Uncharted Seas (40 page)

On each side of the redoubt their bullets dealt death and destruction among the foremost of their aggressors but the others came hurtling on, and the spears they flung came clattering down among the rocks. Unity screamed as one pierced the soft flesh of her arm. Basil turned quickly, but she made a desperate gesture which he knew at once meant that she was not seriously wounded and that he must not relax, for a second, in his efforts to drive off the howling band who were now scrambling up the lower rocks.

The front was clear. Not a single black had succeeded in getting to within two hundred yards. The ground beyond was littered with dead and dying. The unwounded were beating a precipitate retreat; rushing in panic to save themselves from a further rain of death-dealing lead. In the nick of time De Brissac abandoned his gun and came to Basil’s assistance with his automatic; shooting the foremost savage through the head. His intervention enabled Basil to grab up the fifth rifle. He plugged another two Negroes at close range; the rest scuttled back in terror and made off into the darkness.

On his side Luvia had been more fortunate as he had better cover and the rocks in front of him were more difficult to scale. He had succeeded in shooting down five of the natives and the others had abandoned any further attempt to rush him for the moment.

In the lull that followed they sorted themselves out and attended to the casualties. Basil’s thigh-wound was not serious as the spear had caught him in the fleshy part on the outer side of the leg and only ripped away a piece of skin. By tearing out one of his shirtsleeves he was able to make a bandage for it which De Brissac adjusted with practised skill. The spear-wound in
Unity’s arm was more serious as the point had pierced the muscle above the elbow and it was bleeding freely. They applied a tourniquet and bound up the wound to stop the bleeding while Synolda made a sling out of a scarf she was wearing, to keep the arm in place.

‘I’ll say we came out of that mighty well,’ Juhani remarked gruffly. ‘Take a look at all those stiffs in the valley there. That ought to teach ’em.’

‘I hope to God it does,’ Basil murmured. ‘It was touch and go. We may not be so lucky next time.’

‘I doubt if there’ll be a next time,’ Juhani said more cheerfully. ‘They’ve had a bellyful, and they know what’s coming to them if they try the same stuff again.’

De Brissac said nothing; having no wish to depress the others. Now that the natives had learnt what they were up against, after their first mad, unplanned onslaught, he did not think they would make any further attack while the moonlight lasted; but a dark patch in the sky to the north-eastward told him clouds there were blotting out the stars and he feared that in another ten minutes or so they might obscure the moon.

For a little time they sat, almost in silence. The terrible experience which the girls had been through was too recent for them to speak of with any uneasiness yet; the men were all tired after their long forced march and knew that they must conserve their remaining strength in case they had to face fresh fighting.

Basil sat with his back against a rock and Unity lay in the crook of his arm. Juhani and Synolda were perched side by side upon a ledge but a strange shyness seemed to have come between them now that they were suddenly reunited. They had not spoken more than a dozen words to each other since their bitter quarrel and the shooting of old Jansen. Both of them sat awkwardly silent with their eyes cast down; not daring to catch each other’s glance in the soft moonlight.

After a period of quietness, broken only by the groaning of the wounded Negroes, Basil spoke: ‘Deveril and his people ought to be well on their way by now and we’ll be able to chip in with good effect when they start setting light to the kraals.’

De Brissac shook his head. ‘We’ve got a long time to go before we can hope for that. A lot has happened since we reached here but it’s surprising how much action can be crammed into a single minute. It’s barely half an hour yet since we reached the
shelter of these rocks and then, if you remember, we reckoned that the islanders would be a good three hours before they could come up with us.’

As he spoke he was studying the low ground of the valley through his night-glasses. The bonfire still burned brightly in the open space but the savages had vanished to a man. Not a tremor of movement showed among the dark hutments and the Marriage House compound was now empty. During the fight he had glimpsed the half-caste concubines streaming out of the great gates in the palisade and round its north-eastern corner into the patchy blackness of the maize-fields. Evidently they had succeeded in overcoming their gaolers and, by this time, had probably taken to the forest. He wondered how Li Foo was faring, and judged that if he had followed their old track he should, by now, be reaching the higher ground on the far side of the valley where he could take up some advantageous position from which to watch the whole line of the woods for the approach of Sir Deveril and his company.

A film passed across the moon. The silver vanished from the crags and bulging overhang above them. Their range of vision was curtailed, so that the native village was now only a blur in the shadows, and none of the houses could be seen distinctly except those near the big fire. An unbroken hush hung over the darkened sweep of country before them. Not a shadow moved giving the least indication of the place to which the savages had retreated. The minutes crawled by. Gradually the film across the moon thickened until a big bank of cloud blotted it out entirely. They were now dependent on the faint starlight by which they could just make out each other’s faces vaguely, but they could not see more than fifty feet from their redoubt into the surrounding murk.

De Brissac took up his position behind his gun again. Without a word Basil and Juhani picked up their rifles and, posting themselves on his flanks, stood straining their eyes into the darkness. Their muscles tensed, they listened anxiously for the least sound which might indicate a renewal of hostilities. At last it came; the sharp tinkle of a stone as it glanced on a piece of rock and rattled down the slope away to the left in front of Basil.

‘Hold your fire!’ whispered De Brissac. ‘Keep calm and take them one by one. Shoot for their bodies once you can see them.’

‘O.K.’ muttered Luvia, and suddenly his rifle cracked.

A second later the other two came into action as their eyes
focused on black humps of deeper shadow stealthily moving up towards them.

Instantly the rifles and machine-gun flashed the blacks leaped to their feet and launched themselves at the redoubt. The blast of fire from De Brissac’s gun checked the advance in front even more quickly than before but, once again, the two sides of the rocky fort became points of peril. A score of blacks reached the lower boulders in spite of Basil’s and Luvia’s good marksmanship, but De Brissac was equal to the occasion. He stood up, with his machine-gun in his arms, and poured a stream of bullets across Luvia’s front, annihilating the yelling savages there. Swinging round, he brought it to bear on the other group with equal fatal effect.

One huge Negro escaped his fire and was already up on the land-slide behind them, but Synolda snatched up a loose slab of rock and hurled it at him, catching him in the midriff. With a grunt he doubled up and, slipping, somersaulted down the rocks on top of his dead and wounded comrades.

The attack was over and they sat back again; mopping their perspiring faces before hastily setting about the reloading of their weapons. De Brissac frowned anxiously as he fitted a new belt of ammunition to his machine-gun. With it he had done enormous execution but he was down to his last belt and once that had been fired any further attack would render their situation desperate. To his relief the shadows lightened just then and the moon came out from behind the bank of clouds, but another bank shut out the stars further to the north and was drifting slowly towards it.

For a few minutes they sat there, resting their tired limbs and praying fervently that the moonlight might endure a little longer. All too soon the moon was veiled again and the shadows crept forward, like living things, out of the valley, hiding its landmarks in a cloak of inky blackness.

The third attack developed very shortly after the disappearance of the moon; the enemy had evidently been waiting for it and preparing to make a new assault directly they could count on darkness to cover their activities.

Again for breathless seconds the flashes stabbed the murk; the machine-gun chattered and the acrid fumes of cordite were strong in their nostrils; but the tattoo of the gun ceased abruptly. De Brissac’s last belt of ammunition was finished and all that remained from the heavy cases they had humped so laboriously were the chains of miniature brass shell-cases which tinkled as
they knocked against each other. Yet for the third time the gun had done its work. The horde was flying down the hill leaving their dead and dying piled high upon the earth at the edge of the nearest boulders.

‘I’ll say you’ve got guts,’ Luvia panted. ‘They must be stark crazy to charge that gun of yours the way they do.’

‘It won’t help us next time,’ De Brissac said grimly. ‘The ammunition’s run out.’

Their new peril caused them acute anxiety as they tried to pierce the surrounding gloom for signs of a further assault. There was silence no longer. In the last two attacks many of the natives had got right up to the rocks on either side before being shot down and their groans of agony now wrung their heart-strings.

‘Here they come!’ cried Juhani raising his rifle and aiming for a dark figure no more than twenty feet away.

Basil stood ready on his side but their front was now totally unprotected. De Brissac could only clutch a spare rifle that Unity thrust towards him and empty its magazine into the advancing mass. They all felt that their last hour had come. In a few moments they must be borne down by sheer weight of numbers and massacred, but before the attack had a chance to develop fully relief came from an unexpected quarter.

A flame spurted up away down in the blackness of the valley to their right where they knew the thickest cluster of the native huts to be and, as though it were a signal, the rattle of musketry came clearly from beyond the Marriage House.

‘
Dieu merci
!’ De Brissac gasped. ‘Deveril and his men!’

The blacks had also seen the flames; they hesitated, broke off their attack on the stony fort, and turning, ran down the hill, leaving the defenders of the redoubt to witness the scene in the valley unmolested.

From the native village great spurts of flame were now going up as the frail dwellings of dried mud, grass and wattle burned like tinder while the north-east corner of the stockade round the Marriage House compound was lit, intermittently, by the flash of firearms.

‘Well done, Deverill!’ Basil gasped. ‘By Jove, he’s got here quickly!’

‘Nearly two hours before his time,’ De Brissac supplemented.

‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’ Unity sighed; letting her head fall on Basil’s shoulder.

A few moments later, while the fight in the valley was still
raging, the moon came out again and they could see the rescue party. Deveril and his men had fought their way out of the compound and were advancing up the slope firing to either hand, upon shadowy groups of blacks, as they came.

De Brissac stared down at them anxiously. ‘That can’t be all his force. It’s no more than ten to a dozen men. Where the devil have the others got to?’

‘Making a bonfire of the homesteads,’ Juhani said quickly. There’re lots of folks moving down there. Look, man! you can see them against the flames.’

Dense clouds of smoke and sparks were rising from the native village and wild confusion reigned as indistinct figures dashed back and forth, glimpsed only for seconds in the lurid glare.

Deveril’s men were half-way up the slope. Standing up, now, in their front, De Brissac’s party gave them a rousing cheer. An answering shout came from the rescuers and their firing ceased as the blacks gave back on either side, enabling them to cover the last two hundred yards at the double. Willing hands hauled them up into the redoubt as soon as they reached the boulders at its foot.

Panting, laughing, exclaiming, they exchanged breathless greetings and, to De Brissac’s amazement, he found Yonita was among the rescue party.

‘What in the world are you doing here?’ he cried, seizing both her hands and kissing them violently.

‘She was so plaguely insistent,’ Deveril shrugged. ‘With our thirteen balloons we can land twelve men each journey. Four trips will see the forty-seven men I have raised over and leave two balloons spare on the last crossing. Knowing that, Yonita blackguarded me into letting her accompany our vanguard.’

‘But why are you so few?’ asked Basil hurriedly. ‘Are all the rest of your people down in the village?’

Deveril shook his head. ‘Gad! No. Only Li Foo whom you sent to meet us and one other. The eleven of us here, including Yonita, and the fellow who is with the Chinaman, were the first company to make the crossing. ’Twas Yonita’s notion that we should not wait for the rest but set out to your assistance instantly.’

‘Thank God you did.’ Unity flung her sound arm round Yonita’s shoulders. ‘We should all be dead now if you’d waited; we should have been dead long ago if it hadn’t been for the machine-gun and our ammunition, for that has just run out.’

Deveril’s young face suddenly lost its cheerful look.

‘We heard the gun, miles distant in the forest, and saw it in action from the far side of the valley, but we wondered why you did not fire it again to succour us when we were hard-pressed down by the compound. Heaven forfend that the Negroes should attack again until the rest of my people come up.’

‘Oh, shucks.’ Juhani laughed for the first time for hours. ‘Now there are more than a dozen of us we’ll hold this place easily with our rifles.’

‘Think you it will be so easy?’ Yonita broke in. ‘We have a great variety of arms in our island but many of them are of considerable antiquity and for some types we lack ammunition. All that was saved by their first owners was used up long since on occasions when these heathens first raided us.’