheikh al-Salil sent for him every evening to sing to him in his private chambers, soothing away the worries and cares of the day, none of the household thought it strange. Within weeks Yassie had obviously found special favour with his master, and was made one of the sheikh’s body-servants. Then the sheikh ordered Yassie to spread his sleeping mat in the tiny curtained alcove off his sleeping chamber, within easy call of al-Salil’s own bed, so that he could minister to his needs during the night.
On the first night of this new arrangement, al-Salil returned late from the war council with his dhow captains on the terrace. Yassie had been dozing while he waited for him, and sprang to his feet as al-Salil entered the chamber, attended by Batula. Yassie had pitchers of hot water ready on the brazier, and after Batula helped the sheikh strip down to his loincloth, Yassie poured the water over al-Salil’s head and body so that he could bathe. In the meantime Batula hung his master’s weapons on the pegs beside his bed, sword and dagger honed, shield burnished, then came to kneel for his master’s pleasure.
‘You may leave me now, Batula, but wake me in the hour before dawn, for there remains much still to be done before we sail.’ As he spoke, al-Salil dried himself on the cloth Yassie handed him. ‘Sleep well, Batula, and may the eyes of God watch over your slumbers.’
The moment the curtains fell over the doorway behind Batula, Dorian and Yasmini grinned at each other, and he reached out for her. ‘I have waited too long,’ he said, but she danced back out of reach.
‘I have my duties to complete, noble master. I must dress your hair and oil your body.’
She knelt behind him while he sat on a silk rug and, with a cloth, she rubbed his hair until it was almost dry, then combed it out and plaited it into a single thick braid down his naked back. While she worked she gave small murmurs of admiration and awe. ‘So thick and beautiful, the colour of gold and saffron.’
Then she massaged his shoulders with perfumed coconut oil, and touched the scars on his body. ‘Where did this happen?’
‘At a place called the Pass of the Bright Gazelle.’ His eyes were closed and he submitted to the skilful touch of her fingers, for in the zenana she had been taught the arts of pleasing a future husband. When he was lulled and almost asleep, she leaned forward. ‘Are you still so ticklish here, Dowie?’ And she thrust her tongue deep into his ear.
It galvanized him, and he gasped in protest. Goose-pimples rose on his muscled forearms, and he reached back and grabbed her around the waist. ‘You must be taught more respect, slave.’ He carried her to the bed, dropped her on it and knelt astride her, pinning her arms above her head. For a while they laughed into each other’s face, then the laughter stopped. He bent his head and laid his mouth on hers.
Her lips opened warm and wet to receive him, and she whispered, into his mouth, ‘I did not know that my heart could hold so much love!’
‘Thou hast too many clothes,’ he murmered, and swiftly she wriggled out of them, arching her back to let him draw them out from under her and throw them onto the floor.
‘Thou art beautiful beyond the telling of it,’ he said, considering the silky golden length of her, ‘but is thy body healed?’
‘It is, completely. But do not take my word for it, master, prove it to thine own satisfaction, and to mine.’
When the kusi wind blew steady and strong down the channel, and the skies were burning blue, devoid of thunderheads, the flotilla of Sheikh al-Salil sailed from Lamu, and three days later made its landfall on the African mainland.
Under the waving silk of the blue banner they disembarked, and the long lines of armed men and draught animals wound away from the Fever Coast, marching inland along the slave road into the interior.
The sheikh rode in the van, and close behind him followed the slave-boy, Yassie. Some of the men remarked on the adoration and hero-worship with which the lad looked at his master, and smiled indulgently.
For the long months after their escape from Zanzibar Tom Courtney explored the coast of the mainland. He kept well south of the Arab trade routes, avoiding any encounter with the Omani, either on land or sea. They were looking for the river mouth that Fundi, the elephant hunter, called the Lunga.
Without the little man’s help they might never have found the entrance, for the channel doubled back upon itself, forming an optical illusion, so that from the sea the land seemed unbroken, and a ship might sail past without suspecting the existence of the river mouth.
Once the little vessel was safely into the channel, Tom launched the two longboats. In them he sent Luke Jervis and Alf Wilson to follow the main channel, and guide the Swallow through. There were many false channels and dead ends among the papyrus beds, but they threaded their way along them. Many a time they were forced to turn back when the channel they were following pinched out. It took them days of searching and gruelling labour to warp the Swallow through, and Tom gave thanks for her shallow draught. Without it they would never have been able to cross the numerous sandbars and shallows. Eventually they came out into the main flow of the river.
The papyrus beds were infested by villainous-looking crocodiles and grunting, bellowing river-horses. Over them hung a canopy of swarming insects. Vast flocks of shrieking, bleating wildfowl rose from the reeds as they passed.
Abruptly the reed beds fell away, and they sailed through stretches of meadowlike flood plains, and stands of open forest on either bank. Here, herds of strange animals lifted their heads from grazing and watched the little vessels pass, then snorted with alarm and stampeded away into the forest. Their numbers and variety were bewildering, and the sailors crowded the ship’s rail to stare and marvel at them.
There were graceful antelope, some the size of English red deer, others much larger, with strange, fantastic horns, scimitar-shaped or lunate or corkscrewed, not antlered like the deer they knew from home. Each day they went ashore to hunt these animals. The game was confiding, obviously never having seen white men with firearms, so that the hunters were able to approach within easy musket shot and bring them down with a well-placed lead ball. They never lacked for meat, and they pickled and dried what they could not eat immediately.
Once they had butchered the kill, gutting and quartering the carcasses, even stranger creatures came to scavenge the bones and offal they left on the riverbank. The first to arrive were carrion birds, undertaker storks and vultures of half a dozen species, which filled the sky above with a dark, revolving cloud then swooped in to settle. Graceful and majestic in flight, they were grotesque and gruesome in repose.
After the birds came spotted dog-like creatures that whooped and wailed like banshees, and little red foxes with black backs and silver flanks. Then they saw the first lions. Tom did not need Aboli to tell him what these great maned cats were: he recognized them from the coats-of-arms of kings and noblemen in England, and from the illustrations in a hundred books in the library at High Weald. The roaring and monstrous grunting of these beasts in the night thrilled the men as they swung in their hammocks, and Sarah crept closer into Tom’s arms in the narrow bunk in their little cabin.
In the forests and glades they searched for sign of elephant, their intended quarry, whose tusks wo
uld repay them for all this effort and endeavour. Fundi and Aboli pointed out great pad marks moulded rock hard in the sunbaked clay. ‘These were made last season in the Big Wet,’ they told Tom. Then they came across trees in the forest that had been cast down as though by a mighty wind, stripped of their topmost branches and bark. But the trees were dried out, and their injuries long ago withered.
‘A year ago,’ said Fundi. ‘The herds have gone on and might not return for many seasons.’
The land became hilly and the Lunga river twisted through the valleys, becoming swifter, flawed with rapids. Soon they could force their way through only with difficulty, for boulders and sharp black rocks guarded the channel, and each mile they went put the little Swallow in deeper peril.
In the end there was a place where the river formed an oxbow around a low, forested hill. Tom and Sarah went ashore and climbed to the top. They sat together on the brow and Tom surveyed the land below them through his telescope. ‘It’s a natural fortress,’ he said at last. ‘We are surrounded on three sides by the river. We need only build a palisade across the narrow neck, and we will be secure from man and animal.’ Then he turned and pointed out a small bay with smooth rock sides. ‘There is a perfect mooring for the Swallow.’
‘What will we do here?’ Sarah asked. ‘For there are still no elephants.’
‘This will be our base camp,’ he explained. ‘From here we can press on into the interior by longboat or on foot, until we find the herds that Fundi has promised us.’
They built a palisade of heavy logs across the neck of the oxbow. They took ashore the cannon from the Swallow and mounted them in earthen emplacements to cover the glacis in front of the palisade. Then they constructed wooden huts and plastered the walls with mud, and thatched them with reeds from the riverbank.
Dr Reynolds set up his clinic in one of the huts and laid out his surgical instruments and medicines. Each day he forced every member of the party to swallow a spoonful of the bitter grey quinine powder he had purchased in the markets of Zanzibar, and though the drug made their ears sing, and they protested and cursed him for it, there was no fever in the camp. Sarah became his willing apprentice, and soon she could stitch up the gash in a foot caused by a carelessly swung axe or administer a purge or bleed a sick man with as much aplomb as her teacher.
Sarah chose the site for their living hut at a discreet distance from the others. It had a fine view over the river valley to blue mountains in the distance. She used cotton cloth from the bolts of trade goods to sew curtains and bedclothes. Then she designed the furniture and had the ship’s carpenters build it for her.
Ned Tyler had a farmer’s instincts, and to augment the diet of venison and biscuit, he started a vegetable garden with seeds he had brought from England. He watered them through irrigation ditches he dug on the riverbank. Then he fought a never-ending war with the monkeys and apes that came to raid the green sprouts as they pushed out through the soil.
Within a few months the camp was complete, and Sarah named it Fort Providence. A week later, Tom loaded the longboats with trade goods, powder, muskets and shot. With Fundi to guide them, he set out on a hunting and exploring expedition further upstream in search of the elusive elephant herds, and of the native tribes with whom they could open trade.
Ned Tyler was left, with five men, in charge of Fort Providence. Sarah remained with Ned also, for Tom would not allow her to make the journey upstream until he knew what dangers lay ahead. She would take over Dr Reynolds’s duties from him in his absence, and she had plans to continue her home-building work. She stood on the landing and waved to Tom until the longboats disappeared around the next bend in the river.
Three days’ travel beyond the fort, the longboats moored for the night at a confluence with a smaller stream. While they gathered firewood and built shelters of thorn branches to keep out nocturnal predators, Fundi and Aboli scouted the banks of the stream. They had been gone for only a short while before Fundi came scurrying back through the trees. His eyes were dancing with excitement as he poured out a flood of gabbled explanation. When he came to the end, Tom had understood only a few words. He had to wait for Aboli to come into camp to hear the full report.
‘Fresh sign,’ Aboli told him. ‘A day old. A big herd, maybe a hundred, and a few big bulls with them.’
‘We must follow them at once.’
Tom was more excited than the little hunter, but Aboli pointed to the sun, which stood only a finger’s width above the treetops. ‘It will be dark before we have gone a mile. We will start at first light in the morning. Such a herd will be easy to follow. They are moving slowly, feeding as they go, and they will leave a road through the forest.’
Before darkness fell, Tom had planned the expedition. There would be four musketeers to attack the great beasts, himself and Aboli, Alf Wilson and Luke Jervis. Each hunter would have two men to carry the spare guns, to reload and to hand him a freshly charged musket after each discharge. Tom checked the weapons himself. They were the rifled muskets that he had purchased in London. He made certain there were spare flints for the locks, that the powder flasks were filled and the bullet bags bulged with antimony-hardened lead balls for the ten-bore firearms. Ten-bore signified that ten of the lead balls it threw weighed one pound. While he worked on the weapons, Aboli filled the waterskins and made certain they had biscuit and dried meat for a three-day journey.
Even after the long day of rowing and dragging the boats through the shallows, everyone in the party was too excited to sleep. They sat late around the fires, listening to the strange sounds of the African night, the whistle and hoot of the night birds, the idiotic giggling of the hyena and the rumbling roars of a pride of lions hunting the far hills.
Often in the short time he had been with them, Tom had listened to the stories of Fundi as he told of the hunt for the mighty grey beasts, but he asked the little man to repeat them now. Aboli translated when Tom could not follow, but his own knowledge of the Lozi language was burgeoning, and he could understand much of what Fundi said.
Fundi explained again how the elephant had very poor eyesight, but possessed a sense of smell that could warn him of a hunter a mile or more upwind. ‘He can suck up your scent out of the air and hold it in the bone cavities of his head, run with it for a great distance and blow it through his trunk into the mouths of his companions.’
‘Into the mouths?’ Tom questioned him avidly. ‘Not the nostrils?’
‘The smell of the Nzou is in the top lip,’ Fundi explained. His name for the elephant denoted a wise old man, not an animal, and he used it with respect and affection, expressing the feeling of the true hunter for his quarry. ‘There are pink buds in his mouth, like the flowers of the kigilia tree. With these he tastes the air.’
With a stick Fundi drew the outline of the beast in the dust and they craned forward in the firelight to watch as he explained where a man must place his arrow to bring down one of the giants.
‘Here!’ He touched a spot behind the shoulder of his drawing. ‘With great care not to strike the bones of the leg, which are like tree trunks. Deep! Drive the iron in deep, for the heart and the lungs are hidden behind skin this thick.’ He showed the span of his thumb. ‘And muscle and ribs.’ He held out his arms. ‘You must go in this deep to kill the Nzou, the wise old grey man of the forest.’
When Fundi stopped talking at last, Tom implored him to continue, but he stood up with dignity. ‘It will be a long, weary way tomorrow, and it is time to rest now. I will teach you more when we are on the spoor.’
Tom lay awake until the moon had almost completed its circuit of the heavens, excitement boiling in his blood. When he closed his eyes the image of the quarry appeared in his imagination. He had never laid eyes on the living beast, but he had seen hundreds of their tusks piled in the markets of the Spice Islands, and he remembered again the mighty pair that his father had bought from Consul Grey in Zanzibar, which now stood in the library at High Weald. ‘I will kill another beast lik
e that one,’ he promised himself, and in the hour before the dawn he fell into a sleep so deep and dark that Aboli had to shake him awake.
Tom left two men to guard the longboats, and in the first chilly glimmer of dawn they struck out along the trail that the elephant herd had left down the riverbank.
As Aboli had told him, the sign was clear to read and they moved forward steadily. As the light strengthened they went faster, and the trees they passed were smashed and stripped of bark and branches. Huge piles of yellow dung littered the forest floor, and troops of monkeys and flocks of brown partridge-like wild birds were scratching in it for undigested seeds and fruits. ‘Here!’ Aboli pointed to one of these piles. ‘This is the dropping of a very old bull, one that might carry heavy tusks. The ivory never stops growing until the beast dies.’
‘How do you tell his dung from that of a young animal?’ Tom wanted to know.
‘The old man cannot digest his food properly.’ Aboli dug his toe into the pile. ‘See, the twigs are still whole, and the leaves entire. Here, the nuts of the ivory palm, with half the flesh still on the pip.’ Tom considered the first scrap he had been thrown of the lore of the hunt.
In the late morning they reached the point where the herd had left the stream and turned west towards the hills. Here they crossed an area where the surface was of fine talc dust. In this medium the imprint of the elephant pads was so detailed that each crack and wrinkle was faithfully preserved.