The Reckoning (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 2) Read online

  “I could see it was a Portuguese ship,” Sebastião reminded him. “Their gratitude for my assistance would not surpass their lust to see my desertion punished,” he predicted. “I have a good enough life here and I’m not about to risk it. Almost not for anything.”

  “Yet you help us?”

  “A fair question,” he responded. “If God has seen fit to save you from the tempest and deliver you from your owners, and God has seen fit to allow you this time to recover, then it is a small risk for me to win a little favor by lending my efforts to see you on your way.”

  “On our way?”

  “You don’t look like anybody from these parts. You’re never going to fit in. You’re going to have to move north or east. Anywhere but here.”

  “You say you have been watching us?”

  “Aye.”

  “For how long?”

  He laughed.

  “I told you. From your first day you settled in.”

  “You do know that we have been watching you also.”

  “Sure. No harm in that. I saw you watching me many times when I came to harvest my sustenance. I thought it prudent to not let on that I’d seen you notice me. My little game. It is small entertainment in an otherwise unceasing procession of mildly pleasant days.” He turned back and looked out over the tumble of rocks and the pools they formed, choked as they were with kelp and life. “This is the best place to collect seafood in most any weather.” He laughed again at something that moved behind his eyes, “You’ve been living in my pantry.”

  Throughout their stay, Chikunda and Faith had watched this man coming regularly to collect shellfish.

  They’d imagined that their hide was well enough camouflaged and that they’d avoided his detection.

  It was unsettling to know that they had been duped.

  The man seemed to have a routine. Every third day he would arrive at low tide and leave with a bounty of lobster and other snail-like sea life, penguin and seabird eggs and even kelp.

  They’d then seen the wisps of his fire rising from that valley they were now picking their way toward through the hardy waist-high bush.

  “You say that they have detected us?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “You have a short memory or don’t think very broadly,” he said in a joking tone. “I’m the shoemaker, I mend the boots for the soldiers in the next bay, Baai van von Kamptz. They’re preparing to extract you back to the town.”

  “When?”

  “Probably any time now, they only just learned about you. The grog, you see. Out of the way, most of the time this lot are smashed out of their minds on an evil brew. I thought it best not to seem too interested when they told me.”

  “A big risk then?”

  “There’s no reason for them to think I’d harbor you, is there?”

  “You’re a good man then?”

  “Perhaps.” He shrugged. “Or stupid, or one in need of a heavenly reward.”

  “Do they know who we are?”

  “Who else could you be? The other two hundred of your fellows were sold in the town the day after the wreck,” he confirmed. “Perhaps half still in the colony now; the rest shipped to other shores or trekked inland with their new masters.”

  It was the first confirmation that Chikunda had about his fellow slaves who had survived the wreck.

  If two hundred had been saved, then it was another two hundred that had drowned on that dreadful day two months ago when he’d made his escape.

  From their current elevation as they made their way to the shoemaker’s home, Chikunda looked across the bay and down onto the wreck site. The beach was now entirely clear of corpses, eaten by gulls, tides and other scavengers.

  Some of the wreckage was still strewn about up near the highest tidemark, and only one or two beams still jutted above the waterline marking the spot, trapped between the tumble of rocks just behind the crashing waves.

  Arriving at the hill’s brow, where the steep slope paused before soaring into the clouds, they picked their way northward through the bush along a rough foot track.

  Nearing the end of that contoured path around the bay, at what looked from a distance like a dead end to the pathway, they came to a rock hovel inside of a cave with a lean-to of planking and canvas at its entrance.

  “It’s not much,” the shoemaker admitted, “but it keeps me dry.”

  “Me” was about all there was room for.

  “Don’t fret.” The Portuguese saw the concern written across his new friends’ faces. “It has an atrium… the cave proper.”

  Chikunda and Faith had no possessions to speak of, so they added little to the clutter.

  Down at the beach, they had managed to salvage rags from three of the dead crew that had washed ashore in the days after the wreck. From the naked slaves that had littered the beach, they could salvage nothing at all.

  ‘Atrium’ had been a grandiose exaggeration.

  At the back of the cave was a false termination.

  Sebastião dragged his rickety wardrobe made from flotsam aside to reveal a fissure in the rock. In the flickering candlelight, it looked like the granite itself had fractured and part of it had fallen away.

  They squeezed into the void and there beyond its mouth was space enough for all of them to stand upright. There was enough room to lie down as well.

  It was cool and dank and a little claustrophobic, with only the sound of water dripping somewhere in the deep recesses of darkness beyond the reach of the small dancing candle flame.

  The floor was packed earth and the cobbler seemed to use this hiding place as his store for a clutter of tatty valuables evidently salvaged from the shore.

  “You can stay here some days,” he offered. “Not indefinitely, but long enough to learn from me about what you face, and long enough for the people who seek you to lose interest.”

  “Can you guess at how long?”

  “Not much longer than a week, two at the maximum, I’m afraid.”

  “Faith is pregnant. We dare not wait even that long.”

  “You’d be advised to not make it much less than that either. The heat needs to be off and you have much to learn about this land, where to navigate and where not to venture. You’re in a bit of a bind.”

  Chapter 2

  Morning came in the pitch black of the dungeon, the jailer’s voice speaking English beyond the shaft of light cutting through the pitch.

  It was a moment of terror for Chikunda.

  In the dank and musty prison, his mind whirled to make sense of it. How he had landed here, captured.

  Three men’s voices were audible, but only their tone, not their words.

  Though he stumbled to speak it, Chikunda could understand English well enough if he could also read the talker’s lips, but not at all when it was obscured by thick walls.

  Through that cartwheeling terror, the memory came back to him—they were still in the Portuguese shoemaker’s cave.

  Faith’s breathing still whispered softly in sleep. In the cold, she had burrowed in under him and he gently traced her body to understand how she lay. The warmth of her head like a kitten, the soft purr of her breathing even paced and relaxed.

  Satisfied that he could extract himself without disturbing her, he groped to his left. The earthen ground was there and so was the damp rock wall.

  He rose to a crouch and tucked the filthy blanket back in around Faith to let her sleep on.

  The jail wasn’t to keep him in. Right now, it was to keep them out—whoever they were.

  He gingerly approached the slit of light coming in past the makeshift cupboard that was the door to his hidden cave. Listening actively, almost feeling his ears twisting and turning like that of a cat, he examined the sounds for any hint of attitude in the voices.

  They sounded dire.

  The cobbler was doing much of the babble, answering curt questions that were fired at him, making light of the conversation. Chi
kunda couldn’t discern what was being asked, but they had the intonation of questions.

  Very slowly the jovial Portuguese ex-sailor won the men over and gruff laughter was heard.

  The voices moved out of the cave.

  Presently, the sound of horse hooves danced the little signature jig of animals being mounted and having their heads turned to depart.

  They went away at a trot.

  Chikunda waited in the darkness and then Faith started to stir, her hushed voice confused and in Swahili.

  “Sh—sh—sh—my dove. There are men outside,” he whispered urgently.

  He explained to her what he had discerned—that men on horses, at least two of them, had interrogated their host.

  Sebastião came humming back into his hovel, exaggerating the sounds of tidying up and busying himself in the manner of a long-time bachelor.

  Unsure of the normal pattern of the man’s routines, Chikunda and Faith remained silent in the dark, erring on the side of caution. Mindful that one of the inquisitors may still be about or double back, he presumed that Sebastião was deliberately retaining cover for this possibility.

  Eventually, after what seemed like eternity hearing the muted sounds from outside and the repetitive drip—drip—drip in the cold blackness, Chikunda decided that the time must come to break cover.

  He manufactured a light cough.

  “Ahhh,” he heard from beyond the cupboard and Jack barked his own reminder that he knew they were there.

  A moment later, it creaked aside, wobbly on poorly made legs. Light and Jack burst exuberantly into their world.

  “They are alive!” The blue eyes twinkled. “My friends, we had visitors. They were most anxious to meet you.”

  “You told them we are here?!”

  “Of course not. I would now be in irons and you would be in worse. Come, Jack… out,” he laughed and the dog bolted out of the cave, expecting a game. “It was the Sergeant at Arms and his aide, galloped up from the von Kamptz garrison two miles yonder. My prediction came true, they raided your camp last night and were in an evil mood at your escape.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Only that I haven’t seen you. It made them more than a little suspicious because they know that’s where I collect my dinner. I had to admit that I had seen you before. I told them I only saw you from a distance and thought you were simply Hottentots… Hotnots, snuck back to your traditional home.”

  “I don’t understand,” Chikunda frowned.

  “Forgive… this piece of coast used to be wandered by the Khoikhoi people, the Hotnots. The Dutch call them Hottentots. There were also the evil little Bushmen here with their poisoned arrow tips. They were all chased out when the German, von Kamptz, built his homestead there, in the ‘Baai van von Kamptz’. The Hotnots are a treacherous lot. We must perpetually keep our eye out for them. They’ll steal anything not nailed down. The garrison moves them out if they find them.”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “Not until I gave them grog and invited them back for more.”

  “They’re coming back?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “When?”

  “Hard to tell. But not today. Not for some days, I would imagine. It is rare that anyone passes this way. I go weeks without seeing a soul. This morning the old man looked rough. Probably drank his anger away when you had slipped through his fingers. Need breakfast? I have biscuits left.” He fished behind a tatty curtain on a rickety shelf. “Bit old, stale and moldy but edible. The last of the lobster we eat later.”

  He offered them little brown blobs, each wearing a forest of translucent fur.

  “We don’t want to use your scarce resources,” Chikunda answered for the look Faith wore across her face.

  “Suit yourself,” the cobbler replied without judgment and put the tin aside, taking his ancient blunderbuss down from its hook above the doorway and checking its mechanism.

  His action prompted Chikunda to clear up what seemed obvious.

  “I am concerned. We are putting you in grave danger.”

  “Some,” Sebastião admitted. “It depends on the circumstances. If they’d ransacked and found you hidden at the back,” he paused with a shrug of his shoulders and mouth, “I’d be in chains and dragged to the dungeon at the old fort in Cape Town. Something, you can imagine, I don’t relish. But I’ll be honest with you now. If I get caught with you in my presence, to save myself I must claim I have you under arrest. You understand? I am friendly to you, I’m not yet your friend.”

  “I understand,” Chikunda agreed. “If it came to it, we are duty bound to do our all to repay your kindness by not contradicting that.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Sebastião asked now of Faith, “but do you not talk at all? Do you not understand the tongue?”

  She answered to the floor, whispering something in a tiny voice.

  “She fears men,” Chikunda spoke for her. “She means no rudeness by it, but beyond the priests at her convent, her experience with white men and Arabs has not been the best.”

  “Understandable,” Sebastião agreed. “I’m sorry. I meant no offense asking so directly.”

  “It was fair to ask.”

  “It is time I cut wood.” Perhaps to ease the discomfort of the moment, Sebastião picked up an axe and made his way toward a grove, Jack at his heel.

  Within minutes, Chikunda had joined him, drawn by the thud of the axe.

  “Let me take a spell,” the broad-shouldered black man offered, putting out his hand to take the axe.

  “I won’t say no.” Sebastião mopped his brow and stood back to watch.

  The axe arched high and fell on the log, splintering it with a single blow.

  “Perhaps a little less vigor,” the Portuguese suggested, admiration in his voice.

  “This is not difficult work,” Chikunda insisted.

  “Aye… but it’s the only axe I have and it may think that your handling of it is out of sorts.”

  “Understood.” Chikunda went to diligent work with less enthusiasm. “How far did you sail?” he asked of the Portuguese, enjoying the company of a man after such a long spell.

  “Past this cape,” the cobbler pointed south, “and around it and toward the rising sun, many moons. Maybe four moons of sailing to a new land, an island kingdom where the men are small but ferocious. Smaller than me but with slanted pitiless eyes.”

  “Smaller than you even?” Chikunda’s face was a mask of mirth and the Portuguese laughed.

  “Hard to believe, no? Yes. But any one of them would chop you down with empty hands faster than you destroy that log.”

  “This I would like to see,” Chikunda said it with the confidence of having been a master at stick fighting and unarmed combat in his village.

  “They are fierce, my friend. Taught me tricks—where to land a blow, how to plant my feet and turn my hips. How to divert an attacker’s energy and tangle him in his own limbs and choke him with his own garments if it comes to that.”

  “This you can do? You learnt these ways?”

  “I learned what I could from the fishermen of the village where our ship docked.”

  “You could teach me these things?”

  “I can hint at them. I’m no more than a beginner myself, but in this world, one never knows when it might be useful, eh?”

  Chikunda kept the head of the axe travelling in thudding circles, out-round-chop-yank.

  It was brutally hot work, the blast of a furnace-like wind descending upon them down the mountain out of the northeast.

  Round and round the axe head sped, splinters flew and lengths of firewood piled up into an impressive stack. Rivulets of sweat ran freely down Chikunda’s torso, his muscles oiled and resembling a fine statue celebrating the best of the human condition.

  When he was done, the Portuguese showed him some of what he had learned about self-defense and attack in the far away land of little people.

  “These men make war
with their hands only?”

  “Oh, no,” the shoemaker shook his head. “There is a class who carry with them swords. Always two great big swords stuck in their sash, in their belt.”

  “Swords?” Chikunda was unfamiliar with the term.

  “Ahhhh of course. It is not a weapon of your people. Like large knives, as long as your arm.”

  “I understand. I have seen these but not seen them used. What do they call this place?” Chikunda asked with a tone to his voice that suggested he might want to travel there.

  “Nippon. I doubt there has ever been a black man there. You would be quite the spectacle. You learn fast,” he remarked.

  “My parents taught me that it is more important to be curious than to be obedient.”

  “I’m not sure that the one is an alternative for the other,” Sebastião suggested, “but perhaps it doesn’t translate well from your tongue. But it is a good attitude, nonetheless. You say you worked with sticks?”

  “It is customary, yes. Young boys fight with reeds, men go on to use sticks… like this one.”

  Chikunda picked up a discarded length of pole thicker than his thumb and half as tall as he stood. He scratched through the offcuts to find another similar one. Jack bounced on his front legs, expecting a game of fetch.

  “We hold them like this,” Chikunda instructed, ignoring him.

  In his left fist, he grasped near its center. His right fist gripped the attacking stick by its end and then he moved about in fluid steps, fighting an imaginary foe.

  The left spun and parried like a shield while his right wrist deftly flicked the attacking pole. In his fist, it was a lethal weapon, droning a mournful hum as it cut through the air in an unceasing whirl of motion.

  “Most impressive,” Sebastião applauded. “I would like to see you wield a sword. You would be deadly with one in each hand, in the Nippon style. I think that I’ll show you my prize possessions, but first we must move this mountain.”

  They loaded up with cut wood and made their way back to the dwelling, packing the logs out.

  They ate the last of the lobster that the Portuguese kept in his larder of sorts.

  “They’ll keep alive two days if I keep this hemp sacking wet and cold. By the third day, I must collect more,” he explained. “The people of Nippon taught me to forage. If it hadn’t been for them, I might well have starved, as so many sailors do when wrecked on your wild coast.”