“This man,” she indicated toward Sebastião, “says it is dangerous… this notion of yours and the trip you expect us to do.”
“By all means, speak in private,” Sebastião suggested in Portuguese, “but if you point to me and talk about me in my presence… perhaps consider it a little rude.”
There was a brittle edge to the bachelor’s voice, as if they were nearing the end of their welcome. Or perhaps it was, as he hinted, a cultural affront to whisper secrets.
“I am sorry,” Faith admitted timidly in Portuguese, and squeezed past the cupboard and through the fissure into the dwelling cave beyond.
“Are you still intent on this?” the cobbler quizzed Chikunda, easily guessing what the heated debate had been about.
“If you were me?”
“I’d do it, yes. You really have no option, you can’t begin this journey blind, and you must begin it soon. But I do understand her disquiet too,” Sebastião waved toward the dark cave where Faith had disappeared.
“It is stressful.”
“She’s worried about me? About being left alone with me?”
“No. That’s not why she pointed to you. She pointed out that even you said it was dangerous. To go scouting.”
“Aye… but necessary too,” Sebastião agreed. “And, yes, I’m a stranger. It will take you a full day to complete for sure. I can leave her here alone and busy myself if it pleases her. I have errands to run. She can hole up in there.”
“I’d be more comfortable if you remained,” Chikunda admitted.
“Well…” he huffed. “I could do both. I’m in need of more seafood for dinner, eggs and a pail of milk. I could busy myself for half the day with these things. When are you thinking of going?”
“Tomorrow,” Chikunda proposed.
Sebastião whistled through his teeth. “You felt the hot wind of today and saw the crown of cloud on the mountain just now?” He waved vaguely up and behind the hovel, indicating toward the crest of the mountain. “When that lion’s head wears a mane of cloud, we have two days of rain ahead. The mountain can be treacherous when it’s under a blanket.”
“I can move cautiously… get out at first light.”
“And the town will be socked in anyway. You won’t see much.”
“The weather here seems to come in waves. It should clear enough to give me a glimpse and some bearings.”
“It should,” Sebastião agreed.
“Can you harvest shellfish when the weather turns?”
“If you know where to look,” the genial Portuguese nodded.
“Where’s the path?” Chikunda ducked outside.
Sebastião followed him.
“Pretty straightforward. Get off this track as soon as you can, a few hundred paces up this road past where we sat. Aim for that outcrop of boulders there, you’ll find the game path.” He pointed to the skyline of the ridge where a boulder field stood on the saddle of a ridge.
It looked to be perhaps half a mile of slog.
“The bush is thick and full of thistle, best you use my leather leggings or you’ll be torn to shreds. And you’re in luck—I’m a cobbler, of course.” He dug in a well-worn chest and produced a set of fine-looking boots. “Fixed them for a man, but he accepted the wrong duel before he could return for them.”
“Thank you.” Chikunda took them. “They may fit. And beyond that ridge?”
“You’ll see when you’re there, it’s obvious. The saddle of that ridge extends to the north. Once you’re at the top, follow it. The whole plan of the town will be set below you. Take care, particularly of snakes at this time of year.”
“Venomous ones?”
“Cobras, adders… puff adders.”
“What do adders look like? Are they dangerous?”
The Portuguese rolled his eyes.
“Long as my arm, but much thicker. Diamond pattern, diamond-shaped head. You don’t want to get bitten.”
It was still in the black of night and under a drizzling cloak of miserable rain when Chikunda kissed his bride goodbye and stepped out into the dark, moving quickly out of earshot of her tearful protestations.
Second-guessing the wisdom of his trek, he hardened his heart against the pull to be back inside the claustrophobic cave under the stinking blanket, holding the most precious thing in his life to his chest.
He heard Jack’s excited barks fade as he made his way north on the path past the granite lookout where he had sat learning from the cobbler.
Eventually, his eyes adjusted to the starless dark of a cloudy pre-dawn and he stumbled less.
Four hundred slippery paces he counted from when the path flattened out from its slow ascent, and he groped for the entrance to the footpath that would take him straight up the mountain.
The Portuguese had said it would be just after the path turned sharp left on its final straightaway to the bluff and out of sight beyond.
After two false attempts, one pathway blocked by thick bush and another by a cavernous water-cut channel, he found the access point and began the laborious climb.
By the time he made the saddle of the ridge, night had given its reluctant way to an insipid dawn.
He stopped to catch his breath and to tend a minor twist to his ankle.
The drizzle stopped a while giving him a near vertical view down over the bay that had been his landing site on this tip of the continent.
His eyes were drawn to the distant ridge that punched its granite fist out into the Atlantic, drawing a southern boundary to the bay of Schoenmakers Gat. Right down below him were those last bones of his shipwreck and out beyond the ridge was the tangle of a rocky promenade that had been his temporary haven for two months.
Baai van von Kamptz was out of sight from this vantage point.
He turned his back on it all and began to bushwhack toward the skyline of ridge.
The towering grey rock cliffs of the lion’s head mountain still soared high above even at this great elevation. Closer to them now, he could see vast slab faces with vertical fractures cutting the horizontal strata and other scars the mountain must have gathered with great age.
His natural curiosity drew him to climb further, to introduce himself to this part of the continent, to slap those old buttresses as he would a good friend on the back. A good friend that had halted his miserable kidnapping and passage to another more distant foreign land from which there would certainly be no hope of return.
Instead, from that ridge still ahead he would see Africa proper again in all its breadth and majesty. The cobbler had promised that if the weather cleared, he would see thirty or more miles across the plain called the Cape Flats—a vast stretch of beach sand—to a horizon-wide rack of blue mountains in the hazy distance.
The thought of the land under his feet still being his Africa kept him trudging along, dreaming of home with each step.
The sun was shy today, briefly peeking out for a few moments between the curtains of low and weeping fog, the bush he was pushing through wet with its tears.
At noon, somewhere below his elevation, Chikunda heard the BOOM of the naval gun placed above the town on this signaling hill. The cobbler had told him to expect the sound of this newly installed mechanism designed to warn the townsfolk and ships’ crews at anchor in the bay that the noon zenith had been reached and the afternoon was beginning to waste.
In this drab light and under these miserable circumstances, the little town huddling below the vast flat-topped mountain to his right looked forlorn. But Chikunda was a man of great optimism and he saw past the bitterness of his predicament to estimate how magnificently it might present itself when the sky stretched in aching blue and the birds came out to welcome a happier day.
He stopped and allowed himself to swig from the flask that the Portuguese had loaned to him and nibble unhappily on an unpleasantly furry, tasteless little biscuit.
He took in the town through the spyglass that the shoemaker had recommended he carry. A handful of houses stood on a grid
of roads that were centred on a walled-off fort with foundations sunk into the beach. Spring tide was in and a wave surge was driven by the passing weather front, causing the water to lap against one of the fort’s buttress walls.
The fort’s footprint had a five-pointed star design with tall battlements hewn from locally quarried stone. The white cement and square blocks of rock construction gave the edifice the look of a low, squat tortoise. Offspring buildings ate the natural dunes and scrub of the bay with relentless slowness and digested them into regimented rows and columns of European order.
Small as it was, the fort looked formidable.
It took him almost the rest of the day to reach the next prominent position at the northernmost end of the mountain’s saddle.
Even from halfway to this point, he could have turned back; he’d seen enough. He’d already spied those fabled mountains of promise in the far distance.
Instead, he’d kept going, pretending to himself that he needed the best possible sense of what lay ahead when or if he and Faith ever made it southward past the garrison at Baai van von Kamptz, along the coast via the wooded fishing bay, its valley leading to the small mountain pass and perhaps on to freedom in the distant mountains.
In truth, he knew the real reason he’d pressed on was the mention of his nemesis, the cruel bosun aboard the slaver, Alfonso Oliveira. Something sliding through Chikunda’s gut since he’d heard that name again had kept him driving onward—a peculiar compulsion to look down onto the grisly apparatus at Gallows Hill, which was evidently this man’s lair. The horror of fascination kept him accelerating onward as the sun slowly sank through the heavens.
But the vantage point he’d hoped to find for this purpose was an elusive beast.
Each time he set his eyes on the point he must reach to secure the view, he arrived there to find it to be a false promise. From each new vantage point, he would realize the real location that would afford him a sighting, and it always lay a short, tantalizing distance ahead.
Far out in the middle of the large bay lay an island. The cobbler had said it was good hunting grounds for seals, or robbe in Dutch. They called it Robben Island, a place of banishment for misdemeanours.
And so it was that when the weather began to clear in the late afternoon and the sun came out to direct its shimmering beam at Chikunda across the undulating grey-green ocean, the place of execution finally came into view.
There was not much there—nothing to see from this elevation even through the spyglass. Some wooden poles set into the ground and other timber structures atop a well-worn parade ground of sorts.
Nobody was about.
It hadn’t been worth the effort and waste of precious time, and Chikunda cursed his own foolishness for having pressed on and on.
He’d made his approach to this point along the eastern flank of the signalling hill above the town.
Turning back to try and reach Faith before sunset, he took the more direct route, traversing the western side with the ocean at his right shoulder.
One last look over Table Bay where a dozen ships lay at anchor in the bay, the forbidding masts and spars, ropes and reefed sails sending shivers of memory through his whole body. The three weeks he’d spent on one of these creaking, stinking torture contraptions had scarred him for life. He felt only dread at their sight.
He turned away and began to move quickly, making easier progress on this arider stretch of the mountain.
Down below, a green common was spread around a flooded waterway and through the spy glass he saw two dirt tracks running parallel for the length of the coast, one near the water, the other closer to the slope.
Clutches of cattle grazed in various places, evidently not being tended.
The coastline beyond was rocky with no sign of beach for safe landing. The rock of this shore was black and angular, lying in rows of nearly military formation pointing from the shore to the sea.
It seemed curious to him that the rounded, light-coloured granite rock didn’t exist here and the black angular rock found here didn’t exist in the place he had been living not far distant.
Through some recent education at the Mission where he and Faith had met, his natural curiosity for all things strange and remarkable had been strummed.
These kinds of details—when one kind of rock became another, or why and how this might be—fixated his mind.
Most people he had met during his lifetime considered this sort of fascination with details to be a waste of time, and even Chikunda could not answer to himself why gathering knowledge mattered to him.
He now simply accepted that he was built this way and no longer questioned it.
The urge to witness this transition kept his eyes peeled to distinguish the point at which one sort of rock gave way to the other.
Now it was a race against the setting sun, inching as it was closer toward the horizon with every stride he made.
By the time the sun’s leading edge touched the water, he was arriving level with the transition of the rocks on the coastline, but still frustratingly short of the ridge that would give him first sight of the bay of Schoenmakers Gat.
He doubled his efforts on now tiring legs. Once more, he silently thanked the cobbler for the use of his good shoes and leather leggings, while the thistle-like waist-high scrub repeatedly lashed his exposed arms until they were an itchy network of cat-scratches weeping blood.
It was a moonless night and the stars had appeared.
The radiance of the Milky Way provided the only light and barks from baboons and other animal sounds set Chikunda’s nerves to jangling, unarmed and unable to defend himself if a prowling leopard was about.
Finally, stumbling and slipping, doubling back from dead-ends of bush or cervices cut by river washes and landslides into the mountain scree, he came over the brow of the last headland that gave him a view of the welcoming bay and his destination. The details were near impossible to distinguish by starlight alone.
The land pitched steeply. He began his descent on this final run, and that is when he saw the small crowd of fiery torches.
It stopped him dead in his tracks.
He studied it and saw that the lit throng was retreating, moving away from him, southward, along the contour path that he estimated the cobbler had led them on that first day heading north toward his cave.
Alarm bells were ringing in his head.
“It is rare that anyone passes this way. I go weeks without seeing a soul.” The Portuguese’s voice echoed in his head. He could taste the terror of what this portended and he accelerated, not knowing what he could do to alleviate the situation even if it proved to be the worst-case scenario.
Every conceivable possibility crowded his mind. Lost travellers? Fishermen? Customers of the shoemaker….? An ordinary patrol, perhaps?
And at that instant, the ground gave way beneath his feet, and he went with it down into the pitch-blackness like a hooded man falling through the executioner’s trapdoor.
Chapter 4
Chikunda awoke to naked agony.
The ankle he’d twisted at the start of the day was exploding with a searing pain so ferocious that he could scarcely believe a man could suffer it and still live.
He ran his hand down his leg and shin, expecting to feel the jagged bone jutting from tattered flesh. Instead, there was a bulbous swelling of a burning hot mound where his ankle should be that wobbled like a jellyfish.
He tried to adjust his position and a convulsion of new sparks from the distended limb drove his mind into new territories of torment.
He whooped with the pain of it, hot tears in his eyes.
And then the memory of why he was here and what he’d seen the moment before the fall came crashing in on him like the embankments of the trickling river he was lying in.
“Mkiwa!” he started to sob, repeating the Swahili name of his wife somewhere out there in the night, most likely being ushered away by the torches. Or—the optimist in him fought back—safely hidden
in the cave not far away.
The truth of where she was presently was a gamble and flip of a coin. A fact already set by destiny but unknown to Chikunda, and the knowledge of this dichotomy teased him back and forth as he tried to roll to a better position and understand whether there was a way out.
But, there was nothing he could do.
It was too dark down in the ditch, too steep on either side, and the course of the river was hemmed in by matted bush.
So there Chikunda lay and he began to weep. For his circumstance, for his pain, and for the outcome of his wife’s well-being that was already set.
Hours dragged by and the only visible thing, the stars in a narrow band of sky above, crept slowly along in the sky above.
The only comfort Chikunda could find was by elevating that ankle up the embankment he had fallen down. This put his head and shoulders into the icy slosh of the rivulet that had steadily cut this course he was trapped in.
Finally, the bird songs began and the land above him showed the first blush of dawn creeping in.
As the stars gave way to the pale morning light, he began to see his way out of the water-cut crevasse.
The sides of it were taller than he stood by twice his height, but downstream the course seemed open. Just a dry dead thicket of bush plugged his route out of the tight valley.
Preparing himself for the onslaught of pain it would cost him to make his escape; he laid his swollen ankle into the numbing cold of the stream. Very slowly some relief washed over him, but his anguish about what he might find when he reached the cobbler’s cave was now at a fever pitch and he found himself whimpering again, not even from the pain but from the fear of an unknown reality.
The surf was running angry and savage, monstrous waves curling in slow motion on the outer reefs far below the path. Yet, the sky was clear and achingly blue as Chikunda hobbled down the path, dragging his swollen ankle on a makeshift branch that he used as a crutch to prop up his right side.
It was slow going over the rough track, but Chikunda made the best time possible. He passed the path by which he’d accessed the mountain more than twenty-four hours earlier, then the descent began and he passed the granite boulder on which he’d sat with the cobbler, discussing the wreck.
The Reckoning (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 2) Page 4
