The Monsoon (109 page)

“The course to clear Madagascar and make for Good Hope is southeast by south. Mark it on the traverse board, if you please, Mr. Tyler,” Tom ordered.

“Southeast by south, it is, Captain.”

“Full and by, Mr. Tyler,” said Tom, who took Sarah’s hand and led her to the bows. They stood together and watched the flying fish explode from the surface of the Mozambique Channel and spin away in silvery blurs, like new-minted coins tossed across the blue current.

“If I can find a priest at Good Hope, will you marry me, Sarah Beatty?” he asked.

“That I will, Thomas Courtney.” She laughed and hugged him closer.

“That I will.” The little Centaurus anchored in Table Bay on a sunny morning in which the southeaster chopped bursts of white off the tops of the wavelets. They went ashore under the towering mountain whose flat top was covered by the famous tablecloth, a stationary bank of roiling white cloud.

The settlement had grown in size since last they had visited the Cape. The strictures of the Dutch East India Company against foreigners owning land or taking up residence in its territory were every bit as draconian as those of its English counterpart. However, Tom soon discovered that, for a few golden guilders placed in the hands of the right official, these laws could be waived.

Once they had paid their dues, the welcome they received from the burghers was convivial, especially as the Centaurus was well burdened, and the Dutch merchants smelt profits in their visit.

They planned to stay in the Cape until the rains on the Fever Coast had passed. As their quarters aboard the Centaurus were cramped, and the motion of the ship at anchor was uncomfortable, Tom found lodgings for himself and Sarah in one of the little guest-houses below the Company gardens run by a manumitted Malay woman, who was a wonderful cook and hostess.

In the first week Tom visited all the merchants whose warehouses lined the waterfront, and was delighted to find that the demand for ivory was strong. He struck several good bargains for the sale of their cargo. The crew were given their first pay and share of the profits since they had sailed from England. Over the next few months most of them spent everything they had earned in the ale shops and bawdy-houses of the town, but Ned Tyler and Dr. Reynolds used theirs to purchase small holdings of land in the Constantia valley on the far side of the mountain.

Tom and Aboli used nearly all of their share to buy the necessary stores for another season at Fort Providence, and a goodly stock of the trade goods on offer in the warehouses of the colony.

Tom gave Sarah fifty pounds from the prize, which she used to assemble her trousseau. It included a small harpsichord and a baby cradle on wooden rockers, which she painted with floral wreaths and choirs of cherubs.

The entire crew were in the congregation of the little church in the gardens when Tom and Sarah were married, and after the ceremony they carried the newly-weds on their shoulders down the street to their lodgings, singing all the way and pelting them with handfuls of rose petals.

In one of the waterside taverns Aboli found a sun, wizened little Dutchman named Andries van Houten, who had been brought out from Amsterdam as a gold-finder for the Dutch East India Company.

“I have scoured the mountains as far as Stellenbosch,” van Houten told Aboli after the third tankard of ale had slid effortlessly down his gullet, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his red wrinkled throat.

“There is no gold in this devil-damned colony, but I can smell it in the north.” He sniffed the air.

“If only I could find a ship to take me up the coast.” And he looked at Aboli hopefully.

“But I don’t have a guilder in my purse to pay my passage.” Aboli brought him to see Tom, and they talked every evening for a week. In the end, Tom agreed to purchase all the prospecting equipment that van Houten needed and take him to Fort Providence when they sailed.

Those pleasant days at Good Hope passed too swiftly, and they were soon reloading the Centaurus, taking great care with Sarah’s harpsichord and the cradle. As the season changed, and the oak trees that lined the streets dropped their leaves, they hoisted the anchor and sailed northwards around Cape Point and into the Mozambique Channel again.

When they entered the mouth of the Lunga river and forged their way upstream, they saw the high-water mark on the banks, and the debris hanging in the branches of the trees that showed just how strong had been the flood during the months of the Big Wet. When they reached the hilly country, the forest was green and burgeoning with new growth.

Faithful to the trust they had placed in him, Fundi met them at the landing below Fort Providence, and proudly showed Tom how well he had cared for everything in their absence. They set to re thatching the roofs of the huts, and repairing the weak spots in the palisade. Sarah had her new harpsichord installed in the front room of their cottage, and played and sang for Tom every evening after dinner.

She placed the painted baby cradle beside their bed in the back room. The first night Tom eyed it as he sat on the bed and pulled off his boots.

“I take that as a challenge, Mistress Courtney,” he told her.

“Shall we see what we can do about filling it?” They did not have much time to devote to the task, for within weeks Tom was ready to take the first hunting party upriver.

Van Houten was in the leading boat, sitting on his @,” wooden box of chemicals with his gold pans stacked at hand. He prospected every gravel-bed and sandbank they passed. When they went ashore to hunt the elephant herds, van Houten did not join them but wandered away with his two Lozi helpers to search the hills and streams for traces of the precious metal.

The hunting was good this season. Within a month they had filled the boats with ivory, and set out to retrace their steps to Fort Providence.

Sarah accompanied Tom on the second expedition, bringing with her the paintbox she had bought in Good Hope. She filled the pages of her sketchbooks with images of the journey.

They followed the river further than ever before, and at last reached the country of the Lozi. At the first village the entire population fled into the forest, and it took several days before they came creeping out timidly from among the trees. After Fundi and Aboli had overcome their initial fear and suspicion, they began a friendly relationship with the tribe.

They found that the Lozi were generally a pleasant and cheerful people. Though small in stature, they were well formed and handsome. Some of the women were beautiful, with fine Nilotic features. They went bare breasted and their carriage was graceful and proud.

Aboli had a long, serious discussion with the village elders, and the outcome was that, for a few rolls of copper wire and a small bag of glass beads, he acquired two of the prettiest, plumpest virgins as wives. The girls were named Fallo. and Zete. It was difficult to tell who was better pleased with the bargain, the bridegroom or the little brides, preening in the new finery Aboli had given them as art of the bride price and gazing at their husband with aw and reverence.

Dr. Reynolds, with Sarah to assist him, successfully treated many of the sick Lozi, which sealed the good relations with the tribe. When the expedition went on upriver to the capital kraal of the Lozi, the drums carried ahead of them the news of their coming. Their paramount chief Bongola, came down to the landing to welcome them and lead them to new huts that had been built especially in their honour.

Bongola’s village was a cluster of several hundred thatched huts built along the riverbank and on the slopes of the hills. Each hut was set around with a shamba of mango and plantain trees and manioc plants.

Kraals of logs housed the scrubby cattle and goats of the tribe, and kept them safe from the nocturnal forays of leopard and hyena.

By this time Tom and Aboli were both fluent in the language, and they held long indabas with Bongola each day of their stay. Bongola was a naturally garrulous little man and he related the recent history of the tribe to Tom.

The Lozi had once held rich lands on the banks of the great freshwater lake to the north, but then the slavers had arrived and fallen upon them, like the cheetah on the gazelle herds of the plains.

The survivors had fled southwards, and for almost two decades now had evaded further depredations. But each day they lived in terror of the slavers whom they knew were slowly driving their raiding columns deeper into the interior.

“We know that one day we will have to fly again,” Bongola told Tom.

“That was why we were filled with such alarm when we heard of your arrival.” Tom remembered Aboli’s stories of how he had been captured by the slavers when he was a child. He remembered also those unfortunates he had seen in the slave.

markets of Zanzibar, and felt once again that deep abhorrence of the trade, and anger at his own inability to ease the plight of these people.

The trading was profitable with Bongola, who brought out many fine ivory tusks from his hoard to sell. Then van Houten came in from one of his forays into the wilderness and proudly showed Tom five porcupine quills, each stoppered at one end. When he removed the stopper from one and poured the contents into the bowl of his gold scale, Tom stared at the tiny pile of metallic flakes and granules, which gleamed yellow in the sunlight.

“Gold dust?” he asked.

“I have heard tell of the fool’s gold.

Are you certain this is not it?” Van Houten bridled at the slur on his professional integrity, and showed Tom how to test the flakes with acid from his box of chemicals.

“The acid will eat any of the base metals but not the noble one,” he explained. They watched it bubble and fizz as he dipped the flake into it but when he brought it out the metal was bright and unscarred.

He took Tom to the place where he had panned the dust, and showed him the string of gravel-beds and sandbars along the course of a stream down one of the valleys.

At Tom’s request Bongola sent them fifty women of the tribe:

traditionally the men would not engage in such menial labour as working in the field or digging holes in the stream bed.

Van Houten gave each of the women a pan and showed her how to use it, dip and swing, swirling the gravel in the pan and letting the dross flow away over the lip, until only the gleaming tail remained. Swiftly the women learned the art and Tom promised them a measure of glass beads for each quill of the noble dust that they brought to him.

Van Houten’s alluvial gold field proved so rich that a hard-working woman could fill a quill in less than a day, and soon gold panning was the preferred activity of the tribe. When some of the men wanted to join in such a profitable pastime, the women drove them away indignantly.

The rains threatened, and it was time to head downriver again.

The longboats were low in the water under their cargoes of ivory, and Tom had almost a hundred ounces of gold dust locked in the ship’s strong-box.

When Aboli told Fallo and Zete that he was leaving them with their families until he returned next season, they burst into distraught wails and fountains of tears.

Sarah remonstrated with him at such treatment.

“How can you be so cruel, Aboli? You have made them love you, and now you are breaking their little hearts.”

“They would die of terror and seasickness on the voyage down to Good Hope, and even if they survived they would pine for their mothers every day they were away. They would make my life as miserable as their own.

No, they must stay here, and wait for me, as good wives should.”

The desolation of the two girls was miraculously relieved by the parting gifts of beads, cloth and hand mirrors that Aboli bestowed on them, enough to make them the richest wives in the village. Both girls were bubbling over with giggles and smiles as they waved farewell to his tall figure at the tiller of the leading longboat.

When they returned to Lozi Land at the beginning of the following dry season, both Fallo and Zete were huge with child, their glossy black bellies bulging out over their loincloths and their breasts big as ripe melons. They gave birth within days of each other.

Sarah acted as midwife and delivered two baby boys.

“By God!” said Tom as he examined the infants.

“There is no doubt that they are yours, Aboli. The poor little devils only lack a tattoo to be as ugly as their father.” Aboli was a changed man. Gone was his dignified reserve and regal bearing when he held a chubby drooling son on each knee. The scarified visage that had struck terror into a thousand enemies became benign and close to beautiful.

“This one is Zama,” he told Tom and Sarah, “for he will be a mighty warrior. And this one is Tula, for he will be a poet and a wise man.” That night, in the darkness of their hut, Sarah laid her cheek on Tom’s and whispered into his ear, “I want a son also. Please, Tom. Please, my darling, give me a baby to hold and love.”

“I will try,” he promised.

“With all my heart, I will try.” But as the years passed, part of each spent at Fort Providence or travelling in the wilderness of Lozi Land, the other part spent in the Cape of Good Hope, Sarah remained slim” and tall and flat-bellied, with nothing to swell her womb or puff out her shapely bosom.

Both Zama and Tula grew swiftly into strong little boys, taking after their father, tall for their age and natural leaders of the other boys of their age group. They spent their days in the forest and on the grassy plains along the river, tending the communal cattle herds of the tribe, and learning to handle bow and spear, coming to know the ways of the wild creatures of the forests. In the evenings they sat at Aboli’s feet at the fireside, and listened wide-eyed to his stories of the sea, of battles and adventures in faraway places.

“Take us with you, Father,” Zama pleaded. As Aboli had predicted he was the taller and stronger of the brothers.

“Please, honoured father,” Tula piped.

“Take us and show us these wonders.”

“You must stay with your mothers, and tend your duties here until you have been circumcised and initiated into manhood,” Aboli promised them.