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

by Alex Mellanby

  ‘Do we?’ Sam asked, with neither of us waiting for an answer. There was no way we could resist. Now I was really glad that Jack and Mary weren’t with us. I think Mary might have had a pet tortoise. It couldn’t have been anything like the size of this giant, and probably she would have stopped us, but with starving groaning empty stomachs we tore into the pieces of flesh that Bami and the rest threw to us and worse, it tasted delicious.

  After the guilty feast I found a huge fallen leaf and, setting it down on the sand, lay back and looked up at the starry sky. It seemed as hot as ever, even without the sun. A thin moon appeared and it didn’t stop me from seeing the millions of stars. Under that starry sky with the sea gently lapping and a gentle breeze blowing and with a full stomach, I fell asleep.

  I woke to shouts in the early light, pulled Sam up and we ran to the trees. A group of men were coming along the beach. Bami and the others had been awake already and feeding off the remains of the tortoise. Now we all gathered together, wondering who these men were.

  As they came closer I could see they were all black and looked so similar to Bami. Many had tattoo marks over their bodies, which were clothed in rough shorts, a few with necklaces which looked like they were made of sharks’ teeth. All of them carried curved blades.

  ‘Machetes,’ whispered Sam.

  They stopped a few yards away. Stopped and looked threatening.

  Bami stepped forward. I heard their voices but couldn’t understand the words. First the machete men spoke, Bami shook his head, then they tried again. There seemed to be one man leading them who faced up to Bami.

  This wasn’t going well. Suddenly a machete was raised, shouts came from the new group. I knew when a fight was on. I stepped up beside Bami, Sam followed a little behind. They hadn’t noticed me before.

  ‘Eengliss?’ One of them pointed at me and all of them started talking together.

  ‘Are we the next tortoise?’ Sam said, and his voice trembled.

  The new group were shouting angrily between them. Bami was talking more quietly to his followers.

  I didn’t know what to do so I whispered to Sam, ‘Run into the trees if they start a fight, run and don’t stop.’ We both moved backwards.

  Suddenly Bami let out a yell. Everything went quiet. He raised his hands, stepped forward to the other group and fell on to his knees grasping the hand of their leader. And suddenly it was over. The two groups started embracing each other. Different people brought so far from home and sharing the same awful fate of slavery. Bami knew the way to make it safe, to join with them even if they didn’t speak the same language. His gesture was a better way than fighting.

  Slowly we all walked away down the beach. I pushed my way through to the man who had pointed at me. Perhaps I could understand him.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, he gave me a puzzled look.

  ‘Who … you?’ he said in broken angry words. It didn’t seem that he knew very much English and he certainly wasn’t going to be friendly with me. Bami stepped up and wrapped his arm around me, perhaps showing I was not so bad. Not sure that it worked because the other man just shrugged and hurried off. Sam and I were so out of place, not just by several hundred years, we shared nothing with these people. They must have seen us as part of the problem, slavers.

  We walked on.

  Soon we were going back into the forest, following a narrow trail. At least under the trees we were out of the sun but it was so hot. I kept having to wipe the sweat from my eyes as we marched on, with Sam and I being slowly moved to the back. The two different tribes seemed to find words they shared, something like understanding was happening, something more friendly between them, not including us.

  ‘They don’t want us,’ Sam said quietly. ‘Shouldn’t we get away?’

  ‘Nowhere to go,’ I answered, looking around at dripping trees and hearing the wild weird sounds out in the bush.

  Eventually we came into a clearing. At the end stood a wooden house, uncared for and falling down. There were a few cows and some goats grazing on the sparse grass. More women and children stood and watched us as we came nearer. No friendly eyes for Sam and me.

  It looked like a farm, run down and once it must have belonged to someone, not somewhere any of these people had come to make a home by choice. Probably a farmer who had bought them, a man who felt he owned the slaves. Where was he? I didn’t think that was hard to guess.

  Both groups were trying to talk to each other. A lot of pointing as they sorted things out, sharing food. A woman brought us some food and water, handing it to us as though we were something nasty and dangerous. After that I started to wander towards the old wooden house, with Sam following. As we got closer all the talking stopped. I looked round and everyone was staring at us.

  ‘Not good,’ I whispered to Sam. ‘Get ready to run.’

  No one moved as we walked on. The house looked even worse as we neared it. Obviously this wasn’t a place that anyone felt like living in. There were other small huts that had been built further away.

  The door hung on broken hinges. I didn’t know why but I pushed on. I think that they wanted us to see. The jungle forest was invading the inside, creepers spread across the floor, plants starting to grow through the wooden floorboards, dark and smelling of damp. A huge spider’s web across a glassless window. Sam stayed tightly behind me. I suppose we both knew what we were going to find.

  There it was, in the corner on a rough wooden bed, the body of a man, the remains, a skeletal form surrounded by empty bottles. No smell of death or decay. This body must have been here for some time. Bugs and animals had done their work.

  ‘Drunk himself to death,’ Sam said almost hopefully.

  I said nothing, nothing about the broken skull.

  We went back out. The gathered crowd were waiting to see what we would do. Perhaps they expected us to act like the farmer, telling them what to do as though we might try and become slave drivers. Maybe that would have given them enough reason to kill us. I certainly felt they had the right to do that, we had the pale skin of the slavers, even if I was a little darker than Sam. Pale skins and probably we shared the same language.

  I walked us away back to the spot where we’d eaten the food.

  ‘Sit down and look at the ground, don’t move.’ I pointed at where I thought we should sit, there was some sort of path quite close, somewhere we could run if we needed to although I didn’t think we’d get far if they chased us.

  We sat and the talking started again. Now there was shouting and arguing. Bami was trying to calm things.

  Eventually Bami and the man who had pointed at me came towards us along with a woman carrying a bunch of bananas and a gourd full of water. The woman helped us, tying a length of cloth over my shoulder to carry the water. Bami and the other man stood in silence.

  When she’d finished the man came right up to me, looked me in the eyes as though he could read my thoughts and didn’t much like them. Eventually he pointed towards the nearby track and muttered something like ‘Go’ and repeated it more angrily, before pointing again and saying, ‘Boat’ before he turned and walked away.

  Bami stepped forward and gave us a hug. I could see the hurt and pain in his eyes. Many of his fellow captives were dead – his wife dead – and now they had to build another life. Before we left Bami held his finger to his lips. We might have little shared language but it was clear what he meant, why the other people probably worried about us. The thought that we might come back with more people, people that would turn them back to slaves. Tell people about the dead farmer. I nodded and repeated the gesture with my own finger.

  Sam and I hurried off with no idea of what lay in front of us. I thought they all could change their minds about letting us go and pushed Sam forward. We carried our food and drink off on the trail. Behind us it looked as though we were for
gotten, the two groups were sharing words, sharing worlds that we would never understand.

  Walking further into the steaming forest, swatting away more flies, I started to worry again. High above us birds squawked in the tall trees, all around us leaves rustled. This felt like the forest we had trekked through in the caveman world where there had been hornets. There were so many strange noises here, any of them might be made by something dangerous.

  ‘What was that?’ Sam kept whispering loudly although we saw nothing bigger than a lizard.

  We heard the noise of running water as we trod the path uphill, and came across a waterfall plunging down amongst rocks; fallen trees and ferns covered the banks. At one place we knelt down close enough to take more water. Sweating in the heat made us continually thirsty.

  Further up the hill the trees were even larger. Huge leaves clattered in a light breeze. Not soft leaves, these were hard.

  ‘Like one of those window blinds,’ said Sam, banging the folded green fan in front of him.

  We pushed on. Water dripped from everything. We swept away moss and creepers hanging over the path.

  I stopped, looking up at one of the trees.

  ‘Are those nuts?’ Sam was always good at questions and I had no answers until I saw one of the nuts split open next to the path. I poked it with a stick – hard as wood. The shape looked so strange, I stared at it. It couldn’t be …

  ‘Looks like a woman’s bottom bits,’ said Sam with the same embarrassment he’d often shown since we’d been stuck in Miss Tregarthur’s schemes. It made me wonder how he and Ivy had got on together, but he was right. There was no other way to describe this huge nut – it looked like a woman’s hips and thighs. Too heavy for us to carry. Further on we saw more nuts.

  We went over a hill, still in a thick jungle of trees and huge plants and we couldn’t see where this path was taking us. The track went on and I wondered who walked this way. We hurried down the hill. Reaching flat ground there were more buildings. I saw a few animals – cows and goats – grazing. The buildings were run down. I thought I saw some people, if I was right they kept themselves hidden in the shadows. I didn’t think it was a good idea to go searching for them. Ahead I could hear the sea again and we hurried on.

  Reaching the shore was another holiday brochure beach, perfect sand running down to the sky blue sea moving in gentle ripples. Now I could see another island in the far distance, more mountainous than the one we were on. Along the coast the shore line curved and formed a bay. In the bay stood a ship. A three mast sailing ship. Dark and silent. Portholes for cannons all along the sides. And from the mast hung the British flag on a red background. This had to be a navy ship, a ship of war.

  Heading South

  -11-

  Sam started running. I suppose he thought we were saved and wasn’t thinking. I ran after him, dived and caught his legs before dragging him away from the beach into the cover of the bushes.

  ‘What?’ he said with a puzzled look.

  I stared at him for a while, perhaps I didn’t want to squash his hopes. I was sure he hadn’t moved beyond the idea of running up to the boat, asking them to let us on and … that was it. Where would this boat take us – if it would take us anywhere? It certainly wasn’t going to take us home.

  ‘Oh,’ he said as I think he realised and his head dropped.

  ‘Yes – oh – is right,’ I turned my head to look back over the sea.

  ‘What do we tell them?’ Sam’s tone reminded me of Ivy – miserable.

  ‘I guess we say we’re convicted murderers, escaped from jail and would they take us to Australia to find our girlfriends,’ I said and although we were out of sight from the boat I could still hear the shouts of the crew. It sounded to me that they might be about to leave. ‘I don’t know…but we have to tell them something.’

  ‘They’ll just hang us,’ Sam groaned.

  ‘They may not know anything about escaped criminals – no phone. We’ll tell them we were shipwrecked on our way to Australia.’ This was a plan that needed work. ‘Hugh said it wasn’t just convicts going there, other people went to make a new life. That’s what we’ll tell them.’

  I wasn’t happy with this, too many holes in the story, but hearing more shouts from the boat I thought we had to go. I pulled Sam up and we walked back along the beach. Several small boats had been rowed back to the ship and were being hauled onto the deck. One boat remained on the shore, crew members were loading something heavy. As we neared them I saw it was another tortoise. Food for the journey, I thought.

  They saw us, several weeks at sea and a shipwreck hadn’t improved our looks. We must have looked wild, if not savage. The men at the boat stood back and drew their muskets.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ I called, thinking they were going to kill us even before we’d given them our flimsy story.

  Bang!

  One of the crew had let loose. Fortunately their guns couldn’t have been very accurate and the bullet whizzed past us. These men were wearing some sort of uniform, which probably meant they were military and wouldn’t keep missing, not if they all started shooting. We dived to the ground and I shouted again.

  I heard some angry words before two of them walked over to us, pointing their guns at us.

  ‘Shipwrecked, was it?’ one of them said after I had stuttered out our story. ‘See what captain makes of that.’

  They waved us to their boat, already crowded with a moving tortoise and we rowed back to the main ship. One of them kept his musket pointed at me.

  We scrambled up the rope ladder on to the deck while one of the men in the row boat called for the captain. ‘Slavers I reckon,’ he said.

  How did they decide that? Did we look like we were part of the slave trade? I’d hoped we’d be taken to the captain and given a chance to explain; we weren’t.

  ‘Put them below, in chains,’ someone shouted from up near the helm. ‘And get this ship sailing out of here.’

  There was a scramble of activity as men rushed into the rigging, letting the sails fly. We were pushed below as the ship turned and once again I heard the slapping sound as we moved forward into the waves. At least I wasn’t sick this time.

  Sam and I were back in chains. We tried to talk to the crew but they were in a hurry and told us to wait for the captain. ‘Short-handed, see,’ said one of them.

  At least that gave me some hope. If they didn’t have enough crew we might be able to work for our passage.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Sam called as they were about to leave.

  ‘Where are you going or where are we going?’ he laughed and sprang back up the stairs to the deck, leaving us alone. It was hot, very hot and the air so sticky, we were soon pouring with sweat – and I was sick. My retching brought another laugh from above. One of the crew did bring us down a bucket of water but he had no idea when the captain would see us.

  If we hadn’t both been worrying I guess we would have fallen asleep. I could see Sam was chewing over so many thoughts.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Eh?’ Sam frowned.

  ‘Before you ask me what you’re going to ask me – I don’t know,’ I tried to make it sound lighter than I felt.

  ‘But…’

  ‘But you’re going to ask.’ I slopped some of the water to try and clean up the mess I’d made, without realising there might not be that much drinking water on board.

  ‘Ok I won’t ask, but what are we going to do if we do get to Australia?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘You did ask.’

  Sam stayed quiet. I thought for a bit more.

  ‘I’m going to find Jenna and ask her what to do,’ I said eventually. ‘Find Ivy too. We can ask them both.’ Not that we had any chance of ever getting there.

  ‘Maybe we’ll have to stay the
re, like Hugh said people are making a new life there, we could do that.’ Sam didn’t sound like he believed it.

  And I knew why he didn’t; because we wanted to go back to where we came from. Not back to the cave like we had decided to do once before, nor back to the plague village either. But back to where … and that’s when I stopped because I had no idea what would happen if we did get home. Because I didn’t have one, no home. Dad was in jail, I’d been thrown out of my aunt’s house and Mum certainly wasn’t anywhere making a home for me. Chained up here in some ancient sailing boat it felt too unreal anyway. Even thoughts about my mum seemed unreal too.

  ‘Maybe we’ll stay there, as you said.’ I looked up and saw the shape of a man in uniform climbing down to us, gold braid all over his shoulders. He had to be the captain; another man followed him down. The second man was huge, bearded and scarred, with eyes that made me feel he liked hurting people.

  ‘Slavers are you?’ the captain asked.

  ‘No,’ I said trying to sound confident. ‘We were shipwrecked on our way to Australia.’

  ‘Slave traders.’ The second man ignored my words and gave me a vicious kick.

  ‘Wait, Ben.’ The captain held him back. ‘Let’s hear what they have to say.’

  I didn’t have anything useful to say. I told them about the wreck and how we had landed on the island and walked over to find their boat. There were too many gaps.

  ‘Slavers. Like I said.’ Ben looked ready to kick me again when a shout from above made the two men turn to leave.