As he crested, it was as if nature itself wished to hinder his return to captivity. At the skyline, the full force of the storm struck him in the chest with cannon blasts of air, each as heavy as a punch. The sleet it carried stung like icy shrapnel harvested deep in the South Atlantic.
Out in the bay, half a dozen bucking ships strained at anchor, dwarfed by the cobalt ocean beyond, facing into the tempest and rising swell. Their masts and rigging were bare as witches’ brooms and their crews battened out of sight.
In the fading light, he saw with horror how the pattern and distances between the ships were slowly changing.
Anchors were dragging.
He’d carefully stowed his load in a small crawlspace under a boulder off the path in the lee of the storm.
Empty handed, down the path he plunged toward the impending catastrophe.
As he ran, his mind bitterly protested.
What was he running for?
To assist people who enslaved him?
To avoid a sanction for not doing so?
To win approval?
There were no answers, just the blind urge to help another being in peril.
To his right, he could hear the roar of the river that ran into the Buitengracht channel.
Three thousand spine-jarring paces downhill and the track flattened out.
Jack was at a full gallop, enjoying the thrill of stretching his young legs with his new master giving chase.
It was now almost totally dark and he could see torches at the shoreline where the first of the boats was already in the surf line just off the town.
He reached a culvert where the Buitengracht water raged below, boulders tumbling down the channel sounding like giants plodding in the depths, the floor shuddering with each footfall.
Over it he vaulted at a sprint and on toward the cluster of torches.
Above the sounds of the ocean dumpers and the howling tempest, he could hear the crash of timbers and screams of drowning men.
In the dim light of the spluttering torches, the white of flung water and spray revealed a nightmarish scene—a ship in the wave line. It was tilted by the waves, careened over on its port side with its mast facing the beach and men clamouring and clinging to it.
Perhaps it was the howls of terror so fresh in his memory, the ones that still tormented his dreams at night, the screams of his own fated slave shipwreck that had delivered him to these shores; but some insanity drove Chikunda in his headlong dash. He didn’t stop to think of consequences.
Driven by a manic instinct deep within, he threw his clothes aside as he ran and went out into the maelstrom, bounding naked on long legs like a gazelle over the incoming white water.
Shouts of surprise, horror and caution spontaneously rang out from the watching throng.
He grabbed the first body he came to and saw that it had no life still in it, so he skirmished with the rip of water on to the next.
He grabbed the thrashing unfortunate and the man raged to life in a blind panic. He tried to climb on top of Chikunda to get away from the haul of the sideways current in chest deep water.
Chikunda went with the man’s force, under, the man clawing on top of him, using him as a step.
Born to a fishing tribe and accustomed to the ocean waves since he could toddle, Chikunda kept his head in the moment of panic. He did not fight but slipped out from under the man and let the current move him out of range before he surfaced a second later and a fathom’s distance away.
The man was back down in the boil, swirling and tumbling.
Chikunda chose his moment and lunged in, grabbing the man from behind, sliding his arms under the man’s armpits and locking his fingers behind the man’s head. In part, to subdue the victim’s attempts to fight and in part, to keep the man’s head above water.
The ocean was drawing back for another mighty wave of white water and the suck of current made Chikunda’s heels drag toward the horizon along the ocean’s bottom as if he was ploughing a pair of long furrows out to sea.
On shore, Jack patrolled the water’s edge in a panicked trot, bounding as if he had springs on his front legs to get a view of his master fighting the sea.
The next wave ended the slide, and hit them like a runaway bull, sending Chikunda and the victim tumbling head over heel back toward the shore.
This was the way of the ocean, and Chikunda knew how to beat it—relax and rest when the current carries you in a preferred direction, resist with minimum effort it’s attempts to drag you away.
Three more cycles of drag out to sea and roll back in, and Chikunda had the man in thigh-deep water.
During the fight he had drifted half a cable in distance along the beach and away from the torches, but men were following them along the shoreline. They ran in when they dared and took the man from him.
Before hearing their thanks, Chikunda, naked, sprinted back toward the knot of the action, Jack keeping pace.
He bounded out once more to repeat his efforts.
When he had brought three men out, other saviours gained courage by his efforts and dared further into the surf trying to help, but they failed to strip their clothes off and Chikunda had to turn from his task to save his new assistants, their clothes sodden and acting like spinnakers, dragging them relentlessly into deep water.
“Take off! Take off!” Chikunda yelled in poor English at a man as he brought him, spluttering, to safety. “Water pull you!”
He pointed out to sea, pantomiming it for the watchers, not caring that he was naked and that women numbered among the panicked onlookers, seeing but not registering the ugly block that was the Bosun there under a hat running like a waterfall from its wide brim.
“OFF!” he emphasized, “DROWN!”
And he whirled, going out for a fourth man to save.
With a thunderous crash, the ship’s hull was staved in by a gargantuan set of waves that rolled Chikunda up the beach to where the rapidly retreating spectators had just stood.
He stood there facing the ocean, alive with new thrashing bodies coughed out of the holds, his black nakedness glistening in the insipid light.
As the waves sent the last of half a dozen behemoth walls of water up the beach, Chikunda went in for his seventh victim and two naked white rescuers joined him, more tentative, up to their thighs only and less bold.
At the sight of the pair of naked white men, men ashore began herding the women together and steering them steadily away from the action.
When the ship’s two halves had been decimated to threadbare planking and drifted far apart, the sea began to empty of life.
Some bodies still floated limply and were washed ashore, but none fought for life.
Chikunda crawled, naked, as high as he could above the highwater mark and collapsed in exhaustion there, his clothing long since washed away. Jack desperately tried to lick his face as if re-establishing a connection in peril.
The town physician was down attending to the survivors, the priest attending to the dead.
Nobody paid attention to Chikunda until the Bosun swayed over, Jack getting up and clearing out of striking distance.
“So, you disappear with my boat, and then reappear, naked out of the night, you black bastard? Then you show pretence at being the hero?” he accused in Portuguese. “Pick yourself up, hide that shameful nakedness, and get back to your cage. I’ll deal with you later.”
He turned and wandered nonchalantly off with his hands still behind his back and Jack slunk back.
Chikunda rolled to his knees, groaning for his abused body and spluttering out the swallowed water.
All about was the flotsam of the wreck, sodden and covered in the muck of yellow foam whipped up like egg whites by the fury of the surf.
Unnoticed in the near dark, he stumbled about, looking for fabric enough to cover his nakedness, and then he started for his prison.
The Bosun arrived horrendously drunk much later.
A thud and Jack’s yelp beyond the bars annou
nced his stumbling approach.
Chikunda heard the dog’s nails clatter away on the cobble street as he scurried to escape.
“Y’a black bastard,” the man slurred at the grating to the cellar. “Took my boat and gone, eh? And where to? I’d thrash the hide off you but for the governor’s wife.”
He paused so long that Chikunda thought he’d imagined it or the man had stolen away, but then he spoke again.
“That filly has an eye for a black cock too, I might tell you. Took an unhealthy interest in you, all naked frolicking in the surf like you did. Now the governor wants to see me, and you know what happens if it’s not good, eh?”
Then the door bolt shot home, locked from the outside and the Bosun blundered away muttering darkly to himself.
Chikunda lay in the pitch and silence of the dungeon, the rain still clattering onto stone outside.
Moments later came the crash of the man going through the front door.
Time stretched as Chikunda’s mind raced to all the possibilities of what might happen.
A few moments later, there was another crash on the floorboards above and Faith screamed.
Chapter 9
They trudged in silence up the path that ran alongside the Buitengracht channel, still a torrent draining two days’ worth of deluge from up in the mountains.
“Walk,” the Bosun would periodically order Chikunda. From his hand swung the heavy wooden club.
Try as he might, Chikunda could not read his master’s mood today.
Two days after the storm, and two days before this hike, he’d gone to the fort looking sullen. As he’d left he’d locked Chikunda in the basement and threatened unholy cruelties if his visit met bad tidings.
In the late hours of that night, with the full moon casting sharp vertical shadows from a clear and still sky, the gargoyle that was the Bosun’s face had smeared itself against the dungeon’s bars, growling inarticulate nonsense through the window grate.
It was guttural and full of references to bodily functions and dimensions.
Quite out of character, he hadn’t even tried to kick Jack.
Among the garble, had been good tidings from the Governor and many accolades for the happy master for owning such a prize beast.
Now, as they trudged on up the Nek in silence, Jack slunk a few paces behind.
They were heading for the abandoned rowing boat in the shoemaker’s bay.
When they reached the dinghy, the Bosun would never allow the dog aboard, so Chikunda rounded on him.
“Get! T’sak!” he hissed at the dog, making a start toward him to chase Jack back down to the town.
“Leave the dumb cur,” the Bosun ordered. “Let it walk over the hill with us. Make a pitiful meal for a leopard on the return, but still….”
And that? Chikunda wondered. The Bosun had wished an unpleasant fate on the dog, but in the tone of an old friend.
It was confusing.
Chikunda’s mind set to unravelling what might be up with this irrational swerve in character and demeanour.
The man was still mostly drunk, and that could be an answer.
As they trudged in silence through the dewy morning air, ever up toward the cliffs and clouds and the pass between them, “Allaaaaahhhhhhhuuu Ak-bar…” a muezzin crier in the Moslem minaret struck a ululating tune.
“Allaaahhhhhhuuu Ak-bar…”
The sound of it was crisp and clipped on the morning air, ringing out melodiously from the Bo-Kaap community to their right, overlooking the town.
“Allaaahhhhhuuu Ak-bar… Allaaahhhhhuuu Ak-bar… Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah.”
It sent Chikunda’s mind racing back to the drunken, slurring arrival of the Bosun, back from his summoned visit to the fort and drunken binge into the small hours.
“Allaaahhhonnngblack-cock…” the Bosun had yodeled in English, coming up the cobbled lane two drunken nights ago.
“Allahhhong-llllllong-lllllonnngblack-cock….”
He’d lampooned the daily call to prayer that spiced the air over the town with its echo of Malaysian heritage.
“Your thick cock did the trick, boy!” He’d started yelling publicly to Chikunda when he was close enough, crashing headlong into the bars of the cellar window.
This had made him roar with laughter and he’d pealed once more into another throaty rendition of self-amused wailing. “Allahhongblack-cock… Allahhhonnng-lllllong-llllonnnngblack-cock”.
“Shut up, you drunken sod!” someone had boomed from one of the neighbouring houses, sending the Bosun into a staggering, club wielding rampage in the direction of the complaint, his threats of official privilege hurled in response toward the unseen complainant.
“That thick black cock did it boy!” He’d come staggering back to the barred cellar dungeon and roared his gormless newfound wisdom to the still night air.
He’d repeated it with unbridled hilarity until it became a gut-wrenching cough.
The laughter had ended in a heavy glob of phlegm spat onto the cobbles, the sound of its wetness slapping the ground echoing like a clicked finger down the cobbled street.
“Y’a get some sleep y’a fine stallion,” he’d eventually roared and then crashed through the door of the house above.
Chikunda had lain for another sleepless night under the creaking boards of the woman he loved, the wife he’d die for and the child he would soon hear.
From the day of his surrender, he had not yet been allowed so much as a glimpse of or word to Faith. Always locked in the house, he’d only seen her shadow within, heard her voice seldom and her cry often.
The next day, the Bosun had suffered the usual hangover in attitude.
Another hangover of self-loathing and silence.
And on the second day, Chikunda had been let out of his pen and sent on errands.
In the town, eyes had been on him from every quarter, words spoken behind hands, but a nod here and a smile there suggested that his standing had risen immeasurably in the small town.
This morning he’d been fetched early and told, “We walk to fetch the boat. I’m coming with to ensure my fine stallion comes to no harm, valuable as he now is.”
Valuable as he now is…. The words kept echoing in Chikunda’s head, his mind trying to discern what he could from the intonation of it. It was at once encouraging and daunting, and the Bosun seemed to be squeezing every last torture he could from the obscurity and what he wasn’t saying.
“And that woman,” he now dropped offhandedly. “Not as valuable, but still useful… and of course problematic.”
That was all he said; Chikunda’s eyes on him begging for more but daring not to voice it.
As they went, Chikunda smelled the stale smell of excessive alcohol processed into sweat, and he saw a stagger in the Bosun’s walk, the damp crescents of wetness staining at the man’s armpits.
Strangers they passed kept a wide berth and found reasons to face the other way and not greet them.
The Bosun moved cautiously, his eyes bloodshot red and not focusing properly, his nose like a glowing coal on his face.
Eventually, the water of the stream ran clear and fresh down past them as they got above the settlement, well up the Nek from the Buitengraght.
The Bosun stopped to drink with a cupped hand and Chikunda took time to peer down toward the beach where he must shortly navigate the dinghy in through the still-large swells wrapping in there.
Jack was there, of course, his tongue hanging out and panting ten paces behind, patiently waiting for his turn at the brook.
The two halves of the wreck from days before were some distance apart. A little army of scavengers attended each of these, the hulks being deconstructed for their timers, the minor valuables long since secured at the fort.
He could pick out the house where Faith was locked at this very instant. It was two streets up from the stone fort and three streets in the direction of the signalling hill. It ran up to the Square, to the Plein in the local Dutch dialect, name
d after the settlement’s founder, van Riebeeck.
Chikunda heard the stream water running past change its tune—it had gained a tinkle. Impulsively, he turned from the view and looked directly at the boiling and beer-frothing bubbles from the new feed.
“Just topping it up,” the Bosun explained with a laugh.
The stumpy thing in his hand had an open sore on it. It was out through his breeches and arcing a stream of urine—so yellow it looked like it may employ a doctor—into the river that made a brief stop in the town’s reservoir before its overflow flushed into the Buitengracht.
“Let them all taste what fine grog I swallowed, eh?”
He shook the thing vigorously and it disappeared into his codpiece.
“Let me explain,” he began, in an ominously friendly tone as they continued their walk. “You have now gained a significant ally in the wife of the Governor. She harbours a quaint notion that those useless wretches you so boldly hauled from the sea were worth our time. Worth the risk of my valuable property. An English convict ship full of inmates you saved, no less. On their way to Australia. You know what a convict is?”
“Sir… yes. A prisoner.”
“Indeed. White, but no better than you, a slave. So hardly worth the heroics, no? But, that said, it seems the act impressed, even if the action was questionable.”
“Sir?”
“Not very bright, are you? No matter.” He sighed theatrically, as if talking to an imbecile. “People thought you were very brave, and a fine specimen at that. The Governor’s wife most particularly. Unsurprising, I’d say. An old man like that… his quill no doubt long since out of ink, eh? Now there’s something for you to think about when you lay in your dungeon at night rubbing dubbin into the old leather.”
And he laughed again, twirling his club round and round.
Jack, back in tow, halted nervously.
“Well, let’s just say, the price I was offered for you could set me up very nicely back home.” He paused, examining the thought as the crest of the mountain’s saddle came into view. “Then again, I’m not sure I want to leave this place anymore. My life is good here. The bay is handsome, the women compliant at the right price, and when you finally grow some and see to it Vermaak takes a swim—well... This business becomes my stage.”
The Reckoning Page 10
