He was too dehydrated to sweat, almost too weak from hunger to push any harder than he was doing, but the thought of dying in the fire spurred him on, redoubling his efforts, and finally the bottom slat steadily split and shattered sharply outwards.
The soldiers were on the other side of the heap, and even if they heard the dry timber giving way, they would have assumed it was the crackle of the roaring flames.
He slithered out through the narrow gap that he created, allowing the bodies to come tumbling down from above to fill the hole, the heat singeing his hair and burning the flesh on his back through the rags he wore, and he knew that if he didn’t hurry they would ignite.
The bare earth felt comparatively cooler as he wriggled out onto it, but he knew instinctively that he must hurry and get as far away from this conflagration as he could.
He ignored the painful scraping of the broken timber spikes and shards against his bare flesh as he snaked out through them, the splinters that impaled him and buried themselves under the skin as he slithered further along the soil.
He would pull these out later, if he survived.
The soldiers might spot him if he didn’t hurry, and he may well be re-captured, or even shot, but he conceded that this would be far better than the prospect of being roasted alive.
The flames were huge, roaring demons above him, lapping with eager yellow tongues all around the mound that he was gradually creeping away from, pressing his body and face into the cool soil.
Then he felt the grass against his feet, dry and still coarse after the winter. It brushed up against his shins and knees, then his thighs as he continued to move slowly backwards, daring only once to raise his head slightly to see where he was.
The sight shocked him.
The flimsy timber case that he had hidden in was now a hand of blackened fingers of charred wood, splitting and splaying wide as the bodies tumbled from within, burning like wax candles, falling around the mound and continuing to burn on the ground.
The human tallow was cradled in the charred wooden palm.
Through the shimmering heat haze of it all, he could discern the retreating shape of the mule cart and the soldiers, no doubt on their way back to the concentration camp for another load.
He withdrew into the thick tussocks of reedy grasses, surrendering to their cool caress, and drifting off into another hunger induced sleep. In this delirium-induced dream state, his father visited him, laughing heartily at him, and pointing out that he had progressed from eating the dried salty beef that they hung in strips to dry and make biltong, to braaivleis and boerewors; delicious cooked meats.
When he awoke, he found that the stomach cramps and the smell of freshly cooked flesh were all that were needed to make him rake through the still warm coals in search of more food, and with each tender mouthful he found his horror and disgust diminishing and his shame vanishing completely.
Having filled his belly on the remains of the burned-out carcasses he found, he skirted up and around to the north of Pretoria and began to head eastward for Middelburg, travelling during the night, mainly to avoid detection.
It often rained hard during the summer months and the frequent thunderstorms would cool him down and also provide him with an adequate water supply on the journey, but then there would be the occasional hailstorm, forcing him to take shelter under any rocky outcrop that he could find until it abated.
He would try to find shade from the heat of the day and sleep after his long nights of trekking the veldt.
Time became totally meaningless to him as he trudged along, with only the stars to guide him to his goal, and he knew that it would probably take him at least three nights to get to his uncle’s farm, situated on the north-west outskirts of Middelburg.
Sadly, each night, before drifting off to sleep, he noticed that the distant horizon was filled with the blaze of homesteads that had been looted, pillaged and burned by the British who now delighted in and relished adopting their scorched earth policy.
He reasoned that these men were insane; destroying anything and everything that the poor people of the veldt had worked so hard to carve out and maintain, poisoning their water wells, salting the land and ruining the crops.
On his third night, he happened upon the smouldering remains of another huge funeral pyre from a nearby concentration camp that had been doused by a mid-afternoon’s torrential downpour before the bodies had been fully cremated, and he only hesitated slightly before scrabbling through the sticky black ashes to find more food for his aching stomach.
Warm and slippery, fat-covered meats that were practically charred to a crisp on the outside, but which he found were succulent and juicy inside, made his belly rumble as he wolfed it down.
Some of the ruined farmsteads still had underdeveloped fruit and vegetables that were not yet fully ripened or harvested for him to plunder along the way, but they could not compare with the taste of barbecued human flesh, and the huge energy rush that he felt after consuming it.
As he crested the last low hill that overlooked his uncle’s farm, his heart sank.
He was roughly halfway through his fourth night of walking in the damp and the dark, only to find that the farm was little more than grey ash. Thick, half-burned, half-buried timbers protruding from the ground like baleful black fingers aimed at the sky, and little of any value left standing by the British. The bastards had beaten him to it.
He fell to his knees and wept, sobbing and baying at the cloudless night sky for answers that would never come, praying to the God that had totally forsaken him.
Where could he go now?
What was he going to do?
All of his family was either dead or interred in those hateful camps that the soldiers had set up throughout South Africa.
He mulled over all of the options available to him and once he had made up his mind what to do, he skirted down and around to the west of Middelburg. He began to head due south in the hope that he would find somewhere safer to spend the remainder of that miserable night and the following day.
He knew that Bethal was probably going to be three or four more nights of travel for him to reach, but he started to formulate a plan based on the stories that his father had told him as a small child.
He was going to get to Durban and get out of this hateful country.
After eight consecutive nights of tiring trekking and foraging, dodging the infrequent but persistent scouting parties sent out by the British, he encountered yet another massive internment camp at Volksrust, where he stayed for a couple of days to replenish his energies and to feast on more human flesh.
He casually ripped the meat from the bones with no thought now of what, or of whom, it had once been.
He cared little about the gender or age of his food, whether it was cooked or uncooked, because to him, it was simply food. It was juicy sinewy flesh to be hastily consumed and give him the energy he needed to complete his trek.
If Piet Retief, Gerrit Maritz and all those other Voortekker families could manage to forge their pathway from the Cape up into Natal, Waterberg and, eventually, the Transvaal, then there was no reason why he could not reverse that journey.
Andries Potgieter once nailed his colours firmly to the mast up in Potchefstroom, and now Janse ‘Fires’ Van Vuuren was determined to raise his standard in Durban in defiance of the British invaders.
A heavy hailstorm, with stones almost as big as a man’s fist, forced him to waste a night on his journey to Newcastle, but he made up for lost ground by travelling during the afternoon of the following day, and then on into the night.
Scouting parties of British troops seemed fewer around this region and he thought that it was worth the gamble now to be travelling as fast and as far as he possibly could.
Newcastle, Colenso, Ladysmith and Estcourt took him almost to Mool River within a week, but he decided to rest his weary body here for a couple of days to recuperate before plunging onwards to Howick, which he knew would be at least another
two nights of hard walking away.
As he approached, he could hear the Umgeni River, and the falls thundering down from the Drakensberg Mountains near Howick.
He let his imagination run riot, expecting and picturing the British soldiers, enjoying their stay at the Falls Hotel, and living the high life, as his people, his fellow countrymen, were being held against their wills. They were prisoners in their own country and they were being systematically starved, raped or murdered, in those stinking horror camps.
He remembered the tales he had once been told of the British and their glorious victory over the kaffirs at the battle of Islandlwana, where they were outnumbered almost twenty to one by the Zulu.
Now the British were grinding Afrikaaners under their heels in yet another war.
He discovered that there was a concentration camp at Howick and his heart leaped excitedly in his chest at the prospect of more food whilst his belly rumbled in agreement with more urgency.
He found this thought disconcerting, because he was now actively relishing the taste of the flesh that he found, enjoying the feasts and almost salivating at the prospect of it. There were fruits and vegetables that he found along the way to tide him over, but flesh lured him on, drawing him like a magnet.
Hilton was probably only a three hour walk away for him now, so he pressed on stubbornly with his trek, resolute in the knowledge that if he stayed there and refreshed himself, he would more than likely be able to reach Mpumalanga after another couple of nights of travelling.
In Hilton, he managed to replace his shoes, find ointment to rub onto his aching and blistered feet, and exchanged some of his now ragged clothing for better ones. He accomplished this by raiding an abandoned store that had obviously been looted recently, by either the British or itinerant kaffirs, but they had discarded these goods as useless to them.
Fires found a small knapsack which he crammed with a couple of spare shirts, a durable pair of working trousers, and a second pair of sturdy walking boots, along with a tin cup that he intended to use to catch rainwater as he slept during the day.
He rested for a while to the south of Mpumalanga, idling away two full days by recuperating and foraging for wild plants and fruit and bathing in the river before heading out to the east to Pinetown the following night. He felt thoroughly refreshed by both his dip in the river and the wonderfully liberating sensation of laying naked on the rocks in the warm sunshine to dry.
The stone under him was firm and unyielding against his buttocks and shoulders, soaking the moisture from his flesh as he gazed up into a cloudless blue sky, wondering what his life would be like in another country. Was the entire world filled with war?
Heavy thunder showers in the afternoon had filled his little tin cup several times during his stay, and he gulped eagerly at the cool rainwater to slake his thirst and wash down a few more of the wild shrubs that he had collected.
He felt very proud of his ingenuity, and remembering the lessons his father taught him about survival on the land.
However, during the fitful hours of sleep before setting out on the road to Pinetown, he was tormented by more nightmarish visions of his mother’s rape and her horrific death. They unsettled him.
They disturbed him, and tugged at his heart strings, to make him long for her voice and her smile once more.
He wished that he could block out these visions, but it was futile.
The memory was to stay with him for a lifetime.
Pinetown had another small internment camp on its outskirts, and he stayed there long enough to feast on the piles of rotting human flesh that were heaped into the mass open graves, before making his way around to the south and heading into Westville.
Durban was only about two hours walk away for him, but there were a lot more troops to avoid and this would slow his progress.
He slept fitfully before pushing on to the port, allowing the meat to settle in his stomach, to be broken down by his digestive juices and form the bacterial soup of a newly acquired infection from the contaminated flesh...
Durban was, as he had expected, huge and thronging with life and it was a simple matter for him to become lost and inconspicuous in the crowds near to the docks, where the troop ships and cargo freight were being unloaded, sliding casually between strangers and doing his best not to look out of place.
He also noticed faces that were a lot lighter colour than the kaffirs that he remembered from the days of his distant childhood when they came and worked as casual labour for his father on their farm.
These men spoke no Zulu, Bantu or English, and certainly not a word of Afrikaans, but a weird sounding, lilting dialect that he had never encountered before.
They wore uniforms but did not seem to be soldiers, merely allies of the hateful British, and as he weaved his way to the quayside, one of these strange dark men had put his hand on Fires’ head and ruffled his hair affectionately, saying something to him that was unintelligible, but beaming a broad smile down at him.
Fires shrugged this off rather indignantly, and nonchalantly made his way across to the chain-railed gang-plank of a huge vessel that was moored, looming over the stonework of the quay, with ropes as thick as his upper thighs tethering it in place.
The ship itself was a hive of bustling activity, with people shouting instructions and pointing at one another in the confusion, loading and unloading crates, soldiers milling around barking orders, and a constant stream of light brown faces alighting and boarding.
He later discovered that the ship, the SS Wardha, was being used as a troop carrier and had brought the 9th regiment of the Queen’s Royal Lancers to his country to swell the ranks of the invaders, but he cared little about them now.
He wanted desperately to be able board the ship undetected, to stow away and leave this hateful place of death and destruction, to forge his new life and forget the memories of his dead father and mother, eradicate them by finding a better country to live.
He did not particularly care where the ship was bound for, but he secretly hoped that perhaps it would go to the Cape and then on to the Americas from there.
He had heard his father speak many times of the lure of that far away continent, usually by the glow of the firelight as they sat and ate supper together after a hard day out in the fields.
He slipped surreptitiously into a smaller group of these light brown foreigners, and then up the gangway into the ship, only to find that it was a maze of confusing narrow tunnels that seemed identical in almost every way.
A lot of them were crowded with people, rushing to and fro, some colliding with each other in their haste, but none of them paid any attention to the small boy, other than to avoid bumping into him.
It would be so easy for him to become lost and disorientated on this ship, but he had to find a place to hide and also get something to eat; his back pack contained only a few husks of stale bread, his empty metal cup and two ripe Natal plums that he had foraged from a garden on the outskirts of Durban, and he was very hungry.
The ship clattered and clanged, reverberating to the sounds of the people coming and going, boots on metal decking, shouting orders to one another, laughing and even joking in his native tongue.
‘Someone on here spoke Afrikaans...?’ he wondered.
He tried to locate the source of that voice, to follow it through the confusion of cramped corridors and hatchways, homing in on this beacon of familiarity, but it had been a futile chase.
The voice faded and disappeared back into the rabble.
He found two cramped flights of metal stairs at the junction of three corridors, near a doorway to one of the decks, with some that led upwards and some that led downwards, and he allowed his instincts to guide him into choosing the latter, spiralling ever lower into the bowels of the ship, encountering fewer and fewer people along the way.
He noticed that it was starting to feel much warmer down here and eventually found his way into a room fitted with work benches and tools, with heaps of oily rags
littering the floor and space under the benches. The smell of the oil and grease permeated the air but did not make it unpleasant to breathe. In fact, Fires found this a rather comforting smell. He slithered quickly underneath the bench, covered his legs with the smelly rags, ate his plums and waited, drifting off into a light sleep.
He was awakened by a horrendously loud noise all around him and it startled him to full alert, wondering initially where he was, as he was in almost total darkness now.
It took his eyes quite a few moments to acclimatise to the gloom, but he soon realised that there was weak light filtering down from an overhead bulkhead lamp that served as emergency lighting and it finally dawned on him that this deafening racket was the engines that were throbbing into life.
They were on the move, leaving Durban and going off to sea and his heart pounded excitedly in his chest at the prospect.
He had survived, and now he would be free.
He smiled slyly to himself as he pulled the warm rags closer to his body, wrapped himself deeper inside them and went back to sleep, despite the mild stomach cramps of hunger he felt...
Rats watched him warily from the relatively secluded safety of their nest behind the tool chest.
This boy was unlike any of the other humans that had screamed at them or thrown things at them, chased them, hounded them and killed some of them.
He was much smaller and smelled of sickness and death.
His hair was curly, dark and thickly matted with salty moisture that oozed from the pores of his pale smooth skin, and he writhed and mewled in the thick rags of his nest, occasionally thrashing wildly as his eyes rolled in an unfocused and frightening way.
The rats thought that the boy was dying.
They had also been subject to a strange sickness lately, with dozens of them inexplicably dying, reducing their numbers and decimating the nest to the point where only a hardy few remained unscathed.
The nest was littered with the carcasses of dead fleas.
They died of esophogal and gizzard blockages after sucking blood from the infected vermin on which they had fed.
Orphan (Hunger Book 1) Page 2
