Nobody's Slave (11 page)

‘That one over there, behind the screens! Come on, you lubbers, heave!' The bosun roared his encouragement as they wrenched the heavy gun into position behind the wicker screens which Robert Barrett’s advance party had prepared to protect the gunners.

‘Do we fire now?’

‘No. Await your orders. First I must look around, and have a conference with the African king.’  Hawkins stood calmly on their right, the sun flashing on his armoured chest, looking at the town. The wooden walls were at least ten feet high, protected by thorn bushes and a ditch in front. There were two massive timber gates. All along the wall they could see spears and the heads of warriors, watching them across the river.

‘’Twill be a tough nut to crack, this’n,’ muttered Andrew Baines, shoving his lank brown hair out of his eyes.

‘Don't you believe it, boy.’ The bosun spat contemptously, watching the spittle sizzle on the sun-warmed barrel of his gun. ‘A few dozen rounds on they gates’ll soon have 'em down. And then look at all the friends we got!’

The Sumba army was indeed huge, ringing the city in all directions. Tom saw little groups moving about on the hills and the edges of the forest everywhere, like hordes of busy ants. And by mid-afternoon, when the king had deployed most of his forces on the hill behind the town, their numbers became even more apparent. Several thousands, certainly - the grass of the low hills was entirely blotted out by them as they formed up, swarm after swarm, just out of bowshot of the walls. Then they began their drumming, roll after roll of it, punctuated by deep menacing yells of defiance, when a thousand throats opened together like the voice of the hillside itself.

T
HE ATTACK began the following afternoon.  Hawkins had surveyed the scene, and persuaded the Sumba kings to divide their forces. Most of them went to the far side of the town, away from the river, to attack from there. The remainder, several thousand strong, stayed with Hawkins outside the main gates.

The Sumba warriors clustered in ranks on the meadow in front of the main gates, just out of arrow range.  The cannon prepared to fire from their safe position on the far bank of the river. The English gunners crouched around them, waiting for the order to fire. Tom and all the English sailors who were not manning the cannon crossed the river in a boat, and stood together in two ranks beside the Sumba. A dozen men armed with long muskets – arquebuses – stood to the left. On his right, a group of crossbowmen waited in line, a small fire blazing behind them.

Tom, like most of the sailors, was sweating under a stout leather jerkin, his cutlass and pistols ready in his belt. John Hawkins and the other English officers wore gleaming armour and helmets. Hawkins was studying the scene keenly, but beside him, Tom noticed, the tall, disdainful figure of Lord Fitzwilliam was affectedly humming a madrigal, while he examined a flower he had picked as though it was the most important thing in the world.

The defenders on the city walls were less phlegmatic. They chanted defiantly back, clashed their spears across their shields, and then burst into hoots of mocking laughter as a stuffed pigskin was hung over the wall, wearing a blue feather headdress like that of the Sumba king, with a spear stuck up its backside.

‘All right, it’s time to begin,’ Hawkins said. He raised his hand in signal to Robert Barrett, who was in charge of the cannon across the river.

The flat boom of the first cannon stilled the jeering racket to a shocked hush, an echoing silence fanned by the flurried wings of flamingoes fleeing into the air from the river, staining the sky pink for a moment as though sunset had come too soon. Tom looked back across the river, and saw the glow of Andrew Baines's slowmatch as he applied it to the touch-hole of the second cannon. There was a fizz and smoke of powder, and then, a clear second later, the roar of the cannon as it leapt back against its restraining ropes. Then the gunners ran it forward, sponged it out, poured the next charge in, loaded the wad and the shot, while the next gun went off, and then the next, the stunned silences between broken only by the shrill screaming of a child somewhere behind the town wall.

‘Two and five are too high,’ Hawkins said. ‘They need to drop down a little and aim for the white marks.’

But Robert Barrett had noticed this too. Looking back across the river Tom saw him talking urgently to the gunners, and pointing at the white scars the shot had made in the wood of the gates, halfway up.

The guns fired again, this time to a rippling roar of triumph from their allies massed around them. The Sumba army surged forward towards the town, chanting and clashing their spears on their shields, but a shower of arrows drove them back. Several Sumba warriors fell, struggling, into hidden pits which had been dug in the ground. The defenders screamed, and fired arrows onto the men struggling to climb out of the pits.

An arrow whispered past Tom's head, and another bounced off the Admiral’s gleaming breastplate. A man beside Hawkins blew a loud blast on his trumpet, the signal for the arquebusiers to fire. As the men put their slow-matches to the pans, puffs of smoke and sparks fizzed around their faces as though they were magicians. Then the muskets went off, in a long uneven crackle of sound. Tom saw an African warrior on the wall spin round and collapse, throwing out his arms with a wild scream as he fell; but his foot caught in a withy at the top of the wall, so that he swung in hard against it as he fell, and hung there upside down, limp and horrible like a broken doll.

Again the guns fired, and this time the gates looked more damaged, gashed and splintered in a wide area around the centre. The attackers rushed towards them but they were met by a hail of arrows and spears from the walls beside the gates. Beside Tom, two sailors fell screaming into a hidden pit, and a Sumba warrior collapsed on top of them. Tom stumbled on, towards the gates, hoping to force them open; but just as he got there a crowd of enemy warriors appeared from nowhere, jumping down from the wall or perhaps rushing out from a side door that he hadn’t noticed. They were fierce, determined, thrusting and stabbing with spears that had long sharp blades; and after a brief, terrible struggle the Sumba warriors turned and ran, Tom and the English sailors beside them. 

‘Not so easy then,’ John Hawkins said, as the sailors rallied around him on the grass beside the river. ‘But I have a trick worth two of that.’

A cannon ball smashed more splinters out of the shattered gates, and the defending warriors hurried back behind the shelter of their walls. As they did so Tom realized that the line of crossbowmen on his right were no longer firing their short, deadly iron bolts directly at the defenders, but were shooting high, over the walls and into the town behind. And each arrow was on fire; the archers were dipping them in burning pitch before fitting them to the crossbow, so that they fell like a steady rain of fire onto the dry, palm-thatched roofs of the town. Smoke was rising everywhere, and as Tom watched a hut just behind the gates exploded into flame, the blaze rising thirty feet into the air behind the desperate defenders.

The canon fired again, this time almost all at once, and the gates sagged visibly, splintering and collapsing inwards. Encouraged by this, the Sumba warriors returned to the attack, chanting and jabbing with their spears. This time, no warriors came out, and after a brief, intense struggle the attackers managed to heave one of the smashed gates aside; and then, like water bursting through a dam, they were in. John Hawkins turned to his sailors and waved his sword forwards.

‘God and St George! Charge! Into the breach there! For Elizabeth and England!’

Tom ran with the rest, following the Sumba warriors through the shattered gates. There was still fighting all around them, the defenders screaming and stabbing with their long spears, trying to shove them shut in their faces. Tom saw his cousin Francis with two burly seamen from the
Judith
, their axes rising and falling on the shattered beams like maniacs. The bosun flung his arms around a great baulk of timber, heaving it slowly outwards until quite suddenly, just as a spear pierced his hand, it collapsed on top of him.

‘Forward! Jesus and St George!’ The remaining gate fell, crushing the timbers put there to support it, and Tom clambered through the gap with a sailor pushing him from behind and Francis running in front. Then he stumbled over a body, and by the time he had recovered Francis was gone, and there in front of Tom was a huge African warrior, yelling and raising his spear. Tom fired his pistol point blank into the man's chest, and dashed forward, side-stepping the man as he fell.

He fumbled in his belt for the second pistol, and saw the usually refined George Fitzwilliam yelling like a lunatic as he rushed ahead down the street. There were flames and burning huts everywhere. A group of Africans ran in front of him, and then Tom saw a little child, screaming and throwing stones from beside a smoking hut. What was a child doing there? Fitzwilliam raised his sword to strike at it, but a woman snatched the child out of reach before the blade fell. Then someone bumped into Tom from behind. He spun round, and saw a man stabbing at Francis with a spear.

‘Francis! Look out!’ He lifted his cutlass to strike, but even as he did so the man leapt aside to dodge a thrust from a pike, and Tom's blow went clean over his shoulder, the force of it knocking the sword from his hand. Then the African fled, and the press of Sumba warriors and English sailors forcing their way through the gates jostled Tom forward.

It was hard, in the flames, smoke and confusion, to tell which of the African warriors were their allies, and which were the defenders. Tom felt an urgent need to stay together with the men from the ship, but where were they? There were so many streets in the town, they had not all gone the same way. And every street and alley was full of warriors, screaming, fighting, killing.

There was a sudden lull, a gathering of the sailors in a milling crowd in the main street, looking to their leaders to see where to go. Tom saw a sword lying where someone had dropped it, and snatched it up to replace his own.

‘Make for the centre, lads, if you can,’ the Admiral said. ‘And keep together - they may rally yet, and there's more of them than us!’

Of the next hour or so Tom remembered little clearly. The defenders rallied often, but never in groups quite large or determined enough to stop the Sumba, or the flying wedge of sailors pushing ahead after John Hawkins. The fight became a confused series of brief skirmishes in the maze of narrow streets and thatched huts. Half of the huts were blazing, choking attackers and defenders alike with thick, foul smoke, and as often as not people sprang on them by accident, fleeing between the huts from the flames, not aware that they were there until it was too late, uncertain whether they were friend or foe.  The town was a pandemonium, a nightmare of shadows, swirling balls of flame, choking clouds of smoke, and screaming black figures running to escape or attack.

Once a huge shadow leapt up the wall of a hut to Tom's right, hand raised over its head. He spun round, left hand in front of him, sword ready in his right to strike - and found himself clutching the hair of a skinny girl of about nine, the whites of her eyes wide with horror as she screamed. The flames had made her shadow like a giant. Just in time, he stopped his arm which had already begun the sword thrust towards her throat, and shoved her disgustedly aside. A moment later a boy about his own age ran at them, straight into the arms of the bosun, who lashed his arms behind his back and added him to the small group of prisoners they were beginning to collect.

Everywhere it was the same. They reached what must have been the central square of the town, lurid with the flames of one of the largest buildings. The two kings of the Sumba had burst in from the other side of the town, and one of them was already there, resplendent in his leopardskin kilt. In front of him trembling prisoners were being herded into a large building, which looked likely to catch fire at any moment. Admiral Hawkins and Master Barrett, the reflections of the flames mirrored on their chest armour, were talking to the Sumba King earnestly, trying to persuade them to give them all the prisoners as slaves. That was what they had agreed before, after all. They had come to capture slaves, not to see them burnt up in a house.

There was a great deal of shouting, waving of arms and pointing to the prisoners, and for a moment Tom thought the Sumba King’s bodyguards were about to attack the Admiral. Then the prisoners were brought out, sweating and angry, ducking as the blazing hut almost collapsed almost on top of them.

Barrett looked furious; John Hawkins was calmer, controlling his temper as he always did. But he had to shout to make himself heard.

‘His son has been killed in the battle, it seems. That’s why he’s behaving like this. We will repair outside, my lads, to the cool of the river. You've done your work well, and there is no more to do here for now. Take the slaves we’ve got - we've a promise of more in the morning, at least.’

And so they retreated, herding their prisoners back through the warren of burnt, deserted huts to the open grass by the river. Even without the rest, they had nearly two hundred, mostly men, but a few women and children too. They looked desperate, terrified. Each one had to be bound hand and foot, to stop them escaping. As he tied up a young boy, Tom thought, with disgust, of the little girl he had so nearly killed in the heat of the battle. I did not come here to do that, he thought.

Then he settled down to take his turn to guard the prisoners. They sat in the thick, tropical darkness, waiting for the dawn, and listened to the cries of fear and triumph from the ravaged, burning town.

‘Q
UICK! QUICK, in here! Mother, get back!’

‘But where is Ekwefi? Ekwefi, no!’

Madu pushed his struggling mother into the safety of the hut. Then he turned, and saw the horrible, heart-stopping sight of his little sister, Ekwefi, in the hands of a boy, one of the red-face. The red-face boy had her by the hair; in the light of the blazing thatch a tongue of flame flicked along the blade of his sword towards her throat; then he thrust her aside and was gone. Madu snatched his little sister as she staggered away, expecting to find her dead. But though she was screaming he could find no blood, and he bundled her quickly inside his hut, the only one that was still not burning.