Monsoon

by Wilbur Smith

  She placed the painted baby cradle beside their bed in the back room. The first night Tom eyed it as he sat on the bed and pulled off his boots. ‘I take that as a challenge, Mistress Courtney,’ he told her. ‘Shall we see what we can do about filling it?’

  They did not have much time to devote to the task, for within weeks Tom was ready to take the first hunting party upriver.

  Van Houten was in the leading boat, sitting on his wooden box of chemicals with his gold pans stacked at hand. He prospected every gravel-bed and sandbank they passed. When they went ashore to hunt the elephant herds, van Houten did not join them but wandered away with his two Lozi helpers to search the hills and streams for traces of the precious metal.

  The hunting was good this season. Within a month they had filled the boats with ivory, and set out to retrace their steps to Fort Providence.

  Sarah accompanied Tom on the second expedition, bringing with her the paintbox she had bought in Good Hope. She filled the pages of her sketchbooks with images of the journey.

  They followed the river further than ever before, and at last reached the country of the Lozi. At the first village the entire population fled into the forest, and it took several days before they came creeping out timidly from among the trees. After Fundi and Aboli had overcome their initial fear and suspicion, they began a friendly relationship with the tribe.

  They found that the Lozi were generally a pleasant and cheerful people. Though small in stature, they were well formed and handsome. Some of the women were beautiful, with fine Nilotic features. They went bare-breasted and their carriage was graceful and proud.

  Aboli had a long, serious discussion with the village elders, and the outcome was that, for a few rolls of copper wire and a small bag of glass beads, he acquired two of the prettiest, plumpest virgins as wives. The girls were named Falla and Zete. It was difficult to tell who was better pleased with the bargain, the bridegroom or the little brides, preening in the new finery Aboli had given them as part of the bride price and gazing at their husband with awe and reverence.

  Dr Reynolds, with Sarah to assist him, successfully treated many of the sick Lozi, which sealed the good relations with the tribe. When the expedition went on upriver to the capital kraal of the Lozi, the drums carried ahead of them the news of their coming. Their paramount chief Bongola, came down to the landing to welcome them and lead them to new huts that had been built especially in their honour.

  Bongola’s village was a cluster of several hundred thatched huts built along the riverbank and on the slopes of the hills. Each hut was set around with a shamba of mango and plantain trees and manioc plants. Kraals of logs housed the scrubby cattle and goats of the tribe, and kept them safe from the nocturnal forays of leopard and hyena.

  By this time Tom and Aboli were both fluent in the language, and they held long indabas with Bongola each day of their stay. Bongola was a naturally garrulous little man and he related the recent history of the tribe to Tom. The Lozi had once held rich lands on the banks of the great freshwater lake to the north, but then the slavers had arrived and fallen upon them, like the cheetah on the gazelle herds of the plains. The survivors had fled southwards, and for almost two decades now had evaded further depredations. But each day they lived in terror of the slavers whom they knew were slowly driving their raiding columns deeper into the interior. ‘We know that one day we will have to fly again,’ Bongola told Tom. ‘That was why we were filled with such alarm when we heard of your arrival.’

  Tom remembered Aboli’s stories of how he had been captured by the slavers when he was a child. He remembered also those unfortunates he had seen in the slave-markets of Zanzibar, and felt once again that deep abhorrence of the trade, and anger at his own inability to ease the plight of these people.

  The trading was profitable with Bongola, who brought out many fine ivory tusks from his hoard to sell. Then van Houten came in from one of his forays into the wilderness and proudly showed Tom five porcupine quills, each stoppered at one end. When he removed the stopper from one and poured the contents into the bowl of his gold scale, Tom stared at the tiny pile of metallic flakes and granules, which gleamed yellow in the sunlight.

  ‘Gold dust?’ he asked. ‘I have heard tell of the fool’s gold. Are you certain this is not it?’

  Van Houten bridled at the slur on his professional integrity, and showed Tom how to test the flakes with acid from his box of chemicals. ‘The acid will eat any of the base metals but not the noble one,’ he explained. They watched it bubble and fizz as he dipped the flake into it but when he brought it out the metal was bright and unscarred.

  He took Tom to the place where he had panned the dust, and showed him the string of gravel-beds and sandbars along the course of a stream down one of the valleys. At Tom’s request Bongola sent them fifty women of the tribe: traditionally the men would not engage in such menial labour as working in the field or digging holes in the stream bed.

  Van Houten gave each of the women a pan and showed her how to use it, dip and swing, swirling the gravel in the pan and letting the dross flow away over the lip, until only the gleaming tail remained. Swiftly the women learned the art and Tom promised them a measure of glass beads for each quill of the noble dust that they brought to him.

  Van Houten’s alluvial goldfield proved so rich that a hard-working woman could fill a quill in less than a day, and soon gold panning was the preferred activity of the tribe. When some of the men wanted to join in such a profitable pastime, the women drove them away indignantly.

  The rains threatened, and it was time to head downriver again. The longboats were low in the water under their cargoes of ivory, and Tom had almost a hundred ounces of gold dust locked in the ship’s strong-box.

  When Aboli told Falla and Zete that he was leaving them with their families until he returned next season, they burst into distraught wails and fountains of tears. Sarah remonstrated with him at such treatment. ‘How can you be so cruel, Aboli? You have made them love you, and now you are breaking their little hearts.’

  ‘They would die of terror and seasickness on the voyage down to Good Hope, and even if they survived they would pine for their mothers every day they were away. They would make my life as miserable as their own. No, they must stay here, and wait for me, as good wives should.’

  The desolation of the two girls was miraculously relieved by the parting gifts of beads, cloth and hand-mirrors that Aboli bestowed on them, enough to make them the richest wives in the village. Both girls were bubbling over with giggles and smiles as they waved farewell to his tall figure at the tiller of the leading longboat.

  When they returned to Lozi Land at the beginning of the following dry season, both Falla and Zete were huge with child, their glossy black bellies bulging out over their loincloths and their breasts big as ripe melons. They gave birth within days of each other. Sarah acted as midwife and delivered two baby boys.

  ‘By God!’ said Tom as he examined the infants. ‘There is no doubt they are yours, Aboli. The poor little devils only lack a tattoo to be as ugly as their father.’

  Aboli was a changed man. Gone was his dignified reserve and regal bearing when he held a chubby drooling son on each knee. The scarified visage that had struck terror into a thousand enemies became benign and close to beautiful. ‘This one is Zama,’ he told Tom and Sarah, ‘for he will be a mighty warrior. And this one is Tula, for he will be a poet and a wise man.’

  That night, in the darkness of their hut, Sarah laid her cheek on Tom’s and whispered into his ear, ‘I want a son also. Please, Tom. Please, my darling, give me a baby to hold and love.’

  ‘I will try,’ he promised. ‘With all my heart, I will try.’ But as the years passed, part of each spent at Fort Providence or travelling in the wilderness of Lozi Land, the other part spent in the Cape of Good Hope, Sarah remained slim and tall and flat-bellied, with nothing to swell her womb or puff out her shapely bosom.

  Both Zama and Tula grew swiftly into strong little
boys, taking after their father, tall for their age and natural leaders of the other boys of their age group. They spent their days in the forest and on the grassy plains along the river, tending the communal cattle herds of the tribe, and learning to handle bow and spear, coming to know the ways of the wild creatures of the forests. In the evenings they sat at Aboli’s feet at the fireside, and listened wide-eyed to his stories of the sea, of battles and adventures in faraway places.

  ‘Take us with you, Father,’ Zama pleaded. As Aboli had predicted he was the taller and stronger of the brothers.

  ‘Please, honoured father,’ Tula piped. ‘Take us and show us these wonders.’

  ‘You must stay with your mothers, and tend your duties here until you have been circumcised and initiated into manhood,’ Aboli promised them. ‘Then Lord Klebe and I will take you with us into the world beyond Lozi Land.’

  The elephant hunting was good in Lozi Land, and van Houten discovered a new alluvial goldfield three days’ march to the north of the original one, which brought in a steady trickle of gold dust to Fort Providence. Both the tribe and Tom prospered, and each season of the big rains the Centaurus took a full cargo down to the Cape.

  An Amsterdam bank of good repute had an office on the Heerengracht above the waterfront. Tom already had two thousand pounds deposited with them, and after this season the amount was doubled. At last he was a wealthy man.

  He had to face one bitter disappointment. When the time came to sail north again, Ned Tyler declared himself too old to undertake another voyage. By now his hair was as fine and white as new-picked cotton, his back was bowed and his once clear eyes were clouded and rheumy. ‘Leave me on my little farm here in the Constantia valley,’ he begged. ‘Let me tend my chickens and vegetables.’

  ‘I am going to stay with Ned,’ Dr Reynolds decided, ‘I have had enough adventure to last my lifetime.’ Only when he looked carefully at the surgeon’s red, bluff face did Tom realize how he had aged along with Ned. ‘I have had all I want of bandaging and stitching up your rascals. I want to plant a few vines, perhaps make a good wine before I die.’

  ‘But who will look after us?’ Tom protested. ‘You cannot send us out to die of malaria in the wilderness.’

  ‘You have a fine little surgeon with you,’ the old doctor replied. ‘I have taught Mistress Sarah all I know about setting a broken leg or mixing a potion. I place you in her good hands and, like as not, you will be better off. Lord knows, she is prettier than I am, and has a kinder heart.’

  Alf Wilson took over as first officer of the Centaurus, and he had the helm as they pushed into the mouth of the Lunga river at the beginning of the next hunting season. Every man and woman aboard was consumed with excitement on these annual returns to Fort Providence. They were all eager to see how Fundi had taken care of the settlement during the rains, to learn if the elephant were still plentiful upon the hills of Lozi Land, and to find out how much gold dust the women had collected in their absence.

  Aboli tried unsuccessfully to conceal his eagerness to be reunited with his wives and children again: by this time Falla and Zete had added generously to their brood. There were two small daughters and another two sons.

  As always, Fundi met them on the landing below the fort, and welcomed Tom and Sarah ashore. All was well in the fort, and there was little rain damage to be repaired. Sarah unwrapped the canvas cover from her harpsichord, played a chord, then smiled when the notes were true. She launched into the chorus of ‘Spanish Ladies’.

  Aboli demanded from Fundi the news of the tribe and his family, but there was none for the rains had been heavy that season and the river not navigable. No canoe from Bongola’s village had reached the fort. Aboli fretted through the time that it took to unload the cargo from the Centaurus, to repair the fort and to make the final preparations for the expedition upstream to Lozi Land. He was at the tiller of the leading longboat when they were ready at last to leave Fort Providence.

  The first intimation of something seriously amiss came when they reached the outlying villages of the Lozi, and found them all deserted. Though they searched the area around each cluster of huts they found no living soul, nor any clue as to what had happened to the inhabitants.

  Dreading what they would find there, they went on towards Bongola’s village as fast as they could row, dragging the boats through the shallows and keeping going as long as there was light enough to make out the banks on either side and steer around the rocks in the channel.

  They came to it in the early afternoon. A dreadful hush hung over the hills, no sound of drum or horn or shouted welcome. They saw at once that the outlying gardens were overrun with weed. Then they passed the first hut on the bank. The roof thatch had been burned and the walls stood gaunt and bare, the mud plaster washed away by the rains.

  Nobody in the boats spoke, but as he pulled with all his strength on the long oar, Aboli’s face was a terrible mask of despair. They stared at the ruins of the village as they passed, the burned huts, neglected gardens and empty cattle pens. The top branches of the trees were lined with rows of roosting vultures, grim silhouettes, hunch-backed and hook-billed. The sickly sweet stench of death and putrefaction was on the air.

  A single canoe lay on the beach of the landing, but its bottom had been staved in. The fish racks on which the men dried the catch had fallen down, and the nets were abandoned in untidy heaps. Aboli jumped overside when the water was waist-deep, waded ashore and ran up the beach to the overgrown path that led to the huts of Falla and Zete.

  Tom followed him but did not catch up with Aboli until he came to the small cluster of huts surrounded by a boma of thorn branches. Aboli stood in the open gateway, staring at the burned-out huts of his wives and children. Tom stopped beside him, but neither man spoke. Then Aboli walked forward and knelt. From the soft blue ash, he picked up a tiny human skull and held it cupped in both hands as though it were a sacred chalice. The cranium had been crushed by a heavy blow. He stared into the empty eye sockets, and the tears washed down his scarred face. Yet his voice was steady as he looked up at Tom and said, ‘The slavers always kill the babies for they are too young to survive the march to the coast. Their weight only weakens the mothers who are forced to carry them.’

  He touched the deep dent in the dome of the tiny skull. ‘See how they held my little daughter by the ankles and dashed her head on the doorpost of the hut? This was my beautiful baby, Kassa,’ he said, lifted the skull to his mouth and kissed the ghastly wound.

  Tom could not watch his sorrow. He looked away, and saw that somebody had written on the wall of the roofless hut with a stick of charcoal in Arabic script, ‘God is great. There is no God but God.’ That made certain the identity of the perpetrators of this atrocity. He stared at the legend while he tried to compose himself. When at last he spoke, his voice was stifled with horror. ‘When did this happen?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps a month ago.’ Aboli stood up. ‘Maybe a little longer than that.’

  ‘The slave columns must move slowly?’ Tom asked. ‘With the chains and the women and children?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aboli agreed. ‘They move very slowly, and it is a long weary road to the coast.’

  ‘We can catch them,’ Tom’s voice grew surer and stronger, ‘if we start at once and march hard.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aboli, ‘we will catch them. But first I must bury my dead. Make the preparations for the march, Klebe, and I will be ready to leave before noon.’

  Aboli found two more tiny skeletons among the ruins and weeds. The bones were scattered and chewed by the carrion eaters, but he identified his babies by the bead bracelets he had given them, which were still entwined with the small bones. They were of his two youngest sons, not yet two years old. He gathered up their remains and placed them in a tanned leather cloak.

  He dug their grave in the floor of the hut in which they had been conceived, and buried them together. Then he opened a vein in his own wrist, dribbled his blood on to the grave and prayed to his an
cestors to receive the souls of his children kindly.

  When he came down to the landing he found that Tom had almost completed the order of march. From years of experience in hunting the elephant herds, each man knew his duty. There were three bands of five men each. They were commanded by Tom, Alf Wilson and Luke Jervis. Three sailors would be left to guard the boats.

  Each man of the expedition carried his weapons, powder and shot, his waterskin and blanket, and enough food for a week. That was a full load of sixty pounds in weight, and once it was expended they would live off the land.

  ‘You must stay here with the boats,’ Tom told Sarah, as he unwrapped the blue sword from the canvas roll in which he kept it. He did not carry the long weapon on the elephant hunts for it hampered his gait, but he would need it now. ‘There will be fighting and danger,’ he explained, as he belted the scabbard around his waist.

  ‘That is why I must go with you. There will be many wounded and hurt, and none to minister to them. I cannot stay here,’ she replied, and he saw the determination in her set expression, the cold light in her eyes. She had already packed her medicine chest and blanket. He knew from long experience it would serve no purpose to argue with her. He gave in.

  ‘Keep close to me. If we run into danger, do as I tell you, woman, and for once do not stop to argue.’

  Led by Aboli and Fundi, they went in single file through the remains of the village. They passed many more skeletons along the path, all that remained of the old men and women and small children judged too weak by the slavers to survive the march to the coast. It was a relief to leave behind this scene of death and desolation, and to follow the trail left by the shuffling lines of Lozi prisoners as they were driven northwards into the hills.

  Aboli and Fundi set a killing pace. Fundi carried his great elephant bow over one shoulder and a quiver of poisoned arrows over the other. He, too, had lost his family in the slaughter and the pillage.