Golden Lion (45 page)

She waded in amongst the stinking maelstrom of screeching scavengers, heading for Ann, her eyes sifting the chaos for the largest hyena. If she killed that one maybe the others would flee. And there it was, its dorsal mane bristling as it bounded up to Ann who was crouching in the bush, an arm raised defensively as she tried to get to her feet.

But if you miss? Then what?
the child in her belly asked.
What will happen to us then?

‘Kill it!’ Ann screamed. ‘Kill it, Judith, just kill it!’

Judith put the musket to her shoulder and took aim. She knew the beasts were behind her. They were everywhere, buffeting her with their muzzles now, too many to count. She could feel their breath on her, hotter than the night air, but she did not take her eyes off the big hyena. The beast was moving unpredictably, bobbing its big head and darting in and out. It was a difficult shot, too risky.

‘Here, you devil!’ Judith yelled in Amharic, her mother tongue, blowing on the match clamped in the serpent’s jaws. ‘Come and see what I have for you!’ She could see Ann now, see the tears running down the girl’s sun-ravaged cheeks, her eyes blazing with terror. Then she felt something beneath her foot and looked down to see Ann’s water flask. She picked it up and hurled it with all her strength and it struck the hyena on the rump.

The creature giggled and turned, swinging its big head towards Judith.

That was all she needed. In a heartbeat she knew she would never get a better chance and her finger curled around the musket’s trigger. Even now, the tide could be turned. They might just survive.

Then Ann made the worst decision of her life. She ran.

The beast followed her.

‘No!’ Judith screamed and pulled the trigger. The musket roared, spitting flame in the darkness, and the hyenas squealed at the thunder of it, dispersing in all directions. Yet Judith felt nothing but despair. The hyena’s sudden movement had made it a moving target and she had missed it. She saw the ravening hyena lunge at Ann and knew it had bitten her near her left hip, though Ann’s scream was lost amidst the savage howls and demented laughter as the rest of the pack coalesced around the girl. Their shock at the musket’s roar forgotten now in the excitement, the beasts followed their matriarch’s lead, darting in, biting, pulling back lowing and whooping, then wheeling to go for the girl again.

Judith reversed the musket and, gripping it by the barrel, brandished it like a club, bringing the heavy stock down onto a hyena’s back with a crack. The beast screeched in pain, retreating from her, but the others had the scent of blood in their noses now and were only interested in Ann. One animal broke from the pack and to her horror Judith saw that its muzzle was wet with fresh blood.

Leave her
, the unborn child inside her pleaded.
There is nothing we can do for her now. But if we stay they will tear us apart.

‘Help me!’ Ann screamed.

The entire hyena clan was around Ann now like a seething, cacophonous black sea as Ann’s body was pulled this way and that. Judith had experienced enough horrors for any lifetime on the battlefields of Ethiopia, but none compared to this: a woman being dismembered before her very eyes. She felt a sudden, overwhelming shock of nausea, bent double and vomited into the grass. A hyena at the fringes of the mass must have smelt the disgorged contents of her stomach for it turned and loped over and Judith backed away, raising her makeshift club, but the beast was not interested in her as it began to gulp down her steaming vomitus.

Then a sword hacked into the hyena’s skull and it collapsed, shaking and frothing, its long teeth bared in a grimace of death. Judith spun and the masked man was there.

‘Help her!’ she said.

Sword in hand, the man stepped out in front of her, putting himself between Judith and the hyenas, and then the other men were there too, the Portuguese sailors and the two tribesmen, looming out of the darkness, taking up defensive positions around her. ‘Help her, damn you!’ Judith screamed. ‘For God’s sake, somebody help her!’

The masked man said nothing. He stood there, head tilted on one side, the single eye behind its hole fixed on the vile scene before them.

‘Give me your sword and I will help her!’ Judith said.

That leering face turned to her. ‘Shut your mouth and watch,’ it snarled, as one of the sailors snatched the musket from her hands.

A hyena jumped and clamped its jaws on Ann’s upper arm. She stumbled under its weight, her face bright in the starlit gloom, her eyes seeming to fix on Judith’s own one last time before she was pulled down into the growling maelstrom and lost from sight.

‘Please!’ Judith said, but even as she said it she knew there was no helping Ann now. The hyenas were eating her alive. She could hear their jaws snapping shut, hear them gulping down gobbets of flesh.

Even so, she watched, her eyes glutting themselves on the horror of it, until at last the masked man signalled at his men that they should be on their way.

‘Lucky for you one of the Negroes got a whiff of your fire on the air,’ the grey-beard officer said. ‘Otherwise those devils would be feasting on you and your babe by now.’

Judith said nothing. She had no words. She put both hands on her belly, fingers pressing into her own flesh that they might feel a little foot or hand, desperate as she was to touch the child and reassure it that they were safe now.

Yet she knew in her heart that her reassurances were false. For every instinct told her that, however much she had suffered up till now, it was surely nothing compared with the suffering to come.

al lost track of the days and could not say how far inland they had walked. At night though, he watched the moon cycle through its first quarter, to full moon, to third quarter, so that he guessed they had been travelling some three weeks, trudging on in silent monotony. Deeper they went, towards the giant granite outcrops and mountains rising majestically out of the bush in the west, into an Eden of golden grassland savannah, miombo forest and flood plain.

Some nights, if the rain was lashing down, they made rudimentary shelters by stringing up canvas from tree branches, and would sit with their eyes stinging and coughing from the trapped smoke, though they would never be without a blaze because all knew that wild beasts smelt fire from miles around and feared it.

‘Except for the lion,’ Aboli had told Hal once. ‘A lion will walk around the campfire to get a good look at what is going on.’

If the days were too hot, however, and there was enough moon and starlight to see by at night, they trekked then with the star-crammed vault of heaven dizzying in its magnificence above them, its unchained enormity like a promise of freedom in another, better world. One dawn found them walking along a spine of high ground overlooking a lake. The waters, whilst low following the dry season, were far from unoccupied, the most abundant and obvious residents being a pod of hippos that wallowed in the shallows. Crocodiles, too, lay basking in the rising sun. They seemed barely conscious, still as logs until some secret sign made a flock of white birds take wing and wheel into the south, at which point the crocodiles slid down the muddy banks into the water.

They rested through the heat in the middle of the day sleeping in the shade of tall borassa palms and it was almost sunset when they came back down to the plain. Capelo seemed on edge, constantly mopping his brow despite being the only man who was not walking on his own two legs. In the distance ahead of them families of warthogs scurried off into cover. Nightjars and bats streaked in the gathering dusk. The column followed the course of a dry riverbed, which funnelled them between two low hills into a valley whose steep sides bristled with spiny gooseberry trees and other thicket and scrub.

Finally Capelo decided to make camp for the night and the slaves, Hal included, were loosened from the chains around their wrists and put to work erecting thick spiny thorn bush fences to protect them from predators, and setting fires that provided further protection and kept them warm. The fat man’s mood was still very obviously unsettled and one of the guards asked him, ‘What troubles you, senhor?’

‘We are being watched,’ Capelo said.

‘Are you sure, sir?’ the guard replied. ‘I have seen no one.’

‘You do not have to see a man to know he is there. We are being watched.’

Aboli was barely ten paces away from the thorns that surrounded the slavers’ encampment. A day had passed since he and his men had struck the coffle’s unmistakable trail and they had caught up with it a matter of hours after that. It was tempting to attack now, for it would be a simple matter to overpower Capelo and the guards. But then what?

It was not enough to rescue Hal, he had to free Judith, too. He had already sent two men ahead and they had returned with the news that the mines were only a day’s march away. They had also found another trail: eight men and one woman, who had reached Lobo’s land this very day.

Within another day, then, Hal and Judith would both be in the same place. That would be the time to go and get them. And until that time, Aboli was keeping his presence secret, and allowing Hal to remain enslaved, however much it pained him to do so.

It was very seldom that Judith and the Buzzard had ever agreed on anything. But, though neither of them said a word, both knew that the other had precisely the same reaction:
this
is Balthazar Lobo?

Here was a man who had carved out his own kingdom in the heart of Africa, who’d discovered hills full of gold and brought armies of slaves to get it for him. Judith was expecting a crude, hard-hearted bully, but she had no doubt that he would be strong, dominant and virile too. Instead Lobo turned out to be a small, scrawny, dried up old stick of a man whose face was dominated by a long, underslung lower jaw that jutted out so far that his lower teeth were further forward than the upper ones. On her travels in Europe Judith had heard stories of the Habsburg dynasty that had dominated Spain, Germany, Austria and the entire Holy Roman Empire at various times. Its members had been infamous for their extraordinarily ugly lower jaws. Perhaps Lobo was some bastard son of the Habsburg line, exiled to Africa to avoid him embarrassing the rest of the clan.

‘So,’ he said, looking appreciatively at Judith – there was, she noticed, a thin trail of drool trickling down that grotesque chin – ‘you’re the pretty thing who wants to be my next wife? Well, I dare say you’re not looking your best after your long journey. Why don’t you go and rest, my dear, eh? Your chamber has been prepared. We’ve even found a wedding dress for you. It’s only been used twice before. You will sleep tonight and then tomorrow you can rest your weary legs, wash off the dirt, eat some proper food – my cooks will prepare whatever takes your fancy. In short, do whatever will best prepare you to look your prettiest tomorrow night. Then you will put on your magnificent gown, present yourself to me and I shall decide what I want to do with you.’

He fixed her with a piercing stare and suddenly Judith felt the full force of Lobo’s will and understood how, as a younger man, he had been able to carve out his own corner of the wilderness for himself alone.

‘Hmm …’ He tilted his head to one side as he sized her up. ‘Nice plump breasts, rounded stomach, and yet the legs are quite thin. It’s almost as though … you’re not pregnant already are you, girl?’

Judith said nothing.

‘Would it matter if she were?’ the Buzzard asked. ‘Suppose, and I speak on an entirely hypothetical basis, but just suppose that this woman carried the child of a tall, young, strapping white man. Suppose she gave birth to this child when married to you. Why, that would make the child yours. Would it really matter if you had not planted the seed from which it had grown?’

Lobo looked Judith up and down. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I do not suppose that it would. Sleep well, young lady. I want you at your best when next I set eyes on you.’

he Amadoda looked down on the sprawling complex where Balthazar Lobo lived and made his fortune. His house was built in a hollow square, with windowless walls of whitewashed mud, more than twice as tall as a man and topped by battlements on the outside, while the inner part of the house opened on to an inner courtyard that was bright with greenery and flowers.
Surely that is where they have taken Judith
, Aboli thought to himself, pleased that he had possessed the foresight to bring the grappling iron.