Tregarthur's Prisoners: Book 3 (The Tregarthur's Series)

by Alex Mellanby

  After finishing our woodwork I stood and looked all around, there was no sign of land. No sign of anything near to us, no other ships. The storm must have blown us far away and it was much warmer, a lot warmer in the heat of the sun.

  There were shapes swimming in the sea, shapes with fins. We’d heard the splash when someone had gone overboard and I think the sharks must have come to finish the job. Swimming away from the ship wasn’t an option.

  Along with the injured, the crew held in the hold and the rest of us I thought there were about twenty of us left on board. We weren’t going anywhere. The sea was absolutely flat calm now that the storm had passed. Even if there had been a wind we had no sail. One mast had broken clean away, leaving a stump sticking up from the deck.

  The other mast was held by its rigging and leaning over the side with most of the sails attached to it, it dragged in the water and held the boat at this dangerous angle.

  ‘If the wind gets up again we’ll probably go right over,’ said Sam as we stood together looking at the nailed down hatch. ‘If we cut the ropes it should fall off, make it safer.’ Sam started to walk off in search of a saw or an axe or something.

  ‘Wait,’ I called, my voice was loud enough to bring Bami and several of the others over to me. How was I going to explain this? ‘Sam, we’ve got to try and get some of the sails off the broken mast and try to fix them to that broken stump.’

  Sam turned and puffed loudly. He might have managed to make the hatch but re-rigging a sail boat was probably beyond him. It wasn’t beyond the freed captives, who we found out were called the Manding people. We couldn’t understand each other although Bami got the message about the sails as I waved my arms about and pointed. Then it was up to a mixture of Sam finding tools and Bami’s group. Even if they weren’t sailors they were able to set about this task.

  While they struggled with the sail I decided to search around below to see what there was left. Four of the women were doing the same. They looked suspiciously at me but seemed to become friendlier as I helped them move the barrels and joined in the search. There was very little to find. Only two barrels of fresh water remained and when we opened the second it was obvious that it had a leak. One other barrel was half full of the biscuits we had eaten during the passage. This wasn’t going to last long.

  But what was there to stay alive for? Later that day Sam and I sat on the deck, looking out at the setting sun and already starting to get more than thirsty.

  ‘Nothing out there,’ said Sam.

  ‘Not sure we’d like it even if there was something.’ I picked up a broken piece of wood and chucked it overboard. As it splashed I could hear the sound of smaller fish jumping.

  ‘Another boat might come and rescue us?’ Sam looked at me for an answer which didn’t come. ‘Wouldn’t it … rescue us?’

  ‘Look we don’t really know anything about this time in this world. If there are slave traders there’ll be pirates and all sorts of dangerous people wandering these oceans.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sam muttered and started glancing round again with more of a scared face.

  I turned my eyes upwards, stars were starting to appear in the very clear sky. ‘No clouds, no rain, no water,’ I said.

  ‘Oh thanks.’ Sam glowered at me, stood up. ‘I’m going to get another biscuit. And by the way Bami’s lot have started fishing, so it’s not all bad.’

  I let him go alone. I saw what he was talking about. Two of the men had found some sort of line and were trying to fish over the side.

  The boat swung into a more upright position after we cut the ropes from the mast and dragged the sails on board. With a lot more shouting we lashed one of the spars to the stump of the mast and nailed a torn piece of sail to it. It was a tiny area of sail and it hung limply in the airless evening.

  Throughout the day shouts had come from the captain’s cabin. Now they became louder.

  ‘Water, water!’ came the cry from below the nailed down planks keeping the captain and the others below decks. Bami and some of the others moved closer to our makeshift hatch. One of them stamped on the wood. Another shot rang out and the bullet whizzed through a gap in the wood just missing the man. Bami shrugged and led them away.

  I couldn’t see how this was going to end. Would we let the captain die of thirst and starvation? Shooting at us wasn’t a great idea, had they found more guns? I couldn’t see how Bami and the others were likely to forget what had happened to them.

  A small gust swept over the sea making the ragged sail flutter, just flutter, and the ship didn’t move. None of us would survive out here without fresh water. The sharks would probably get us all.

  A Step too Far

  -9-

  Hungry, thirsty and too tired to worry anymore, I fell asleep out on the sloping deck in the breathless air. With the coming night the temperature didn’t seem to fall. If anything the sticky heat felt worse. Sweating made my need for water even greater. As if the weather was making fun of us I was woken by rain. Huge drops fell from the night sky for just a few seconds. Not even enough to wet the deck, just to wake me. I lay, aching from sleeping on the deck. Others had woken too.

  Dawn and the sun rose up from the sea; light and burning heat came quickly. More banging came from below the hatch, more shouts for water from the captain, and his shouts were becoming weaker.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Sam coming up behind me.

  That question again, it had followed me ever since we left on the hike. Where was Jenna? We needed her to find answers. Had her ship taken her to Australia? Had she arrived? If we ever got there would I have been able to find her? She must have thought we had been hanged.

  I looked over to Bami. He sat at the ship’s rail gazing out; next to him, his wife. I’d heard her name and couldn’t pronounce it, but Amy seemed to work. It did sound a bit like her real name. She had survived the storm and been the one who dealt with the injuries. I thought that Bami took a lot of his strength from her.

  Another shot rang out from below, and a groan. It seemed that the captain and crew were fighting. Bami came over to me. I could see that same ‘what do we do?’ question was in his mind.

  I could only guess the horrors Bami and his people had met. I knew nothing of their life or where they had lived. They’d been dragged off and imprisoned in this ship, heading for a life of captivity, of slavery. And down below the deck were the men responsible. At first I thought he would laugh at the captain’s desperate end. I guess I was really just thinking the old Alvin Carter family story. That’s what Dad would have done, left them to die. Why did I think that Bami would be the same? He was probably just a quiet ordinary leader of a village of farmers. Not the sort of person to stand back and let the captain die down in his cabin.

  He fixed my eyes and gestured to the makeshift hatch. We used the tools to lever it off. Bami made it clear that I should tell them what was happening.

  ‘About time, you good-for-nothing slave-lovers,’ the captain shouted back angrily, as though he was still in charge of the boat.

  He led the others up onto the deck. I suppose I had no idea what would happen, but I didn’t expect them to charge up holding their guns, which they did, and even though they had only three shots, they fired them into the group of Mandings. Two shots missed. One struck home. One struck Amy, she screamed and toppled, falling to the deck. Bami ran to her, held her up, there was nothing he could do and her lifeless body slipped back to the deck.

  ‘Get below,’ shouted the captain, waving his empty gun. ‘Get below or we’ll kill you all.’

  Slowly Bami got to his feet, seeming to move in slow motion.

  ‘Below,’ screamed the captain with more uncertainty.

  Bami moved across the sloping deck. His face set firm. The decision made. He turned to me and Sam and pointed to the back of the ship. He wanted us below
decks. I grabbed Sam and pulled him with me. Down we went.

  It wasn’t long before we heard more cries. The crew’s weapons were useless, the crew were helpless. After cries came splashes. Three splashes. They’d thrown the crew overboard and that’s when the real screams started. Sam sat with his hands over his ears. I felt that I deserved to listen, to hear the thrashing sounds as the sharks found the men in the water. This terrible end was another battering to Bami and his tribe. Lives ruined, stolen from their homes and now, despite their offer of human kindness, they were made inhumane. Bami had been made a little more like my dad. I hoped that one day he would be able to find himself again.

  Bami sent the body of his wife into the sea. There was no option. It had happened to all the others who had died on this awful ship. The air was too hot to leave them on the boat.

  As the day passed a slight breeze blew up. A fortunate breeze that moved us away from the awful bloody scene in the water. As the wind grew stronger it caught the fragment of sail and the prow of the boat carved very slowly into the ocean. Still there was nothing out there except water, sea water and nothing to drink. We soon finished anything in the barrels. The men did catch fish and the salty flesh made our thirsts worse.

  Under the heat, exhaustion came quickly. The wind grew stronger and we needed to lash the ropes to hold the small piece of sail. Sam and I had little strength left. The other men seemed to grow in determination. We moved on even though we couldn’t alter direction. The ship’s wheel and steering gear had been destroyed by the cannon shot. We were at the mercy of the wind. It made me think that we should have freed Bami earlier, the captain had lied when he said they had no idea about sailing. He wasn’t interested in anything they could do except make him money.

  Night and day slipped by. The weather finally pitied us with a little shower of rain and a mouthful of water to drink. More days and nights, more rain, often at night, which we captured in the bags that had held the sails. Still no land. Sickness seemed to take hold, first of the Manding and then Sam and me. It might have been the heat. We were burnt to blisters. Too hot to shelter below, but the sun’s rays so harsh on deck. One of the men seemed to think he saw something in the distance, waving his hands and croaking his shouts through his parched throat. Even if he had seen something there was no way we could change direction.

  ‘Make a rudder?’ Sam didn’t move from the deck. Making a rudder was an impossible idea and we had no strength. No strength to do anything except lie on the deck, frizzling under the sun. I didn’t think we had many days left.

  A creaking wrenching sound came from the hull of the ship in the night. The ship was no longer sound and with each day we had sunk lower into the sea. The creaking was followed by a sudden judder. I heard a different sound, it didn’t seem to make sense in my brain. Like a train? There were no trains. It could only be the sound of breaking waves. The sound grew so much louder.

  There was only a fragment of moon which caught briefly on the breaking crests. It was too dark to make out if we were near to land, but the noise of the waves suggested that we must have arrived somewhere.

  ‘Reef.’ Sam peered out in the early light of dawn. I saw what he meant. What remained of our ship was stuck fast onto sharp points of rock with waves breaking all around. If a storm came we would be ripped apart. We just held on and waited for light.

  With a little more light I thought I could see palm trees in the distance, perhaps a beach. As the light grew stronger it looked like an island, about a mile away through foaming waves breaking on jagged rocks. Impossible to swim even if we hadn’t been weakened by days at sea with little food and water.

  I thought we were stuck fast before the boat heaved again, slipping on a rising tide. The wooden planks screeched as we lurched forward. I grabbed for a rail which wasn’t there and tumbled onto the broken boards. Another wave came up behind us, lifting us up and shooting us forward over the reef and into calmer water.

  Picking myself up I saw the reef had ripped off more timbers and the boat was a broken shell. With a shudder we crashed to a stop and must have hit the bottom. All around me were groans and shouts from this crew of bruised and battered unexpected sailors. Our surf ride had saved us because now I could see the sandy shore only a short distance away.

  ‘Saved,’ called Sam. ‘We must hurry or the ship will break up. We don’t want to be in this water long.’ He said the last words as he looked around, for sharks.

  Bami and the others didn’t move. They held firmly on to any piece of wood they could find. Held firm and let out a soft sobbing moan. Sam went over to Bami and tried to pull him up, shouting for him to hurry. Bami didn’t move.

  It came back to me. ‘They can’t swim,’ I shouted to Sam.

  ‘But we’re nearly there,’ Sam called back. ‘Only a few yards away. Surely they could …’

  We both saw it was impossible. The sea was calm now we were over the reef. Calm all the way to the island beach. I just had to jump over the side and after a few strokes I would be on the sand.

  ‘Ropes,’ I shouted, lurching across the deck as the boat shifted again under a wave. We pulled the men into action, finding any ropes we could, pulling them off the sail we had rigged to the broken mast.

  Taking one end I was over the side, heaving at the rope as I struggled to make the shore. It was so heavy and I was so weak. I thought I wouldn’t make it with the rope. Suddenly my feet touched the ground. I pulled and pulled, dragging the rope into the shallow water, up the beach and tied it to a palm tree. It was as much as I could do and I collapsed to the ground, leaving it up to the others to get ashore. It was slow. Hauling themselves along the rope, often slipping and letting go, they all helped, no one simply saved themselves. This group were going to help each other, no matter how hard it was. As they staggered to shore they started looking for water. A huge palm leaf had fallen from the trees and held whatever rain had fallen. We drank, we cried. We might be safe, but where were we?

  Paradise

  -10-

  By the time everyone was ashore, the fifteen surviving captives along with Sam and me, the sun was starting to sink in the sky. Sam and I sat on the sand and watched. The sun seemed so large and so near. The huge yellow ball sank quickly as we watched and just as it dipped below the horizon the sky lit with a flash of green before the clouds were lit up in pink and purple colours of sunset.

  ‘Must be near the equator,’ said Sam.

  I gave him a puzzled look.

  ‘I read about it once. The green flash.’ Sam bowed his head, obviously remembering things that had happened before we ever set out on the moor.

  ‘At school?’ I asked and he nodded. Thinking back I don’t know why I was surprised. Before this all started Sam had been the small round chubby kid who got bullied a lot – mostly by Zach. I supposed he went to school more than I did, probably went all the time like most kids did. Just happened that they didn’t always let me – excluded for running Dad’s errands.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam went on. ‘The sun goes down quickly near the equator, anyway we must be somewhere near ’cos it’s so hot.’

  And it was hot, hot and steamy. Moving around had soon made me start to sweat. It was fine sitting here on the sand with the breeze blowing off the sea, gently swishing the palm trees behind us.

  ‘It looks like a holiday resort.’ I felt stupid not knowing anything about the equator but before the sun went down the pale yellow beach dipping down to the rippling sea could have been a picture on the front of any holiday brochure.

  ‘Where’s the hotel?’ mumbled Sam.

  After the sunset it soon became very dark. Bami and his group had been searching for food in the thick forest behind the beach. They had gathered a huge pile of fallen branches and somehow managed to set it alight.

  ‘Didn’t need a lighter,’ Sam said, patting his pockets and not find
ing the green plastic lighter that we had once had. ‘Lost everything,’ he said rather slowly.

  It was easy to feel hopeless, so I jumped up to see what Bami and the rest were doing. Perhaps I should have waited.

  Four of the men came out of the shadows of the trees carrying something. It seemed heavy and moved. I walked towards them. My mouth fell open as I watched. Was it a dinosaur, had we arrived at some real Jurassic Park?

  ‘Tortoise,’ Sam said from behind me. ‘Giant tortoise.’

  As the men neared the fire I could see he was right. They struggled under the weight of the massive beast, carrying it on its back, and with a shout they turned the creature over and heaved it straight onto the fire.

  I’m sure I heard it screech, struggling to escape as the flames scorched the leathery flesh. The animal was to be cooked alive. Despite all the things I had seen killed, eaten while raw, this was the worst sight I’d seen.

  Sam picked up a thick broken branch, ran to the fire and smashed it down on the beast’s head. At least the animal was dead.

  I sat down again, near to the fire, it seemed to keep the biting flies and things away, and there were lots of them. We watched the flames. Sam helped to get more fallen branches, they were easy to find and the fire easy to keep burning.

  ‘Wonder what happened to Jack,’ I said, looking at Sam. Jack had always been the one who kept fires burning. Jack and Mary had vanished when we went through the last tunnel trip. Would I ever see them again?

  Sam didn’t say anything. He was staring at the fire. The smell of cooking meat started to waft from the fire.

  Bami’s group seemed to know what they were doing. Had they cooked tortoise before? I didn’t know and there was no way to ask them. There was also nothing else to eat. Later they pulled the tortoise from the fire. Several of the men had taken knives from the ship and they set about the animal. Bami waved us forward to join them.