Birds of Prey (52 page)

Firmly Aboli turned away his eyes and looked again to the bereft and tragic figure of Hal Courtney on the castle walls. We should not mourn for him, Gundwane. He was a man and he lived the life
of a man. He sailed every ocean, and fought as a warrior must fight. He knew the stars and the ways of men. He called no man master, and turned aside from no enemy. No, Gundwane, we should not
mourn him, you and I. He will never die while he lives on in our hearts.

For once Hal hated the clarity of his own eyesight, that spared him no detail of the terrible transformation that was taking place as he watched. By the third day the birds had picked the flesh
from his father’s skull so that it grinned at the sky with empty eye-sockets. The burghers crossing the open Parade on their way to the castle walked well downwind of the scaffold on which he
hung, and the ladies held sachets of dried herbs to their faces as they passed.

However, on the dawning of the fifth day when Hal looked down upon it, the gibbet was empty. His father’s pathetic remains no longer hung there, and the seagulls had gone back to the
beach.

‘Thank the merciful Lord,’ Ned Tyler whispered to Daniel. ‘Now young Hal can begin to heal.’

‘Yet it is passing strange that they have taken the corpse away so soon.’ Daniel was puzzled. ‘I would not have thought that van de Velde could be so compassionate.’

Once he had escaped over the walls it took Aboli less than an hour to run through the darkness to the boundary of the colony, marked by a hedge of bitter almond bushes planted at the order of
the Governor. Although the hedge was still scraggy and there were more gaps than barriers in its length, it was the line over which no burgher might pass without the Governor’s permission. On
the other hand, none of the scattered Hottentot tribes that inhabited the limitless wilderness of plain, mountain and forest beyond were allowed to cross the hedge and enter the colony. On the
orders of the Company, they were to be shot or hanged if they transgressed the boundary. The VOC was no longer prepared to tolerate the savages’ treachery, their sly thieving ways or their
drunkenness when they were able to get their hands on spirits. The wanton whoring of their women, who would lift their short leather skirts for a handful of beads or a trifling trinket, was a
threat to the morals of the God-fearing burghers of the colony. Selected tribesmen, who might be useful as soldiers and servants, were allowed to remain in the colony but the rest had been driven
out into the wilderness where they belonged.

Each night Aboli crossed this makeshift boundary and ranged like a silent black ghost across the flat plain whose wide expanses cut off Table Mountain and its bastion of lesser hills from the
main ranges of the African hinterland. The wild animals had not been driven off these plains, for few white hunters had been allowed to leave the confines of the colony to pursue them. Here, Aboli
heard again the wild, heart-stopping chorus of a pride of hunting lions that he remembered from his childhood. The leopards sawed and coughed in the thickets, and often he startled unseen herds of
antelope, whose hoofs drummed through the night.

Aboli needed a black bull. Twice he had been so close as to smell the buffalo herd in the thickets. The scent reminded him of his father’s herds of cattle, which he had tended in his
childhood, before his circumcision. He had heard the grunting of the great beasts and the lowing of the weaning calves, he had followed their deeply ploughed hoofmarks and seen splashes of their
wet dung still steaming in the moonlight. But each time as he closed with the herd, the wind had tricked him. They had sensed him and gone crashing away through the brush, galloping on until the
sound of their flight dwindled into silence. Aboli could not pursue them further, for it was past midnight and he was still hours away from the bitter almond hedge and from his cell in the slave
quarters.

On the third night he took the chance of creeping out of the window of the slave quarters an hour earlier than Sukeena had warned him was wise. One of the hounds rushed at him, but before it
could alarm the watch, Aboli calmed it with a soft whistle. The hound recognized him and snuffled his hand. He stroked its head and whispered softly to it in the language of the forests and left it
whining softly and wagging its tail as he slipped over the wall like a dark moon shadow.

During his previous hunts, he had discovered that each night the buffalo herd left the fastness of the dense forest to drink at a waterhole a mile or so beyond the boundary hedge. He knew that
if he crossed it before midnight he might be able to catch them while they were still at the water. It was his best chance of being able to pick out a bull and make his stalk.

From the hollow tree at the edge of the forest he retrieved the bow that he had cut and carved from a branch of wild olive. Sukeena had stolen the single iron arrowhead from the collection of
weapons that Governor Kleinhans had assembled during his service in the Indies, which now hung on the walls of the residence. It was unlikely that it would be missed from among the dozens of
swords, shields and knives that made up the display.

‘I will return it to you,’ he promised Sukeena. ‘I would not have you suffer if it should be missed.’

‘Your need of it is great than my risk,’ she told him as she slipped the arrowhead, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, beneath the seat of the carriage. ‘I also had a father who was
denied a decent burial.’

Aboli had fitted the arrowhead to a reed shaft and bound it in place with twine and pitch. He had fletched it with the moulted feathers from the hunting falcons housed in the mews behind the
stables. However, he did not have time to search for the insect grubs from which to brew poison for the barbs, and so he must rely on this single shaft flying true to the mark.

Now as Aboli hunted in the shadows, himself another silent gliding shadow, he found old forgotten skills returning to him, and recalled the instruction that he had undergone as a young boy from
the elders of his tribe. He felt the night wind softly caress his bare chest and flanks and was aware of its direction at all times as he circled the waterhole until it blew straight into his face.
It brought down to him the rich bovine stench of the prey he sought.

The wind was strong enough to shake the tall reeds and cover any sound he might make so he could move in swiftly over the last hundred paces. Above the soughing of the north wind and the rustle
of the reeds he heard a coughing grunt. He froze and nocked his single arrow. Had the lions come to the water ahead of the herd, he wondered, for that had been a leonine sound. He stared ahead, and
heard the sound of great hoofs plodding and sucking in the mud of the waterhole. Above the rippling heads of the reeds a dark shape moved, mountainous in the moonlight.

‘A bull,’ he breathed. ‘A bull of a bull!’

The bull had finished drinking. The crafty old beast had come ahead of the cows and calves of the breeding herd. His back was coated with glistening wet mud from the wallow, and he plodded
towards where Aboli crouched, his hoofs squelching in the mud.

Aboli lost sight of the prey as he sank down among the swaying stems and let him come on. But he could mark him by the sound of his heavy breathing, and by the rasping of the reeds dragging down
his flanks. The bull was very close, but still out of Aboli’s sight, when suddenly he shook his head as the reed stems tangled in his horns, and his ears flapped against his cheeks. If I
reach out now I could touch his snout, Aboli thought. Every nerve in his body was drawn as tight as the bowstring in his fingers.

The reed bank parted in front of Aboli, and the massive head came through, the moonlight gleaming on the curved bosses of the horns. Abruptly the bull became aware of something amiss, of danger
lurking close at hand, and he stopped and raised his huge black head. As he lifted his muzzle to test the air, his nose was wet and shining and water drooled from his mouth. He flared his nostrils
into dark pits and snuffled the air. Aboli could feel his breath hot upon his naked chest and his face.

The bull turned his head, questing for the scent of man or cat, for the hidden hunter. Aboli stayed still as a tree-stump. He was holding the heavy bow at full draw. The power of the olive
branch and the gut bowstring were so fierce that even the granite muscles in his arms and shoulder bulged and trembled with the effort. As the bull turned his head he revealed the notch behind his
ear where the neck fused with the bone of his skull and the massive boss of his horns. Aboli held his aim for one heartbeat longer, then loosed the arrow. It flashed and whirred in the moonlight,
leaping from his hand and burying half its length in the massive black neck.

The bull reeled back. If the arrowhead had found the gap between the vertebrae of the spine, as Aboli had hoped, he would have dropped where he stood but the iron point struck the spine and was
deflected by bone. It glanced aside but sliced through the great artery behind the jawbone. As the bull bucked and kicked to the stinging impact of the steel, the severed artery erupted and a spout
of blood flew high in the air, black as an ostrich feather in the light of the moon.

The bull dashed past Aboli, hooking wildly with those wide curved horns. If Aboli had not dropped his bow and hurled himself aside, the burnished point that hissed by, a finger’s width
from his navel, would have skewered him and ripped open his bowels.

The bull charged on and reached the hard dry ground. On his knees Aboli strained his ears to follow his quarry’s crashing rush through the scrub. Abruptly it came up short. There was a
long, fraught pause, in which he could hear the animal’s laboured breathing and the patter of streaming blood falling on the leaves of the low bushes around it. Then he heard the bull stagger
and stumble backwards, trying to remain on his feet while the strength flowed out of his huge body on that tide of dark blood. The beast fell heavily so that the earth trembled under Aboli’s
bare feet. A moment later came the rasping death bellow, and thereafter an aching quietness. Even the night birds and the bullfrogs of the swamp had been silenced by that dreadful sound. It was as
though all the forest held its breath at the passing of such a mighty creature. Then, slowly, the night came alive once again, the frogs piped and croaked from the reedbeds, a nightjar screeched
and from afar an eagle owl hooted mournfully.

Aboli skinned the bull with the knife that Sukeena had stolen for him from the residence kitchens. He folded the green skin and tied it with bark rope. It was heavy enough to tax even his
strength. He staggered with the bundle until he could get under it and balance it on his head. He left the naked carcass for the packs of night-prowling hyena and the flocks of vultures,
carnivorous storks, kites and crows that would find it with the first light of morning, and set off back towards the colony and the table-topped mountain, silhouetted against the stars. Even under
his burden he moved at the ground-eating trot of the warriors of his tribe that was becoming so natural to him again after his confinement for two decades in a small ship upon the seas. He was
remembering so much long-forgotten tribal lore and wisdom, relearning old skills, becoming once more a true son of this baked African earth.

He climbed to the lower slopes of the mountain and left the bundled skin in a narrow crevice in the rock cliff. He covered it with large boulders, for the hyenas roamed here also, attracted by
the rubbish and wastes and sewage generated by the human settlement of the colony.

When he had placed the last boulder he looked up at the sky and saw that the curling scorpion was falling fast towards the dark horizon. Only then he realized how swiftly the night had sped, and
went bounding back down the slope. He reached the edge of the Company gardens just as the first rooster crowed in the darkness.

Later that morning, as he waited on the bench with the other slaves outside the kitchens for his breakfast bowl of gruel and thick, curdled sour milk, Sukeena passed on her way to tend the
affairs of the household. ‘I heard you return last night. You were out too late,’ she whispered, without turning her head on the orchid stem of her neck. ‘If you are discovered,
you will bring great hardship on all of us, and our plans will come to naught.’

‘My task is almost finished,’ he rumbled softly. ‘Tonight will be the last time I need to go out.’

‘Have a care, Aboli. There is much at risk,’ she said and glided away. Despite her warning she had given him any help he had asked for, and without watching her go Aboli whispered to
himself, ‘That little one has the heart of a lioness.’

That night, when the house had settled down for the night, he slipped through the grating. Again the dogs were stilled by his quiet whistle, and he had lumps of dried sausage for each of them.
When he reached the wall below the lawns, he looked to the stars and saw in the eastern sky the first soft luminescence of the moonrise. He vaulted over it and, keeping well clear of the road,
guided himself by touch along the outside of the wall, towards the settlement.