Chikunda cocked his head, inviting details.
“Kelp, you have forests of it here. Quite edible when you learn how to prepare it and acquire the taste.”
“I saw you collecting it too,” Chikunda nodded sagely. “I wondered what you were doing with it. Can you show me?”
“Indeed. You may need it someday, if…”
The cobbler left the matter open ended.
“These mementos you brought,” Chikunda referred back to the weapon that the Portuguese had hinted at. “May I see them?”
Sebastião wore an expression of some regret. It said that in a moment of camaraderie, he had shared too much information.
“These are valuable to me,” he told Chikunda before moving. “I have never told anyone about them, much less shared the sight of my darlings.”
“If you are uncomfortable…” Chikunda didn’t finish.
“I'm not comfortable,” Sebastião admitted. “But I feel the urge. They are too magnificent to be kept so long without the praise they deserve.”
He stood and disappeared behind the cupboard that was temporarily Chikunda and Faith’s room.
“What is he fetching?” Faith quizzed. She had been steadily tidying the place.
“He has weapons from a faraway place. Large daggers I believe.”
“Do you trust this man?” she asked in Swahili.
“Strangely… with my life. He has already saved ours. We owe him a life and perhaps more than that.”
The cobbler reappeared carrying a length of canvass wrapped around something weighty.
He laid it on the rickety homemade bench that doubled as a dining table and workspace, and carefully began to unwrap his prize.
When the stiff fabric was put aside, two weapons lay before them, both with similarly long and intricately patterned handles. With great reverence, the small man picked up the larger of the two weapons and with a whisper, it slid gleaming and glinting out of its scabbard, three feet of flashing brilliance.
“Beware not to test the edge,” Sebastião warned. “It will slice you to the bone before you even realize you have touched it.”
He handed it over to Chikunda lying flat across the upturned palms of both his hands, but he wore the worried look of a mother cat when she allows her kittens to be handled.
Chikunda felt a breath of whistle fluting through his teeth. The thing seemed to be alive in his hands.
“It is beautiful.” The natural warrior in him almost choked at the touch of it.
“And most deadly,” Sebastião assured.
Down the entire length of the blade, swam a most handsome undulation of subtle patterns in the steel.
“I have never seen anything quite like it,” Chikunda was mesmerized.
“This is the cutting sword. They call it a katana. The other is the companion sword, for stabbing and disemboweling.”
Faith kept an eye on the weapons as if serpents had been brought into the little cave, also detecting their lethal proportions.
“When they kill, it is not with brute force,” Sebastião explained. “They draw the weapon across the target—slashing and cutting all in one movement. When I saw you move with the sticks and watched the travel of the blows, I had a sense that you would appreciate the magnificence of my trophies.”
Carefully, he resheathed and then rewrapped his prizes and disappeared to sequester them away.
“What are you planning?” Faith asked in Swahili in the absence of the Portuguese.
“Nothing, my dove. Just idle men’s chatter. Getting to know one another. This man has an unusual grace and refinement for such an outcast.”
“We too are now outcasts, and I hold that we keep our grace,” she responded.
“I think this is what the man saw in us, and I in him.”
Sebastião re-emerged from the antechamber.
“Do you want to see your shipwreck from this high angle?” the shoemaker posed.
“If it’s safe enough and the visitors are well away by now, it would be interesting.”
They ducked out of the cave mouth and Sebastião led Chikunda another hundred paces, following the gently ascending mountain track winding toward the northern boundary of the bay.
Faith elected to remain behind, keen to clean the place, she told Chikunda.
“Not too much,” he cautioned her in Swahili. “We don’t know this man’s temperament.”
“Why did you desert?” Chikunda quizzed the Portuguese man as they ambled, Jack running ahead with that one ear pricked, always alert to threats and opportunities, manufacturing some if none presented themselves.
“Life on the ocean wasn’t for me,” he answered plainly.
“Why did you go to sea then?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t choose to. My father had debts and no options.”
“How bad can it be?” Chikunda didn’t think the crew on the slaver had it too bad—or was it just relative circumstance that had bent his mind? he wondered to himself.
“The biscuits you refused for breakfast? That would have been a banquet.”
“Why so poor?”
“Crew aren’t the owner or the captain’s guests or friends. They are tools. Expendable tools.”
They reached a granite boulder extending twice their head height on the sea side of the path.
From its perch above the bush they could scan the whole bay, all of its beaches and down onto the ocean flat as a lake and clear as spirits. Rock outcrops divided the beach into four equal parts. Dark fingers of rocky reef and kelp reached from the shore out toward the center of the bay where the water became too deep to discern the white sand from the outcrops.
“What do they do with my people,” Chikunda quizzed.
“Beyond the sea? Well, there is another great land out there,” he waved toward the western horizon. “The Americas they are called. Two continents… Like your Africa, two large landmasses. I believe that your ship was bound for Terra de Santa Cruz… for Brazil. A place where, it is said that farms reach as far as the eye can see. They need your labor.”
Chikunda contemplated the possibility of it, of a land beyond sight.
Jack held vigil on the path below the men, whimpering sulkily at being abandoned at path-level.
“Can we see this land? If we climb this mountain behind us perhaps?”
The Portuguese laughed at the thought.
“No, my friend. It is too far. Not days, not weeks, but—like Nippon—months of sailing.”
“Months? Moons?”
“Moons, yes. And it is below the horizon. Far below. This earth under our feet is round. You understand? Like a… a…”
Much to Jack’s delight, he jumped down from their perch, scouted and picked up a rock of approximate spherical shape then climbed back up.
“Like this. We would be here, you see, and then the other land would be there… and Nippon,” he sought a spot almost on the opposite side of the rock to touch his finger to, “would be there.”
Sebastião held the spherical rock with three fingers touching its surface approximately all equally distant from one another.
Chikunda eyed him carefully for a hint of humour, as though he might peel into laughter for tricking a gullible victim with such an outlandish claim.
“You are surely joking?”
“No,” the cobbler sighed. “It is not my specialty or training. I can tell you no more than that as a fact, to take or to leave.”
“Hmmmm,” Chikunda frowned, puzzling the possibility. “Are there no people there to do this work?”
“Truly… yes. Yes, I believe there are. But quite why they don’t use them, I cannot answer either. I am, at best, a shoemaker and, at worst, a failed sailor. My mind is no better than yours, my little knowledge belongs to others.”
They sat in silence a while, the conversation echoing in their heads.
Down below, next to a rock pinnacle that looked like a cherry placed atop the water in the low tide, was the barest outline of the wrecked
slave ship.
“Most days, the waves down there where you wrecked are fierce. In winter storms it is a cauldron. Someday, the last of that wreck will all be gone without a trace,” Sebastião predicted. “Nobody will know what great drama played out here.”
Chikunda nodded in agreement. He’d seen how swiftly the Atlantic had swallowed the evidence of her cruelty.
“Where were we when you saw us?”
“Yonder,” Sebastião answered, pointing halfway to the horizon and halfway down the coast to where a big prominent mountain stood in relief, obscuring whatever lay further to the south of it. “It was a vile day and I felt pity for whoever found themselves on this mercilous ocean that afternoon.”
He pointed west, to a spot out in the deep, perhaps a nautical mile or more out to sea.
“You can’t see it now, but there is a deep and hidden reef there. I watched your ship on its northward tack, tracking directly toward it, my elevation up here giving me the full scope of what was happening and about to happen.”
“We saw the waves,” Chikunda recalled. “Perhaps as tall as our mast when the squall cleared and the source of that booming thunder was revealed.”
“Aye. Your Master must have been an experienced man. I saw him veer from it with no more than three ship lengths of safety. And then you came in here, under this cliff.”
His finger traced in agreement with Chikunda’s precise memory.
“I saw that reef loom too,” Chikunda pointed to the pinnacle just a cable in distance out from the cherry-shaped rock on which they had ultimately foundered.”
“I was surprised that your captain did not make for the safe haven of that beach over there, in behind the ridge where I found you yesterday.”
“I believe he tried,” Chikunda confirmed, “but our steering was broken.”
“How does a slave chained in the holds know so much?” The Portuguese eyed him suspiciously. “Come to think of it… how did this slave manage to avoid drowning with his fellows? Or did you escape after being saved?”
“It is complicated,” Chikunda was unsure of the dangers or advantages of saying more.
“Now this sounds most intriguing,” those blue eyes squinted. “I have time and curiosity. I’m sure you can imagine, after saving you from certain peril… well. I feel I deserve better than secrecy… my home open to you.”
Chikunda explained how, when loaded aboard, Alfonso Oliveira, the bosun who was in charge of discipline, a wicked rotund man with a nose like a red bulb, had taken exception to Chikunda’s bearing on sight.
How this man had branded him with particular cruelty and relish.
He lifted his shirt to show the Portuguese man the wicked cicatrices of new scar tissue, his left nipple swallowed by the angry keloid welts that looked like coarse and knotted ropes under the skin.
Even accustomed to the ravages that a cruel life could visit on its victims, Sebastião grimaced at the sight of it.
Chikunda described how, when Antonio Pereira, the Captain of the ship São José de Afrika, had intervened, an evidently long brewing tension between the men had come to its head.
Upon learning that Chikunda was a devout Christian and that his wife, Faith, was also, the captain—citing the English law that no Christian could be taken into slavery, perhaps to irk the bosun—had spared the couple passage below decks and he had given them privileges that had kept them alive.
When the prospect of the ship’s grounding became obvious, the bosun had ordered Faith and Chikunda chained to one another through a hawsehole on the deck.
As the ship had groaned on the slacking tide, hard aground on the reef, fate had intervened and broken her back, freeing the couple from their chained imprisonment in the black of night. Under the cover of that darkness, they had made landfall and escaped to the safe haven six cables in distance south along the coast, to where Sebastião had eventually spied and then confronted them.
“I have heard of this man, of this bosun, Alfonso. He’s a butcher.” The cobbler nodded gravely and spat as if the mere thought of him brought bile to his mouth. “A crueler bastard, they say, has never darkened these shores.”
The whites of Chikunda’s eyes became beacons against the anthracite black of his tropical skin.
“He is about? You speak in the present, as if he dwells here still.”
“Indeed,” Sebastião nodded bleakly. “The captain of your ship and most of that crew have found passage out on other ships. You have chosen tumultuous times to drop in on this little colony.” The shoemaker grunted at his own understatement. “Governorship here is far from settled. The Dutch governor still packing, the English Admiral holding the fort, the townsfolk and farmers confused as to who their master may be. Your shipmates—those other wretches like you, salvaged as they were from that storm—were sold the day after you wrecked to defray costs and the money owed to crew paid. It is said that this Alfonso pig lost most of his earnings in the taverns of the towns and on the whores. He is as marooned as you are. Though now, I understand, he has better prospects.”
Chikunda had stood on blind impulse and was frantically pacing the small pinnacle that had been their throne for the last several minutes.
Jack gave a yap of elation that his isolation seemed at its end.
Chikunda heard nothing but the terror echoing within his head. The terror of it projected from his eyes, his vision fixed far and distant, as if he was already fleeing toward the horizon.
“Better prospects?” he quizzed, a frown furrowing his brow.
“The drunken old Dutch executioner in the town has lost the stomach for torture. He leaves that to his new assistant, who, I’m told, relishes in it.”
There was no need to connect dots any further.
“Does he know about us?” Chikunda’s pitch rising sharply, sweat prickling on his brow.
“In all likelihood, by now, yes.” Sebastião did not coat it. “I’ll wager, he’s setting up a posse and bounty hunters. You might be his ticket out of here, you see.”
“Ticket?” Chikunda’s fingers were knitted behind his head, his elbows almost touching, his forearms trying to crush the anguish out of his brain.
“You’re legally still his property. He’s the most senior officer of that slave ship left on this coast. If he finds you, you belong to his ship and therefore to him.”
“We must go then,” Chikunda made to bound down off the rock, his body language signaling that they make haste back to the cave to begin fleeing.
“Sit down,” Sebastião insisted. “Running now is the worst thing you can do. Now is the time for a cool and calculating head. I convinced the garrison that you would have escaped along the coast, south toward that mountain. That’s where they’ll send the search.”
“What is in that direction, behind the mountain?” he asked, indicating southward.
“Another bay, Chapman’s Bay it is called. It used to be a great wooded valley they say. A bay of hout—that’s ‘wood’ in the Dutch tongue—much of it cut down now. Sand dunes and a few fishermen are left. Beyond that, is a tall cliff, Chapman’s Peak—it is impassable. There is a pass to the east, between the mountains, up a valley and river. If you cross through there, you are onto flat lands, sand dunes and scrub for two days’ walk. And then you reach the mountains again—the rest of Africa—Hottentots Holland they call that mountain range. It is a wild place, but you look like quite a wild man and may survive.”
“And my wife?”
“Rough going, especially with another mouth to feed, my friend. You could stick to the coast at the Hottentots Holland. Rumor has it that there is a community of runaway slaves somewhere along that coast. The drosters, they’re called. Dangerous men living at the boundary of desperation. I’m not sure I’d take a wife and child there.” He paused. “Besides, the day will come when their owners in the town and out on the farms will want them back or at least avenge their losses. There will be hell to pay.”
“And this path?” Chikunda indicated
the extension of the track that they had walked up from the cave dwelling. It snaked its way further to the north and out of sight around a headland.
“It descends back to the coast, but you can’t take it.” He grimaced. “It leads down and along a narrow coastal plain where cattle graze and directly into the town. The town blocks the entire passage beyond, from Table Bay beach to the lower slopes of Table Mountain. There is no way through in this direction, my friend. The first structure you’ll come to on this path will be your old friend Alfonso’s place of work at Gallows Hill. It sits between us and the settlement, overlooking the ships at anchor. These people, the Dutch and English, are most macabre in that way. It is the finest view that any scaffold you don’t wish to stand on could have… and the bodies regularly dance at the end of a rope there, providing fine and free entertainment for the sailors at anchor too. The only way out for you is along that path to the south to Chapman’s Bay,” he declared, pointing, “or perhaps up and over those cliffs to the top of Table Mountain. But I’ve heard of nobody who has tried that and returned to talk about it.”
Chapter 3
“I’m against it and begging you not to go,” Faith insisted in Swahili, tears of fear pooling in her eyes. “And if you do go, I will not stay here.”
“Impossible for you to come along. The path is steep and the bush thick, my dove.”
“There are leopards on this mountain,” Faith bargained. “The white man said that they hunt the livestock on the fringes of the town.”
“If they are there, then they are here too,” Chikunda countered, “and we have thus far been safe.”
“Well, I’m not staying here,” she emphasized.
“There is nowhere else for you,” Chikunda pointed out.
“I don’t see why you would want to go. What is there to see? There is no point.”
“I need to estimate the magnitude of the challenge that we face, dove. That mountain is bigger than it looks, the distances wider, the going worse.”
The Reckoning Page 3
