Monsoon

by Wilbur Smith

  Between them, Alf and Luke had brought down one of the other bulls, but the third had escaped the ambush, and had run off unscathed with the rest of the herd into the forest. Tom wanted to follow him up but both Fundi and Aboli laughed at him. ‘You will never see him again. He will run for twenty miles without stopping, and then he will walk another fifty miles faster than you could run.’

  That evening they dined like princes on tough, rank elephant cheek meat, roasted on green-stick skewers over the coals, and drank the muddy pool water, tainted with elephant urine, as though it were the finest claret. They slept like dead men beside the fire.

  Over the next two days they drew the tusks from the two bulls, chopping them out of the skull, taking infinite pains not to mark or mar the ivory. Fundi showed them how to free the long conical nerve from the cavity in the butt of each tusk and stuff the hole with green grass. Then they used bark rope to secure the four huge tusks to carrying poles. When they set out on the long march back to where they had left the boats, it took four men to carry each tusk.

  When they reached the river again, they cached the tusks on the bank, burying them so deep that even the hyena could not dig them out and chew them to splinters. Then they went on upstream in the longboats. Each day they found fresh elephant sign more plentiful, and they followed on foot, sometimes killing within a few miles. At other times they were forced to march for days to catch up with the herds.

  Within a month they had harvested enough ivory to make a full load for both longboats. All the white men were ragged and exhausted. The fat had been burned off them, their bearded faces were gaunt and their bodies skeletal. Only Aboli and Fundi seemed unaffected by the hardships of the hunt. There was general rejoicing when Tom announced his decision to turn back to Fort Providence.

  That night at the camp-fire, Aboli and Fundi came to where Tom sat staring into the dying flames, thinking of Sarah, anticipating their reunion. They squatted on each side of him and he considered their dark faces thoughtfully before he spoke. ‘This is grave business,’ he said, with certainty. ‘I can see that you mean to spoil my contentment and my pleasure at the return to Fort Providence.’ He sighed with resignation. ‘Very well, what is it?’

  ‘Fundi says that we are very close to the lands of his people, the Lozi.’

  ‘How close?’ Tom asked suspiciously. By now he spoke the Lozi language with confidence and he had learned what Fundi considered very close.

  ‘Ten days’ travel,’ Fundi said confidently, but when Tom stared at him accusingly, he dropped his eyes. ‘Or perhaps a very little further,’ he admitted.

  ‘So Fundi wishes to return to his own people?’ Tom asked.

  ‘And I will go with him,’ said Aboli quietly.

  Tom felt a stab of alarm. He stood up and led Aboli out of the firelight, then turned on him almost angrily. ‘What is this?’ Tom asked. ‘Do you wish to leave me, and go back to Africa?’

  Aboli smiled. ‘I leave you only for a while. You and I have become branch and vine of the same tree. We can never be put asunder.’

  ‘Then why do you go without me?’

  ‘For many years the Lozi have been hounded by the slavers. If they caught a glimpse of your white face . . .’ He shrugged expressively. ‘No, I will go with Fundi. We will take trade goods with us, as much as we can carry. Fundi says that his tribe has a store of ivory, from the elephant they have taken in their pitfalls and from the carcasses of those old animals they have found dead in the forest. With Fundi to calm their fears and with samples of our goods to show them, perhaps I can open up a road of trade with the Lozi.’

  ‘How will I find you again?’

  ‘I will come to you at Fort Providence. Fundi says that I can buy a canoe from his tribe. Perhaps my canoe will be loaded with riches when we meet again.’ Aboli placed an avuncular hand on Tom’s shoulder. ‘You have shown that you are a mighty hunter in these last days, but now it is time for you to rest. Go back to the woman who waits for you and make her happy. I shall return before the season changes and the Big Wet begins.’

  The next morning Aboli and Fundi lifted the heavy bundles of trade beads, copper wire and cloth onto their heads, balancing them easily so their hands were free to hold their weapons, and set off westward along the river-bank. Tom walked a little way beside Aboli, then stopped and watched his old comrade disappear among the tall riverine forest trees before he turned away sadly and went down to where the longboats were loaded and moored against the bank.

  ‘Shove off,’ he ordered, as he took his seat at the tiller of the leading boat. ‘Take us back to Fort Providence.’ And they cheered him as they bent to the oars and ran down with the current towards the east.

  The lookouts on the hill above Fort Providence spotted the longboats as soon as they rounded the last bend upstream, and Sarah was dancing with excitement on the beach when Tom stepped ashore. She rushed into his arms, but after the first embrace drew back and stared into his face, appalled by what she saw. ‘You are starved!’ she said. ‘And dressed like a scarecrow, in rags!’ Then she wrinkled her nose. ‘When last did you bathe?’

  She led him up the hill, but would not let him into the little cottage. ‘You will stink out all my hard work.’

  First she filled the galvanized hip bath, which stood under the wild fig tree in the backyard, with steaming water. Then she undressed him, set aside his rags for later washing and mending, and sat him in the bath as though he were a little boy. She sponged away the accumulated dust and filth of the weeks of hard hunting, combed out his thick black hair, and braided it into a sailor’s pig-tail. With her scissors, she trimmed the shaggy bush of his beard into the neat, pointed style that King William had made fashionable. She anointed all the scratches and cuts that covered his legs and arms with a salve she fetched from Dr Reynolds’s surgery. Tom revelled in the attention.

  At last, she helped him into fresh, lovingly ironed shirt and breeches. Only then did she take his hand and lead him into the cottage. Proudly she displayed everything she had done in his absence, from the easy chair that the carpenters had made especially for him to the broad double bed in the back room and the mattress she had sewn and filled with dried kapok from the silk-cotton trees that grew along the riverbank.

  Tom eyed the bed with a wicked grin. ‘It looks to be a fine piece of work, but I’d best test it before I give a firm opinion,’ he said, and chased her giggling twice around it before she allowed herself to be captured and lifted onto the embroidered covers.

  Afterwards they lay and talked while the sun set, and then long into the night. He told her of all he had done and seen. He described the hunting to her, and the new strange lands they had found, the forests and the far blue mountains, and the marvellous animals and birds they had discovered. ‘It is so big, and endless and beautiful and wild,’ he told her, and held her close. ‘We never saw another man, nor any sign of one in all our journey. It’s all ours, Sarah. Ours for the taking.’

  ‘Will you take me with you next time?’ she asked, jealous of his attention, wanting to share the wonders of it all with him. Somehow she never doubted that there would be a next time. She saw that he had fallen in love with this land, as much as he was in love with her. She knew that from now on they were both a part of it.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Next time you shall be with me to see it.’

  There was so much to tell and to discuss that it took more than one long night. Over the lazy weeks that followed, while the men rested and recuperated from the hunting, Tom and Sarah spent hours alone each day. He read to her from the journal he had kept during the expedition so that he overlooked no detail, and when he had told it all to her, they discussed and planned the future.

  ‘We have been lucky to discover this Lunga river or, rather, to have Fundi show it to us,’ Tom told her. ‘The old Portuguese explorers must have overlooked it, and the Arabs also. Fundi tells me that the Arab trading routes, the slave road, is a long way further to the north.’ He smiled ruefully.
‘If Fundi says it is a long way, you can believe it is a hundred miles or more. With luck, neither the Omani nor John Company will ever find us here. Fort Providence is a perfect entrepoˆt to the interior. The elephant herds hereabouts have never been hunted, and if Aboli and Fundi can make contact with the tribes, we can open up trade with them and have it all to ourselves.’

  ‘But where will you sell the ivory?’ she asked. ‘Not in Zanzibar or any other Arab port, nor any place where the Company has a factory. Brother Guy will never let you rest if he finds where you are. We can never go back to England.’ She tried not to sound wistful, and hurried on, ‘Where can we sell our goods, and buy the necessities, powder and shot, medicines and flour, candles and oil, rope and canvas and pitch?’

  ‘There is such a place close at hand,’ Tom assured her. ‘As soon as the long rains begin, the Big Wet, we will pull out of here and sail down to Good Hope. The Dutch at the Cape will be hot for our ivory, and even hotter to sell us all the goods we can pay for. Best of all, they won’t give a brass guilder or a morsel of their old cheese for the warrant of arrest placed on me by the Lord Chancellor of England.’

  There was much to keep every man in the fort busy during the weeks when they waited for Aboli to return. All the ivory had to be cleaned, weighed and packed with dry grass to prevent it being damaged during the voyage. Then the little Swallow had to be careened on the beach below the fort, her bottom scraped clean of weed. The ship-worm that had taken hold in her planking had to be burned out with boiling pitch. Once she was afloat again, they repainted her, stitched the rents in her canvas and made small changes to her rigging so that she would not be recognized as the ship in which they had escaped from England. It was a sailor’s superstition that it was bad luck to change a ship’s name, but there was no help for it. They scraped the old name from her transom, and painted the new one over it.

  When they relaunched her, Sarah broke a bottle of brandy from the ship’s stores over her bows. ‘I rename this ship Centaurus,’ she intoned. ‘May God bless her and all who sail in her.’

  Then the ivory was taken aboard the Centaurus and carefully loaded into her holds. They refilled her water casks and made all ready for the voyage southwards.

  Now each afternoon the thunderheads began to build up along the northern horizon, mountains that reached up into the heavens. The sunset turned the cloud ranges purple and sullen scarlet, the lightning flickered in their bellies and the far thunder muttered the threat of the coming wet season.

  The first rains burst upon them, sweeping across the hills in trailing robes of grey. For three days and nights, thunder bombarded them and the air was filled with water, as though they lay beneath a mighty waterfall. Then the stormclouds opened, and in that lull a dozen long dugout canoes came fast down the swollen waters of the Lunga river. In the lead canoe stood Aboli, tall and scar-faced. Tom shouted with joy and ran down to the beach to welcome him ashore.

  Fundi was in the last canoe, but the oarsmen were all strangers. The bottom of each craft was stacked with elephant tusks, none as large as those that Tom’s expedition had taken but valuable none the less.

  The oarsmen were all of the Lozi tribe, kinsmen of Fundi. Despite his assurances, they were terrified of the strange white men of Fort Providence. They expected to be taken as slaves, chained together and marched away as had happened to so many of their tribe. Gone, never to be seen or heard of again.

  They were mostly old men, grey and bent, or uninitiated striplings. They huddled together on the beach, not to be reconciled or comforted by any of Tom’s reassurances in Lozi. ‘They have come with us only because Bongola, their chief, ordered them to do so,’ Aboli explained. ‘When he saw the trade goods we brought with us, his greed surpassed his fear of the slavers. Still, he would not come himself to trade, but sent the least important members of the tribe in his stead.’

  They brought the ivory ashore from the canoes and weighed it, then discussed a fair price for it with Fundi. ‘I do not want to spoil the trade by overpaying them,’ Tom explained to Sarah, ‘but neither do I want to bilk them, and kill the trade before it begins.’

  In the end the bags of Venetian trade beads, bolts of cloth, crates of hand-mirrors and axe-heads, and bales of copper wire were loaded into the canoes, and the rowers were sent home. Their little flotilla shot upstream against the current, propelled by men so thankful to have escaped with their lives that they rowed with the strength of demons, hysterically chanting their gratitude for their escape to their tribal gods and ancestors as they disappeared around the first bend.

  ‘They will be back next season,’ Aboli prophesied. ‘Bongola will see to that.’

  Fundi and three of the bolder Lozi, who had remained with him, agreed to stay on at Fort Providence during the Big Wet and protect the buildings and gardens against the ravages of the weather and wild animals. The rest of the party loaded the last of the ivory and went aboard the Centaurus. As the full onslaught of the rains washed over them, they let the swollen river and the monsoon wind drive the little Centaurus downstream and out into the Ocean of the Indies.

  ‘The course to clear Madagascar and make for Good Hope is south-east by south. Mark it on the traverse board, if you please, Mr Tyler,’ Tom ordered.

  ‘South-east by south, it is, Captain.’

  ‘Full and by, Mr Tyler,’ said Tom, who took Sarah’s hand and led her to the bows. They stood together and watched the flying fish explode from the surface of the Mozambique Channel and spin away in silvery blurs, like new-minted coins tossed across the blue current.

  ‘If I can find a priest at Good Hope, will you marry me, Sarah Beatty?’ he asked.

  ‘That I will, Thomas Courtney.’ She laughed and hugged him closer. ‘That I will.’

  The little Centaurus anchored in Table Bay on a sunny morning in which the south-easter chopped bursts of white off the tops of the wavelets. They went ashore under the towering mountain whose flat top was covered by the famous tablecloth, a stationary bank of roiling white cloud.

  The settlement had grown in size since last they had visited the Cape. The strictures of the Dutch East India Company against foreigners owning land or taking up residence in its territory were every bit as draconian as those of its English counterpart. However, Tom soon discovered that, for a few golden guilders placed in the hands of the right official, these laws could be waived. Once they had paid their dues, the welcome they received from the burghers was convivial, especially as the Centaurus was well burdened, and the Dutch merchants smelt profits in their visit.

  They planned to stay in the Cape until the rains on the Fever Coast had passed. As their quarters aboard the Centaurus were cramped, and the motion of the ship at anchor was uncomfortable, Tom found lodgings for himself and Sarah in one of the little guest-houses below the Company gardens run by a manumitted Malay woman, who was a wonderful cook and hostess.

  In the first week Tom visited all the merchants whose warehouses lined the waterfront, and was delighted to find that the demand for ivory was strong. He struck several good bargains for the sale of their cargo. The crew were given their first pay and share of the profits since they had sailed from England. Over the next few months most of them spent everything they had earned in the ale shops and bawdy-houses of the town, but Ned Tyler and Dr Reynolds used theirs to purchase smallholdings of land in the Constantia valley on the far side of the mountain.

  Tom and Aboli used nearly all of their share to buy the necessary stores for another season at Fort Providence, and a goodly stock of the trade goods on offer in the warehouses of the colony.

  Tom gave Sarah fifty pounds from the prize, which she used to assemble her trousseau. It included a small harpsichord and a baby cradle on wooden rockers, which she painted with floral wreaths and choirs of cherubs.

  The entire crew were in the congregation of the little church in the gardens when Tom and Sarah were married, and after the ceremony they carried the newly-weds on their shoulders down the street to
their lodgings, singing all the way and pelting them with handfuls of rose petals.

  In one of the waterside taverns Aboli found a sun-wizened little Dutchman named Andries van Houten, who had been brought out from Amsterdam as a gold-finder for the Dutch East India Company. ‘I have scoured the mountains as far as Stellenbosch,’ van Houten told Aboli after the third tankard of ale had slid effortlessly down his gullet, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his red wrinkled throat. ‘There is no gold in this devil-damned colony, but I can smell it in the north.’ He sniffed the air. ‘If only I could find a ship to take me up the coast.’ And he looked at Aboli hopefully. ‘But I don’t have a guilder in my purse to pay my passage.’

  Aboli brought him to see Tom, and they talked every evening for a week. In the end, Tom agreed to purchase all the prospecting equipment that van Houten needed and take him to Fort Providence when they sailed.

  Those pleasant days at Good Hope passed too swiftly, and they were soon reloading the Centaurus, taking great care with Sarah’s harpsichord and the cradle. As the season changed, and the oak trees that lined the streets dropped their leaves, they hoisted the anchor and sailed northwards around Cape Point and into the Mozambique Channel again.

  When they entered the mouth of the Lunga river and forged their way upstream, they saw the high-water mark on the banks, and the debris hanging in the branches of the trees that showed just how strong had been the flood during the months of the Big Wet. When they reached the hilly country, the forest was green and burgeoning with new growth.

  Faithful to the trust they had placed in him, Fundi met them at the landing below Fort Providence, and proudly showed Tom how well he had cared for everything in their absence. They set to rethatching the roofs of the huts, and repairing the weak spots in the palisade. Sarah had her new harpsichord installed in the front room of their cottage, and played and sang for Tom every evening after dinner.