“Then Lord Klebe and I will take you with us into the world beyond Lozi Land.” The elephant hunting was good in Lozi Land, and van Houten discovered a new alluvial gold field three days” march to the north of the original one, which brought in a steady trickle of gold dust to Fort Providence. Both the tribe and Tom prospered, and each season of the big rains the Centaunts took a full cargo down to the Cape.
An Amsterdam bank of good repute had an office on the Heerengracht above the waterfront. Tom already had two thousand pounds deposited with them, and after this season the amount was doubled. At last he was a wealthy man.
He had to face one bitter disappointment. When the time came to sail north again, Ned Tyler declared himself too old to undertake another voyage. By now his hair was as fine and white as new-picked cotton, his back was bowed and his once clear eyes were clouded and rheumy.
“Leave me on my little farm here in the Constantia valley,” he begged.
“Let me tend my chickens and vegetables.”
“I am going to stay with Ned,” Dr. Reynolds decided, “I have had enough adventure to last my lifetime.” Only when he looked carefully at the surgeon’s red, bluff face did Tom realize how he had aged along with Ned.
“I have had all I want of bandaging and stitching up your rascals. I want to plant a few vines, perhaps make a good wine before I die.”
“But who will look after us?” Tom protested.
“You cannot send us out to die of malaria in the wilderness.”
“You have a fine little surgeon with you,” the old doctor replied.
“I have taught Mistress Sarah all I know about setting a broken leg or mixing a potion. I place you in her good hands and, like as not, you will be better off.
Lord knows, she is prettier than I am, and has a kinder heart.”
All Wilson took over as first officer of the Centaurus, and he had the helm as they pushed into the mouth of the Lunga river at the beginning of the next hunting season.
Every man and woman aboard was consumed with excitement on these annual returns to Fort Providence. They were all eager to see how Fundi had taken care of the settlement during the rains, to learn if the elephant were still plentiful upon the hills of Lozi Land, and to find out how much gold dust the women had collected in their absence.
Aboli tried unsuccessfully to conceal his eagerness to be reunited with his wives and children again: by this time Fallo and Zete had added generously to their brood. There were two small daughters and another two sons.
As always, Fundi met them on the landing below the fort, and welcomed Tom and Sarah ashore. All was well in the fort, and there was little rain damage to be repaired.
Sarah unwrapped the canvas cover from her harpsichord, played a chord, then smiled when the notes were true. She launched into the chorus of “Spanish Ladies’.
Aboli demanded from Fundi the news of the tribe and his family, but there was none for the rains had been heavy that season and the river not navigable. No canoe from Bongola’s village had reached the fort. Aboli fretted through the time that it took to unload the cargo from the Centaurus, to repair the fort and to make the final preparations for the expedition upstream to Lozi Land. He was at the tiller of the leading longboat when they were ready at last to leave Fort Providence.
The first intimation of something seriously amiss came when they reached the outlying villages of the Lozi, and found them all deserted.
Though they searched the area around each cluster of huts they found no living soul, nor any clue as to what had happened to the inhabitants.
Dreading what they would find there, they went on towards Bongola’s village as fast as they could row, dragging the boats through the shallows and keeping going as long as there was light enough to make out the banks on either side and steer around the rocks in the channel.
They came to it in the early afternoon. A dreadful hush hung over the hills, no sound of drum or horn or shouted welcome. They saw at once that the outlying gardens were overrun with weed. Then they passed the first hut on the bank. The roof thatch had been burned and the walls stood gaunt and bare, the mud plaster washed away by the rains.
Nobody in the boats spoke, but as he pulled with all his strength on the long oar, Aboli’s face was a terrible mask of despair. They stared at the ruins of the village as they passed, the burned huts, neglected gardens and empty cattle pens. The top branches of the trees were lined with rows of roosting vultures, grim silhouettes, hunch-backed and hook-billed. The sickly sweet stench of death and putrefaction was on the air.
A single canoe lay on the beach of the landing, but its bottom had been staved in. The fish racks on which the men dried the catch had fallen down, and the nets were abandoned in untidy heaps. Aboli jumped over side when the water was waist-deep, waded ashore and ran up the beach to the overgrown path that led to the huts of Fallo and Zete.
Tom followed him but did not catch up with Aboli until he came to the small cluster of huts surrounded by a boma of thorn branches.
Aboli stood in the open gateway, staring at the burned-out huts of his wives and children.
Tom stopped beside him, but neither man spoke. Then Aboli walked forward and knelt. From the soft blue ash, he picked up a tiny human skull and held it cupped in both hands as though it were a sacred chalice. The cranium had been crushed by a heavy blow. He stared into the empty eye sockets, and the tears washed down his scarred face.
Yet his voice was steady as he looked up at Tom and said, “The slavers always kill the babies for they are too young to survive the march to the coast. Their weight only weakens the mothers who are forced to carry them.” He touched the deep dent in the dome of the tiny skull.
“See how they held my little daughter by the ankles and dashed her head on the doorpost of the hut? This was my beautiful baby, Kassa,” he said, lifted the skull to his mouth and kissed the ghastly wound.
Tom could not watch his sorrow. He looked away, and saw that somebody had written on the wall of the roofless hut with a stick of charcoal in Arabic script, “God is great.
There is no God but God.” That made certain the identity of the perpetrators of this atrocity. He stared at the legend while he tried to compose himself. When at last he spoke, his voice was stifled with horror.
“When did this happen?” he asked.
“Perhaps a month ago.” Aboli stood up.
“Maybe a little longer than that.”
“The slave columns must move slowly?” Tom asked.
“With the chains and the women and children?”
“Yes,” Aboli agreed.
“They move very slowly, and it is a long weary road to the coast.”
“We can catch them,” Tom’s voice grew surer and stronger, “if we start at once and march hard.”
“Yes,” said Aboli, “we will catch them. But first I must bury my dead. Make the preparations for the march, Klebe, and I will be ready to leave before noon.” Aboli found two more tiny skeletons among the ruins and weeds. The bones were scattered and chewed by the carrion eaters, but he identified his babies by the bead bracelets he had given them, which were still entwined with the small bones. They were of his two youngest sons, not yet two years old. He gathered up their remains and placed them in a tanned leather cloak.
He dug their grave in the floor of the hut in which they had been conceived, and buried them together. Then he opened a vein in his own wrist, dribbled his blood on to the grave and prayed to his ancestors to receive the souls of his children kindly.
When he came down to the landing he found that Tom had almost completed the order of march. From years of experience in hunting the elephant herds, each man knew his duty. There were three bands of five men each.
They were commanded by Tom, All Wilson and Luke Jervis. Three sailors would be left to guard the boats.
Each man of the expedition carried his weapons, powder and shot, his waters king and blanket, and enough food for a week. That was a full load of sixty pounds in weight, and once it was expended they would live off the land.
“You must stay here with the boats,” Tom told Sarah, as he unwrapped the blue sword from the canvas roll in which he kept it. He did not carry the long weapon on the elephant hunts for it hampered his gait, but he would need it now.
“There will be fighting and danger,” he explained, as he belted the scabbard around his waist.
“That is why I must go with you. There will be many wounded and hurt, and none to minister to them. I cannot stay here,” she replied, and he saw the determination in her set expression, the cold light in her eyes. She had already packed her medicine chest and blanket. He knew from long experience it would serve no purpose to argue with her.
He gave in.
“Keep close to me. If we run into danger, do as I tell you, woman, and for once do not stop to argue.” Led by Aboli and Fundi, they went in single file through the remains of the village. They passed many more skeletons along the path, all that remained of the old men and women and small children judged too weak by the slavers to survive the march to the coast. It was a relief to leave behind this scene of death and desolation, and to follow the trail left by the shuffling lines of Lozi prisoners as they were driven northwards into the hills.
Aboli and Fundi set a killing pace. Fundi carried his great elephant bow over one shoulder and a quiver of poisoned arrows over the other. He, too, had lost his family in the slaughter and the pillage.
By Tom’s reckoning they covered ten miles in that first march, and he declared a halt only after the moonless night became too dark to allow them to make out the ground under their feet. He slept only fitfully with Sarah beside him under their blankets. Soon after midnight he sprang to his feet as a ghostly cry echoed from the summit of the hill above them. It was a human voice, calling down to them in the language of the Lozi.
“What manner of men are you?”
“I am Klebe, your friend,” Tom shouted back.
“I am Aboli, husband of Fallo and Zete.” Aboli threw more wood on the fire, which flared up brightly.
“I am Fundi, the hunter of elephants. Come down to us, men of the Lozi.” They appeared among the dark trees, moving shadows in the firelight that materialized into human shapes. There were less than a hundred survivors of the raid, many of them women, but over fifty warriors who still carried their weapons, throwing spears and the heavy elephant bows with quivers of poisoned arrows.
They squatted in a dense mass around the fire and one at a time the elders described the attack that had caught the village by surprise, the massacre and the slave-taking that had followed.
“Some of us were able to run into the forest, and others were out hunting or gathering roots and wild honey, so we escaped,” they explained.
“What of my family,” Aboli asked.
“They have taken Fallo and Zete, and your sons Zama and Tula,” they told him.
“We saw them in chains when we spied upon the slavers” caravan from afar.” They sat all the rest of that night, reciting the long roll of those who had perished and those who had been captured.
In the dawn, when it was time to resume the pursuit, Tom ordered the old men and the women back to the ruined village to bury the dead and plant crops to ward off the famine that must inevitably follow this disaster.
“Some of my men are there. They will hunt game to feed you until the crops are ripe.” They went back obediently, and Tom assembled the remaining Lozi warriors. He knew most of them by name, and had hunted with some.
“We are going after the caravan. We will fight to free those who have been captured,” he told them.
“Will you join us?”
“We wanted to follow them, but the Arabs have fire sticks, and we were afraid,” they said.
“But you also have the terrible fire sticks, so we will come with you.” Fundi picked out the most intrepid, skilful hunters among them, and sent them to scout ahead, to discover any ambush or snare the slavers might have set. When they started out again, he kept the rest of the Lozi with them, following the well-worn slave road into the north.
They marched hard from first light of day until dark, and though the signs of the slave caravan were too old and eroded for even Fundi and Aboli to read accurately, they knew that they had covered in a day the same ground that it had taken the long files of chained slaves six days to make good. During the day they had passed the rudely thatched shelters and dead campfires of that number of overnight camps.
The next day they were away again at first light, and before noon they came upon the remains of the first casualties among the slaves.
There were only a few bone chips and blood-caked scraps of loincloth lying beside the path, for the Arabs had removed the chains from the corpses and the forest scavengers had devoured the rest.
“These were the weak ones, Fundi said.
“They died of weariness and broken hearts. We will find many more before we catch up with the caravan.” On each day’s march now the sign became fresher and clearer to read. Always the road was marked by the old camps where the caravan had passed the nights, and by the remains of those who had not survived the rig ours of the journey.
Ten days out, and they came upon the junction of the roads, where the slave column from Lozi Land in the south joined up with another more numerous column coming in from the country of the great freshwater lakes in the west.
Fundi and Aboli examined the abandoned site where the two caravans had camped the first night after they had met.
“There are now over two thousand slaves in the column. I have counted their sleeping places.”
Aboli showed Tom where the slaves had flattened the grass when they lay down for the night.
“Most are carrying heavy loads, some made up of food supplies, grain and dried game meat.”
“How do you know that?” Tom demanded.
“Their deep heel prints in the dust show that they are burdened.
Then they have discarded a few of the empty food baskets beside the cooking-fires, and left a few kernels of grain and scraps of meat in them, Aboli explained.