A Falcon Flies

She was bound with her own porters and Hottentots, forced to wear the light marching chains which were proof, if proof was needed, as to who her captors were.

The dawn revealed them to be half-breeds and blacks, all of them dressed in the cast-off finery of European style, but carrying modern weapons.

These were the men she had crossed half a continent to meet, but now she cowered in the rags that were her only disguise. She shuddered to think on her fate if they should discover her sex, and she berated herself for having so blithely believed that she and her entourage would be safe from these predators merely because she was white and English. Their prey was human flesh, of whatever colour and condition and that was all she was now, human flesh on the hoof. A chained creature, of little real value, a few dollars on the auction block, and she knew that her captors would think nothing of taking their pleasure upon her, or of leaving her beside the road with a ball through the temple if she provoked them in any way. She kept silent and obeyed instantly the least word or gesture from her captors. Slipping and dragging in the mud they were marched on eastwards, forced to carry their remaining stores and equipment which had now become slavers" booty.

They were closer to the coast than Robyn had calculated, they smelt the iodine and salt of the sea from afar, and later as night began to fall, they caught the smell of woodsmoke and the unmistakable odour of captive humanity. Then at last they saw the firelight flickering in the darkness ahead, and the awful loom of the barracoons.

Their captors marched between the dark stockades of pole and daubed mud, from which the chilling dirge rose of men without hope singing of a land they would never see again.

At last they came into the central square around which the barracoons were built. It was an open area of trampled mud where a raised platform of rough-sawn planks had been built. Its purpose was immediately clear, for the first of Robyn's servants was dragged up the steps and stood upon the platform, while the fires around the clearing were heaped with dry wood to light the scene. The platform was the auction block, and it seemed that the sale was to take place immediately.

The auctioneer was clearly of pure Portuguese stock, a little man with the wrinkled, sun-browned face of a vicious gnome. He had the bland smile and the unblinking eyes of a serpent. He was dressed in elegantly cut jacket and breeches, and his boots and belt were of the finest Iberian leather, ornately tooled and with solid silver buckles. He carried a pair of expensive pistols in his belt, and wore the wide-brimmed flat-crowned hat of a Portuguese gentleman upon his small wrinkled head.

Before climbing up on the block, he sent one of his personal slaves with a casual kick and cuff to the carved wooden drum at the edge of the clearing. On it the slave began pounding out a summons to the buyers. The slave went to it lustily, his bare torso gleaming with sweat and raindrops in the firelight.

And in answer to the urgent staccato rhythm of the drum, men came from out of the shadows of the grove and from the living huts between the barracoons. Some of them had been drinking, they came arm in arm brandishing their rum bottles and bellowing in drunken chorus, others came singly and silently, but they came from every direction and gathered in a circle about the auction block.

The men who formed the circle seemed to be of every hue that the human skin is capable of assuming, from le black through all the shades of brown and yellow purp to dead shark's belly white, and their features were African and Arabic, Asian and European. Even their dress differed widely, from the flowing robes of Arabia to the faded finery of embroidered jackets and high boots. They had only one thing in common, the hawk-fierce eyes and merciless mien of those who deal in human misery.

One at a time Robyn's servants were prodded up on to the block, and their ragged clothing was ripped away to expose their physique to the buyers. One of these might come forward to feel the muscle tone, or force open a slave's mouth to examine the teeth, like a gypsy horsedealer at the fair.

Then, when the buyers had satisfied themselves as to the quality of the wares on offer, the small Portuguese would step lightly to the front of the block and begin the bidding.

The men in the circle below him called him Alphonse and though they exchanged coarse banter with him, yet they all treated him with wary respect, there could be no clearer proof of the man's reputation than fear and respect from these men.

Under his control the sale went swiftly. The Hottentots, small wiry men, butter yellow and with flat puglike features attracted little interest from the circle of buyers, knocked down for a few silver rupees apiece, while the porters, taller men and well muscled from many months of hard marching and porterage, fetched better prices, until they came to old Karanga, ancient and toothless, hobbling on to the block on storklike legs, seeming barely able to support the weight of his chains.

The laughter was derisive, and the little Portuguese pleaded in vain for a single bid before dismissing the old man with disgust. It was only when he was hauled down off the block and dragged away into the darkness beyond the fires that Robyn realized what was about to happen to him and, forgetting her resolve not to draw attention to herself, "No, let him go! " Hardly one of them glanced in her direction, and the man who held her chain hit her a careless open-handed blow across the side of her face that blinded her for a moment. She dropped to her knees in the mud, and through the buzzing in her ears beard the thud of a pistol shot from the darkness.

She began quietly to weep, and still weeping she was hoisted to her feet and in her turn dragged forward into the circle of firelight and hoisted by her chain on to the block. A young skinny one, said the Portuguese. "But white enough to make a choice bum-boy for the harems of Omani, once he has had his knockers clipped. Who will give me ten rupees? "Let's have a look at him, " a voice shouted from the circle, and the Portuguese turned to Robyn, hooked a finger into the top button of her flannel shirt and ripped it down to the level of her belt buckle.

She doubled over, trying to conceal her upper body, but the man behind her twisted the chain and forced her upright. Her breasts pushed out pertly through the torn shirt, and the ring of watchers growled and moved restlessly, the mood changing instantly.

Alphonse touched the butt of one of the pistols in his belt significantly, and the growl of comment died, the ring of men drew back a little.

Ten rupees? " Alphonse Pereira asked.

From across the circle a powerfully-built man swaggered into the firelight. Robyn recognized him instantly.

He wore a tall beaver hat tilted back on his head, and from under the brim curled thick shiny black hair. His teeth, when he opened his mouth, sparkled in the light of the flames. His face was flushed with excitement, his voice was thick with it. Gold, he shouted. "I'll bid gold, a gold mohur of the East India Company, and a plague on any of you that goes above thatA gold mohur, called Alphonse, the slave-master. "A gold mohur bid by my brother Camacho Pereira, and good luck to him, he chuckled. "Come now, who wants to deny my brother Camacho a fair tup at the wench? " One of his men slapped Camacho's back. Sweet Christ, you always were a hot one, at that price you can have my turn on top of her."

And Camacho laughed delightedly and came to the front of the block to stare up at Robyn, tipping the beaver hat forward he whispered, I've had to wait a long time-Robyn felt the little insects of loathing crawling over her skin, and she backed away to the limit of her chain. Come now, Alphonse called. "Who will go beyond a gold mohur for a fine piece-'She's mine, Camacho told his brother.

"Strike the bargain."

His brother lifted his hand to knock down the sale, when another voice stopped him. A double eagle, sir. Twenty golden dollars American bid. " The voice was not raised, yet it carried clearly to every man there, as it could carry from quarterdeck to maintop in a force eight gale.

Robyn started, and swung her chains disbelievingly in that direction; she would have known that lazy drawling inflectionif she had not heard it for a lifetime. He stood at the very edge of the firelight, but as every head in the circle turned to him, he stepped forward.

The smile had frozen on Alphonse's face, and he hesitated. Call the bid! " The advancing figure in plain white shirt and dark breeches made the men about him seem small and grubby, and after a moment's hesitation, Alphonse obeyed him. A double eagle bid, he said harshly. "Captain Mungo, St. John of the clipper Huron bids a double golden eagle."

Robyn felt her legs start to sag under her with relief, but the men behind her jerked her upright by her chain.

Camacho Pereira had whirled to face the American, and to stare at him furiously. Mungo St. John answered him with a smile, indulgent and patronizing. Robyn had never seen him look more handsome and dangerous, his dark wavy hair catching the firelight, and the gaze of his yellow-flecked eyes level and unflinching in the face of Carnacho's fury. A thousand rupees, Carnacho, he said softly. "Can you match it? " Carnacho hesitated, and then turned back quickly to his own brother, his voice low and urgent.

Stake me? " he asked, and Alphonse laughed. I never lend money."

To a brother? " Camacho insisted. Especially not to a brother, Alphonse answered. "Let the wench go, you can buy a dozen better for fifty rupees each. "I must have her. " He whirled back to face Mungo St. John. "I must have her. It is a matter of honour. Do you understand? He took the beaver from his head, and spun it away. One of his men caught it, and Camacho ran both hands through his thick black locks, and then stretched his arms down at his sides, fleidng the fingers like a conjurer about to perform a sleight of hand. I will make one more bid, he said ominously. "I bid one mohur of gold, and ten inches of Toledo steel. " The knife seemed to appear in his hand from out of the air he lifted the point to the level of Mungo St. John's belt buckle. Walk away, Yankee, or I will take the woman and your gold double eagle."

The watchers growled, a low blood-thirsty sound, and swiftly rearranged themselves into a ring about the two men, jostling for a better view. One hundred rupees says Machito slits the Yankee's guts. "Done! And there was a rising hubbub as the wagers were called and accepted.

Mungo St. John had not stopped smiling, but now he held out his right hand without once taking his eyes off the Portuguese's face.

Out of the ranks of the watchers emerged a large, toadlike figure with a head as round and bald as a cannon ball. Tippoo moved with reptilian speed to Mungo St. John's right side. He placed a knife in the outstretched hand, and then unknotted the embroidered sash from his waist and handed that to his Captain. Mungo wrapped the sash around his left forearm, still smiling softly to himself.

He had not once looked up at Robyn, though she had not been able to tear her own eyes from his face.

He seemed godlike to her at that moment, everything about him, the darkly classical features, the wide shoulders under the white cloth of his shirt, the narrow waist clinched with a broad belt of polished leather, the strong straight legs in tightly fitted breeches and soil leather boots, seemed to have come down directly from Olympus. She would have gladly thrown herself at his feet and worshipped him.

just below Robyn, Camacho was stripping off his own jacket and wrapping his guard arm with it. Then with the long knife in his right hand he made a low swift cut, forehand and then backhand, so the steel whispered as it dissolved into a silver blur like the wing of a dragonfly in flight. At each stroke he ducked his head slightly and flexed his knees, loosening and warming his muscles like an athlete before the contest.

Then he moved forward, stepping lightly in the treacherous mud and weaving the point of the knife to distract and intimidate his adversary.

The smile went from Mungo St. John's lips, to be replaced by a grave and attentive expression, like a mathematician considering a complex problem. He kept his own knife low, advancing his wrapped forearm, and balancing easily, stood his full height and turned gently to face the Portuguese as he circled. It reminded Robyn of the night she had watched him on the dance floor at Admiralty House, so tall and graceful, so balanced and controlled in each movement.

Now at last the watchers were silent, straining eagerly for the first glimpse of blood, but when Carnacho charged they roared the way the crowd roars when the bull first bursts into the ring. Mungo St. John barely seemed to move, swaying his body at the hips so the knife slid past him, and then he was facing Camacho again.

Twice more the Portuguese attacked, and both times Mungo St. John moved effortlessly aside, but each time he gave a little ground, until he was backed up to the first rank of watchers, they began to fall back to give the American room to fight, but Camacho saw his opportunity as Mungo, was crowded like a prize-fighter against the ropes and he swung back to attack. At the same moment, almost as though it had been rehearsed, a booted foot shot out from the crowd.

Nobody was sure whose foot it was, for the throng was closely packed and the light uncertain, but the kick to the back of Mungo St. John's heel almost brought him down sprawling in the mud, he lunged to catch his balance, but before he could do so, Camacho hit him with the long bright blade. Robyn screamed and Mungo St. John spun away from the sting of the steel with scarlet spreading wetly down his shirt-front like rich Burgundy wine spilled on a damask tablecloth, and his own knife flicked out of his hand and was lost in the red mud.

The crowd bellowed, and Camacho swarmed in eagerly, following the wounded man the way a good dog hunts a pheasant with a broken wing.

Mungo was forced to give him ground, falling back, clutching the wound, dodging and weaving, catching a forehand slash on his wrapped guard arm so the embroidered cloth split almost to the flesh beneath it.

Skilfully Camacho herded him towards the auction block, and when Mungo, felt the poles catch in the small of his back, he froze for a moment as he realized that he was trapped. Camacho drove in at him, going for the belly, his lips drawn back baring his perfect white teeth.

Mungo St. John caught the knife on his guard and then snatched a grip on the wrist with his right hand. The two men stood chest to chest, their arms entwined like vines on a trellis, swaying slightly as they strained together, and the effort brought a fresh flood of bright blood from Mungo's wound, but slowly he forced Camacho's knife hand upwards, bending it at the elbow, until the point was no longer aimed at Mungo's belly but at the night sky above them.

Mungo shifted his feet, gathering himself and then his face darkened, his jaw clenched and his breath sobbed with effort. Slowly Camacho's wrist gave to the pressure, and his eyes widened as the point of his own knife reversed towards him.

Now he also was wedged against the side of the auction block and could not break away, and infinitely slowly but inexorably, the long blade moved towards his own chest. Both men stared down at it, their hands and arms interlocked, pitting their strength to hold each other, but the point touched Carrincho's chest, a drop of blood welled up at the tiny prick.

On the block beside Robyn, Alphonse Pereira drew the pistol from his belt with a furtive movement, but before she could shout a warning there was a blur of movement and Tippoo the mate towered beside him, his own huge smooth-bore pistol pressed to the side of Alphonse's skull. The little Portuguese rolled his eyes sideways at Tippoo, and then hurriedly returned the weapon to his obyn could watch again with fascinated horror belt, and the contest at her feet.

Mungo St. John's face was congested with dark blood, every muscle in his shoulders and arms raised in knots under the thin shirt, his whole existence concentrated on the knife, and he slid his left foot back until it was anchored against the auction block, and then using it as a pivot hurled all his weight forward on to the knife, the final effort like the matador going over between the horns for the kill.

For a moment longer Camacho resisted him, and then the blade resumed its forward movement entering Camacho's chest as slowly as a python swallows a gazelle.

Camacho's mouth opened in a cawing burst of despair, and suddenly his fingers opened as all resistance and strength went out of them. His own blade with Mungo St. John's full weight behind it shot its length into his chest with such force that the cross piece of the hilt struck against his ribs with a sharp thump.

Mungo St. John released his grip and let him fall, face forward into the mud, while he himself caught at the edge of the auction block for support. Only then did he lift his chin to look up at Robyn. Your servant, ma'am, he murmured, and Tippoo rushed forward to catch him before he fell.

Huron's seamen all of them armed, formed a guard about them, and Tippoo led them holding aloft a bull'seye lantern which he shone into the shadows as they hurried down the path.

Mungo St. John was on his feet, but supported by Nathaniel, his bosun, and Robyn had bound up the wound roughly with a strip of linen torn from a seaman's shirt and had used the rest of the shirt to make a sling for Mungo's right arm.

Through a grove of mangroves they reached the bank of the creek on which the barracoons had been built and in the centre of the stream, her bare masts and yards silhouetted against the starry sky, lay the lovely clipper.

She had lanterns in her rigging and an alert anchor watch, for at Tippoo's first hail the whaler swung away from her side and was rowed swiftly to the bank where they stood.

Mungo climbed the ship's side unaided, but sank down with a grateful sigh on to his bunk in the stern cabin, the bunk that Robyn remembered so vividly.

She tried to force the memory from her mind, and keep her manner brisk and businesslike. They have taken my medical chest she said as she rinsed her hands in the porcelain basin at the head of the bunk. Tippoo. " Mungo looked up at his mate, and the bald, scarred head bobbed once and then Tippoo ducked out of the cabin. Mungo and Robyn were alone, and she tried to remain remote and professional as she made her first examination of the wound in good lantern light.

It was narrow, but very deep. She did not like the angle of the thrust, just below the collar bone but angled in towards the point of the shoulders. Can you move your fingers? " she asked. He lifted his hand towards her face and touched her cheek lightly. Yes, he said, as he stroked her. "Very easily."

Don't, she said weakly. You are sick, he said. "So thin and pale.

"It is nothing, lower your arm, please."

She was terribly conscious of her matted hair and filthy mud-stained clothing, of the yellow tinges of fever on her skin and the dark smudges of fatigue and terror under her eyes. Fever? " he asked quietly, and she nodded as she went on working on the wound. Strange, he murmured. "It makes you seem so young, so fragile, he paused, so lovely."

I forbid you to talk like that. " She felt flustered, uncertain of herself. I said I would not forget you, " he ignored the instruction, "and I did not. "If you don't stop, I will leave immediately. "When I saw your face tonight in the light of the fires I could not believe it was you, and at the same time i; was as though all our lives we had a rendezvous to keep here tonight. As though it had been destined from the moment of our births. "Please, she whispered, "please stop. "That's better, please is better. Now I will stop."

But he watched her face attentively as she worked. In the ship's medical chest which he kept in the locker below his bunk Robyn found most of what she needed.

He neither flinched nor grimaced as she laid the stitches in the wound, but went on watching her. You must rest now, she said as she finished, and he lay back on the bunk. At last he looked tired and drained, and she felt a rush of gratitude, of -pity, and of that other emotion which she had believed that she had long ago subdued. You saved me. " She dropped her eyes, no longer able to look at him and busied herself with repacking the ship's chest. "I will always be grateful for that, just as I will always hate you for what you are doing here."

What am I doing here? " he challenged her lightly. Buying slaves, " she accused. "Buying human lives, just as you bought me on the slaving block. "But for a much lower price, " he agreed as he closed his eyes. "At twenty dollars gold a head there is not much profit in it, I assure you."

She awoke in the small cabin, the same cabin in which she had sailed the length of the Atlantic Ocean and in the same narrow uncomfortable bunk.

It was like homecoming, and the first thing she saw after her eyes had adjusted to the harsh beam of sunlight through the skylight were the chests of her medical instruments, her remaining medicines and her few personar possessions.

She remembered the unspoken command that Mungo had given to the mate the previous evening. Tippoo must have gone back ashore during the night, and she wondered what price he had paid or what threat he had made to get them back for her.

She rose swiftly from her bunk, ashamed of her sloth; whoever had left the chests, had also filled the enamel jug with fresh water. With relief she washed away the mud and filth and combed the tangles of her hair before finding worn. but clean clothing in her chest. Then she hurried from her cabin down to the master's quarters. If Tippoo had been able to find her chests, then he might be able to find and free her people, the Hottentots and porters who had gone upon the auction block in the firelight.

Mungo's bunk was empty, the vest and bloodstained shirt bundled and thrown into a corner of the cabin, and the bedclothes in disarray. She turned swiftly for the deck, and as she came out into the sunlight she saw that it would be only a temporary respite from the monsoon, for already the thunderclouds were boiling up over the horizon.

She looked about her quickly. Huron lay in the centre of a broad estuary, with mangroves on each bank, and the bar and the open sea was not in sight, though the tide was ebbing, rustling down the ship's hull and leaving the mud flats half exposed.

There were other vessels in the roadstead, mostly big dhow-rigged buggaloos typical of the Arab coastal traders, but there was another fully rigged ship at anchor half a mile further downstream, flying the flag of Brazil at her peak. Even as Robyn paused to watch her, there came the clank of her capstan, and men ran up the ratlines and spread out along her yards. She was getting under way. Then Robyn realized that there was unusual activity all about her. Small boats were plying from the shore to the anchored dhows, and even on Huron's deck there was a huddle of men on the quarter-deck.

Robyn turned towards them, and realized that the tallest of them was Mungo, St. John. His arm was in a sling and he looked drawn and pale, but his expression was forbidding, the dark curved brows drawn together in a frown, and the mouth a thin cruel line as he listened attentively to one of his seamen. So absorbed was he that he did not notice Robyn until she was only a few paces away. Then he swung towards her, and all the questions and demands stayed behind her lips for his voice was harsh. Your coming was an act of God, Doctor Ballantyne, he said. Why do you say that? "There is a plague in the barracoons, he said. "Most of the other buyers are cutting their losses, and leaving."

He glanced downstream to where the Brazilian schooner had set reefed main and jib and was running down towards the bar and the open sea, and there was activity aboard most of the other vessels. But I have over a thousand prime blacks afattening ashore, and I'll be damned if I'll run now. At least, not until I know what it is."

Robyn stared at him. Her mind was a whirl of doubts and fears. "Plague" was a layman's word, it covered everything from the Black Death to syphilis, the grand pox, as it was called. I will go ashore immediately, she said, and Mungo St. John nodded. I thought you would say that, he said, "I will go with you. "No. " Her tone brooked no argument. "You will aggravate that wound, and in your weakened conditionyou will be easy prey to this plague, whatever it is. " She glanced at Tippoo, and his face split laterally into that broad toadlike grin and he stepped up beside her. By God, ma'am, I've had them all, said Nathaniel, the little pockmarked bosun. "And none of them killed me yet And he stepped up to her other hand.

Robyn sat in the stern while Tippoo and Nathaniel handled the oars, and as they pulled across the ebb towards the shore the bosun explained what they would find ashore. Each of the traders has his own barracoon built and guarded by his own men, he told Robyn. "He buys from the Portos as the blackbirds are brought in."

As Robyn listened to Nathaniel, she realized the answers to questions that had worried her and Zouga.

This was the reason why Pereira had tried so desperately to persuade them not to bring the expedition south of the Zambezi river, and why, when all else had failed, he had attacked it with his armed brigands and the to destroy it. He had been protecting his brother's trade routes and selling area. It was not mere avarice and lust, but a logical attempt to preserve this lucrative enterprise from discovery.

L She went on listening to Nathaniel. -1 "Each trader fattens his wares ashore, like pigs for the market. That way they are stronger for the crossing, and he makes sure that they are healthy and not going to bring sickness aboard with them. There are twenty-three barracoons here, some small ones with twenty blacks or so, belonging to the small traders, right on up to the big ones like Huron's, with a thousand and more prime blackbirds in the cage. We have the slave-decks set up in Huron's hold, and we would have begun taking them aboard any day, but now-Nathaniel shrugged, and spat on the horny calloused palms of each hand in turn, and then plied himself to the oars once more.

Are you a Christian, Nathaniel? " Robyn asked softly. That I am, ma'am, " he said proudly. "As good a Christian as ever sailed out of Martha's Vineyard. "Do you think God approves of what you are doing here to these poor people? "Hewers of wood, ma'am, and drawers of water, like the Bible says, the weather-beaten sailor told her, so glibly that she knew that the reply had been put in his mouth, and she guessed by whom.

Once they were ashore, Tippoo led the small party with Robyn in the centre and Nathaniel carrying her chest in the rear.

Captain Mungo St. John had chosen the best site available for his barracoon, on a rise of ground at a distance from the river. The sheds were well built, with floors of sawn timber raised above the mud and good roofs thatched with palmetto leaves.

Huron's guards had not deserted, proof of the discipline which Mungo St. John maintained and the slaves in the barracks had evidently been carefully chosen.

They were all well set up men and women, and the copper cookers were filled with boiling farina so that their bellies bulged and their skins were glossy.

At Robyn's direction they were lined up and she passed swiftly down the ranks. There were some mild ailments, which she singled out for later treatment, but she found none of the symptoms which she so dreaded. There is no plague here, " she decided. "Not yet."

Come! " said Tippoo.

He led her through the palm groves, and the next barracoon had been deserted by the traders who had built it and stocked it. Already the slaves were hungry and confused by their sudden liberation. You are free to go, " Robyn told them. "Go back to your own land."

She was not certain that they understood her. They squatted in the mud and stared at her blankly. It was as though they had lost all power of independent thought or action, and she knew that they would never be able to make their way back along the Hyena Road, even if they survived the coming epidemic.

With a flash of horror Robyn realized that without their slave-masters these poor creatures were doomed to a lingering death by starvation and disease. Their masters had cleared out the store rooms before they left, there was not a cupful of farina or corn meal left in any of the barracoons they visited that morning.

We will have to feed them, " Robyn said. We have food for our own, that is all, Tippoo told her impassively. He is right, ma'am, Nathaniel confirmed. rWe feed them, then we'll starve our own blackbirds, besides, most of them are poor goods, not worth the price of a cup of farina."

In the second barracoon Robyn thought that she had at last discovered the first plague victims, for the low thatched sheds were crammed with rows of prostrate naked figures, and their low moaning and whimpering was a heart-breaking sound, while the smell of corruption was thick and oily on the palate.

It was Tippoo who corrected her. "China birds, he grunted, and for a moment Robyn did not understand, and she stooped over the nearest body, then straightened immediately. Despite her training cold blisters of sweat formed on her forehead.

By Imperial Decree from Peking, no black African slave could be landed on the shores of China unless he had been rendered incapable of reproducing his own kind. The Emperor was concerned that future generations would not be plagued by the growth of an alien population in their midst. The traders found it expedient to castrate their purchases in the barracoons, so that losses caused by the operation could be absorbed before the expense of the long voyage was incurred.

It was crudely done, a tourniquet applied to the root of the scrotum and then the entire scrotal sack removed at a single knife stroke and the wound cauterized immediately with a heated iron or a daub of hot pitch.

About sixty percent would survive the shock and subsequent mortification, but their price per capita was so enhanced that the trader could face forty percent losses with equanimity.

There was nothing that Robyn could do for so many, she felt overwhelmed by the suffering and misery all around her, and she stumbled out on to the muddy pathway, blinded by her own tears. In the next barracoon, the one nearest to the central auction block, she found the first plague victims.

Once again the sheds had been deserted by the slavemasters, and the dimly lit thatched sheds were filled with naked figures, some squatting motionlessly, others lying on the damp earthen floor, knees drawn up, shaking with the cold of fever, and powerless to lift themselves out of their own bodily wastes. The sound of delirium and suffering was murmurous as of insects in an English orchard on a hot summer's day.

The first sufferer that Robyn touched was a young girl, just beyond puberty, and her skin was burning hot. She rolled her head from side to side, endlessly and senselessly, mouthing snatches of gibberish. Swiftly Robyn ran her fingertips down the girl's naked bulging stomach and immediately she felt the tiny lumps under the hot skin, like pellets of buckshot. There could be no doubt.

Smallpox, she said simply, and Tippoo drew back fearfully. Wait outside, she told him, and he went swiftly and with obvious relief. She turned to Nathaniel. She had noticed the little pitted scars in his folded sun-toughened skin, and now there was no fear in his expression.

When? " she asked. When I was a boy, " he said. "It killed my old ma -and my brothers."

We have work to do, she told him.

In the gloomy stinking shed the dead were piled with the living, and on some of the wracked and furnaceheated black bodies the plague had already burst into full flower. They found it in all its stages. Papules beneath the skin had erupted into vesicles, bubbles of clear thin fluid that thickened into pustules, which in turn burst and released a custard-thick trickle of matter. These will live, " Robyn told Nathaniel. "The plague is purging from their blood. " She found a man whose open pocks had already crusted over.

While Nathaniel held the man from moving, Robyn scraped away the crusty scabs with a spatula and gathered them in a wide-mouthed glass bottle that had once held quinine powder.

, This strain of the disease has been attenuated, Robyn exp lamed impatiently, and for the first time she saw fear in the flecked eyes of Mungo St. John. "The Turks first used this method two hundred years ago. "I would prefer to sail away from it, Mungo St. John said quietly, staring at the stoppered bottle which was half filled with damp yellow matter in which were s mall flecks of blood. It would be no use. The infection is already aboard-."

Robyn shook her head firmly. "In a week or less Huron would be turned into a stinking plague-ship filled with dying men."

Mungo turned away from her and went to the ship's rail. he's stood there one hand clasped -into a fist behind his back, the other still in its sling staring at the shore where the thatched roofs of the barracoons just showed above the mangroves.

You cannot leave those poor wretches, " Robyn said. They will starve.

I alone could never find food to feed that multitude. You are responsible for them."

He did not answer her for a moment, then he turned back to study her curiously. if Huron sailed, with her holds empty, would you stay here on this fever and smallpox-ridden coast to tend this multitude of doomed savages? " he asked. Of course. " She was still impatient, and he inclined his head. His eyes no longer mocked, but were sober, perhaps even filled with respect. If you will not stay for common humanity, then stay for self-interest. " She scorned him with her tone. "A million dollars" worth of human cattle, and I will save them for you."

. "You would save them to be sold into captivity? " he insisted.

Even slavery is better than death, she replied.

Again, he turned away from her, taking a slow turn of the quarterdeck, frowning thoughtfully, puffing on the long black cheroot so that wreathes of tobacco smoke drifted behind him, and Robyn and half Huron's crew watched him, some fearfully, others with resignation. You say that you have yourself undergone this, this thing. " His eyes were drawn back, with loathing fascination, to the little bottle that stood in the centre of his chart table.

For answer Robyn lifted the sleeve of her shirt and showed him the distinctive deeply pocked scar on her forearm.

A minute longer he hesitated, and she went on persuasively, "I will give you a strain of the disease that is "passant" that has been weakened and attenuated by passage through another man's body, rather than the virulent form of the plague which you will breathe on the very air and which will kill most of you. There is no risk? " She hesitated and then replied firmly, "There is always risk, but one hundred, nay a thousand times, less risk, than if you take the disease from the air With an abrupt gesture Mungo St. John ripped open the sleeve on his left arm with his teeth and offered it to her. Do it, he said. "But in God's name do it quickly, before my courage fails."

She drew the point of her scalpel across the smooth deeply tanned skin of his forearm and the tiny crimson droplets rose behind it. He did not flinch, but when she dipped the scalpel into the bottle and scraped up a speck of the noisome yellow stuff, he blanched and made as if to jerk his arm away, then with an obvious effort controlled himself.

She smeared the pus over the tiny wound, and he stepped back and turned from her. All of you. " His voice was rough with his horror and disgust. "Every last one of you, he told the gaping terrified seamen.

With Nathaniel, the bosun, there were three others who had survived the disease, and were speckled by the small dimpled scars which were its stigma.

Four men were not enough to help Robyn care for a thousand slaves, and her losses were much higher than she had expected. Perhaps this strain of the disease was more virulent, or perhaps the black men from the interior did not have the same resistance as the Europeans whose forbears had for generations been exposed to smallpox.

She introduced the crusted pus into the scratches on their limbs, working in the noon sunlight on into the gloom of dusk and then by the lantern's gleam, and they submitted with dumb resignation of the slave which she found pitiful and repugnant, but which none the less made her work much easier.

The reaction began within hours, the swelling and fever and the vomiting, and she went out into the other deserted barracoons to gather more of the loathsome pus from the bodies of those who had survived the smallpox and were now dying of starvation and neglect, resigning herself to the fact that she had only the strength and time to care for those in Huron's barracoons, resigning herself to the fact that there was farina to feed them only, and closing her mind to the cries and entreaty, to the silent dying stare from wizened faces that streamed pus from open pocks.

Even in her own barracoon the four of them working hour after hour, night and day, could give only perfunctory attention to each of the slaves, a handful of the cold pasty farina and a mugful of water once a day during the period of the most violent reaction to the inoculation.

Those who survived this were left to care for themselves, to crawl to the water bucket when they could or to wolf a lump of farina from the spadeful that Nathaniel left on a wooden platter at intervals between the rows of supine figures.

Then when they were strong enough to stand they were put to work at piling the rotting bodies of their less fortunate peers upon a gun carriage and dragging them out of the barracoon. There was not the remotest chance of either burying or burning the bodies, and there were too many for the bloated vultures. They piled the corpses in heaps in the coconut grove, well downwind of the barracoon and went back for more.

Twice a day Robyn went down to the edge of the creek and hailed the anchor watch on Huron's deck and had the whaler row her out to the ship, and she spent an hour in the stern cabin.

Mungo St. John's reaction had been frighteningly severe, perhaps he had been weakened by the knife wound. His arm had swollen to almost twice normal size, and the scratch Robyn had inflicted turned into a hideous canker with a thick black crusty scab. His fever was intense, his skin almost painfully hot to the touch, and the flesh seemed to melt off his big-boned frame like candle wax under the flame.

Tippoo, himself suffering from a raging fever, his own arm swollen grotesquely, could not be made to leave the side of Mungo's bunk.

Robyn felt easier knowing that Tippoo was there, strangely gentle, almost like a mother with a child, to care for Mungo while she must go back ashore to the suffering multitude that choked the barracoons.

on the twelfth day when she went aboard Huron, Tippoo met her at the companionway with that wide toadlike grin which she had not seen for so long, and when she hurried into the cabin she saw why.

Mungo was propped up on the bolsters, thin and pale, his lips dry and dark purple bruises under his eyes, as though he had been beaten with a heavy club, but he was lucid and his skin cool. God's breath, he croaked. "You look awful! " And she felt like weeping with relief and chagrin.

When she had bathed and bandaged the shrinking canker on his forearm and was ready to leave, he took her wrist. You are killing yourself, he whispered. "When did you last sleep, and for how long? " only when he spoke did she realize the depth of her exhaustion, it had been two days previously and then only for a few hours that she had slept, and she felt Huron's deck swing and lurch under her feet as though she rode a high sea and was not lying quietly at anchor in a placid creek.

Mungo drew her down gently beside him on to the bunk, and she did not have either the strength or will to resist. He made a cradle for her head on his shoulder, and almost immediately she was asleep, her last memory was the feel of his fingers smoothing back the dank ringlets from her temples.

She awoke with a guilty start, not sure how long she had slept, and still fuzzy with sleep struggled out of Mungo St. John's arms brushing the hair out of her eyes Z with her fingers, trying ineffectually to straighten her rumpled and sweat-dampened clothing. I must go! she blurted groggily, still exhausted and half asleep. How many had died while she slept, she wondered. Before he could prevent it, she was stumbling up the companionway to the deck calling for Nathaniel to row her ashore.

The few hours of rest had refreshed her so that she looked about the estuary with a new and lively interest again. It was the first time that she became aware that one other vessel, besides Huron, was still lying at anchor in the river. It was one of the small dhow-rigged buggaloos, the coastal slavers similar to the one from which she had rescued Juba. On impulse, she had Nathaniel row her alongside, and when nobody answered her hail, she went aboard. The vessel had clearly been overwhelmed by the plague before she could flee, perhaps she was the vessel from which the original infection had been carried ashore.

Robyn found the same conditions prevailing aboard as there were ashore, the dead, the dying, and those who would recover. Although they were slavers she was still a physician, and she had taken the Hippocratic oath.

What she could do was very little, but she did it and the Arab captain, stricken and weakened, thanked her from his sleeping-mat on the open deck. May Allah walk beside you, he whispered, "and may he give me the opportunity to return this kindness one day. , And may Allah show you the error of your ways, Robyn told him tartly. "I will send some fresh water, before nightfall, but now there are others more deserving."

In the days that followed, the plague ran its inexorable course, the weaklings died, some of them consumed by the terrible thirsts of fever crawled from the abandoned barracoons on to the mud flats of the estuary to fill their bellies with the salt water. Their bodies were twisted into grotesque contortions by the cramps of the salt in their blood, and their insane rantings were like the cries of seabirds across the water, extinguished at last by the incoming tide. The surface of the river was troubled by the swirl and splash of the crocodile and the big sharks that had come upstream to gather this grisly harvest.

Others had crawled away into the forest and groves; they lay under every bush and even before they died they were covered with a red mantle of the fierce safari ants that overnight picked the skeleton to gleaming whiteness.

Some of those that survived, encouraged by Robyn, crept weakly away towards the west. Perhaps a few would complete the long hazardous journey back to their razed villages and devastated countryside, she hoped.

However, most of the survivors of the plague were too weak and confused and demoralized to move. They stayed on in the squalid stinking barracoons, pathetically dependent upon Robyn and her tiny band of helpers for every mouthful of water and farina, watching her with the eyes of dumb and suffering animals.

All this time the piles of corpses in the palm groves grew taller, and the stench more penetrating. Robyn knew too well what would happen next. The battlefield plagues, she explained to Mungo St. John. "They always follow when the dead are left unburied, when the rivers and wells are choked with bodies. If they strike now, then none will survive. All of us are weakened, we would be unable to resist the typhoid and enteric plagues. Now is the time to leave, for we have saved all those who are for saving. We must fly before the new onslaught, for unlike the smallpox, there is no defence against them."

IrMost of my crew are still sick and weakThey will recover swiftly out on the open ocean."

Mungo St. John turned to Nathaniel to ask, "How many slaves have survived? IMore than eight hundred, thanks to the missus here."

We will begin to take them aboard at dawn tomorrow, he decided.

That night Robyn came back to his cabin after dark. She could not stay away, and he was waiting for her, she could tell by his expression and the quickness of his smile. I was beginning to fear that you preferred the company of eight hundred plague-ridden slaves, " he greeted her. Captain St. John, I wish to make one more appeal to you. As a Christian gentleman, will you not release these poor creatures and have them escorted and fed on the Tourney back to where they cameHe interrupted her, his tone light and that smile hovering on his lips. And will you not call me Mungo, rather than Captain St. John?

She ignored the interruption, and went on. "After all they have suffered, that terrible march down from the highlands, the error and humiliation of slavery and now this plague. If you would consent to release them, I would lead them back to their homes."

He rose from the canvas chair and came to stand over her. His leanness and pallor made him seem even taller.

Mungo! " he insisted. God would forgive you, I am sure of that, he would forgive you the sins that you have already committed against humanity-, Mungo! " he whispered, and placed his hands upon her shoulders. She felt herself begin to tremble uncontrollably.

He drew her to his chest. She could feel his ribs, he was so thin, and her voice choked up in her throat when she tried to continue her appeal. Slowly he stooped over her, and she closed her eyes tightly, her arms stiff at her sides, her fists clenched. Say Mungo! he commanded quietly, and his lips were cool and soft on hers. Her trembling became uncontrolled shaking.

Her lips opened under his, and her arms went up around his neck. Mungo, " she sobbed. "Oh, Mungo, Mungo."

She had been taught that her naked body was shameful, but it was the one lesson that she had learned imperfectly, and much of her shame had been mitigated, firstly in the lecture rooms and dissection rooms of St. Matthew's, and secondly in the company of Juba, the little Matabele dove, whose unaffected delight in her nudity she had transmitted to Robyn. Those childlike I romps together in the cool green pools of an African river had served to blow away most of the cobwebs of shame.

Now Mungo St. John's delight in and admiration for her body gave her joy and, far from shame, brought her pride that she had never known before. Their lovemaking was no longer accompanied by pain, there were - so locked together I no longer barriers between them they could ride the dips and swings of emotion from Himalayan heights where the great winds blew, down to the sweet languorous depths where they seemed to be drowning in honey, each movement slowed, every breath drawn out as though it would last forever, their bodies damp and hot, pressed together and without form, like clay in the hands of a child.

The night was too short, while the wick of the lantern guttered and smoked, neglected and untrimmed. In the dawn, their loving seemed to have filled them with new strength, to have driven away the weakness of fever and the exhaustion of the past weeks.

It was only the sound of the first slaves coming aboard that roused Robyn and brought her back from that far frontier to the hot and cramped little cabin on a slave ship in a fever creek on a wild and brutal continent.

She heard the whisper of bare feet and the clank and drag of slave chains, the sound of men's voices raised, hectoring and impatient, on the deck above.

Hurry them, or we load for a week. " Tippoo's voice.

Robyn raised herself on her elbow and looked down at Mungo. His eyes were closed but he was not asleep, she knew. Now, she whispered. "Now you cannot but release them. After last night, I know that something has changed in you."

She felt a strange joy, the zeal of the prophet looking down upon a convert for whose soul she had wrestled with the devil and won. Call Tippoo, " she insisted, "and give him the order to free the slaves."

Mungo opened his eyes, even after the long night in which neither of them had slept, his eyes were clear.

There was the shadow of new beard, dense and dark, carpeting his bony jawline. He was magnificent and she knew then that she loved him. Call Tippoo, she repeated, and he shook his head, a little gesture of perplexity. You still do not understand, " he answered her. "This is my life. I cannot alter that, not for you nor for anybody. "Eight hundred souls, she pleaded, "and you have their salvation in your handsNo. " He shook his head again. "You are wrong, not eight hundred souls but eight hundred thousand dollars that is what I have in my hands."

Mungo! His name still felt awkward on her lips.

Jesus has said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than that a rich man should enter the kingdom of Heaven. Let them go, you cannot judge human lives in gold."

He laughed and sat up, With eight hundred thousand bucks, I can bribe my way into Heaven, if I want to, but between us, my dear, it sounds an awfully dull place. I think the devil and I might have more to talk about."

The mocking gleam was back in his eye again, and he swung his legs out over the edge of the bunk, and naked crossed to where his breeches hung on a wooden peg from the bulkhead. We have lain too long abed, he said briskly. "I must see to the loading, and you had best begin your own preparations for the voyage. " He belted his breeches and stuffed his shirt into them. "it will take us three days to load, I would be obliged if you would test the water barrels. " He came to sit on the edge of the bunk and began dragging on his boots, talking the while in crisp businesslike fashion, detailing the preparations that she should make for the welfare of the slaves during the voyage. We will have less than a full cargo, which will make it easier to exercise them on deck and keep the holds clean. " He stood up and looked down at her.

With a rush like a roused fawn she threw off the blanket that covered her and knelt on the edge of the bunk, seizing him about the waist with both arms.

IMungo, she whispered urgently, "you cannot torture us so. " She pressed the side of her face to his chest, feeting the harsh springing curls of his body hair even through the linen of his shirt. "I cannot offend further against my God and my conscience, unless you free these poor damned souls, then I can never marry you."

His expression changed swiftly, becoming tender and concerned. He lifted his hand to stroke the dense russet locks of her hair, still damp and tangled from the loving of the night. My poor darling, his lips formed the words, soundlessly, but her face was still pressed to his chest and she could not see his lips. He drew a deep breath, and though his eyes were still marked with regret and his expression sober, his tone was light and casual. Then it is just as well that I have no intention of freeing a single one of them, for what would my wife say otherwise? " The words took many seconds to make sense to Robyn, and then her whole body spasmed, her grip around his waist tightened and then slowly relaxed. She released him. Slowly she sat back on her heels, naked in the midst of his disordered bunk, and she stared at him with an expression of desolation and disbelief. You are married? " Robyn's voice echoed strangely in her own ears, as though from the end of a long bare corridor, and Mungo nodded. These ten years past, he answered quietly.

"A French lady of aristocratic birth, a cousin of Louis Napoleon. A lady of great beauty who with the three fine sons she has borne me awaits my return to Bannerfield. " He paused and then went on with infinite regret. "I am sorry, my dear, I never dreamed that you did not know. " And he reached out to touch her cheek, but she cringed away as though he held a poisonous serpent in his hand.

Will you go away, please, she whispered.

Robyn-" he began, but she shook her head violently. No, she said.

"Please don't say any more. just go. Go away! Please go away."

Robyn locked the door of her cabin and sat down at the sea chest which she used for a desk. There were no tears.

Her eyes felt dry and burning as though blasted by a wind off the desert. She had very little paper left and had to tear the end sheets from her journal. They were speckled with mildew and distorted from the heat and dryness of the highlands and the humidity of the monsoonridden littoral.

She smoothed out the first sheet carefully on the lid of her writing case, dipped her pen in the remaining half inch of India ink and headed the sheet with a hand that was calm and unshaken.

16th November, 1860.

Aboard the Slaver Huron.

And then in the same clear unhurried script began to write: My Dear Captain Codrington, My trust in an all-merciful Providence and my belief in the true and one God, and in his gentle son and our Saviour Jesus convinces me that this will come into your hands while there is still time for you to act.

Through a series of incredible adventures and misfortunes I now find myself devoid of friends or protectors, in the power of the notorious American Slave Master and trader Mungo St. John. Against both my will and my conscience I am being forced to act as the physician for this infamous vessel which is at this moment preparing for the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic Ocean for a port in the Southern States of America.

As I write, I can hear the doleful sounds from the deck above me, and from the hold below where the poor creatures, eight hundred forsaken souls in all, wearing only their chains are being brought aboard and incarcerated for the voyage which many of them will not survive.

We are lying at anchor in a hidden creek, concealed from the open sea by a sweep of the channel and the mangrove swamps, a perfect hide-away for the nefarious business in hand.

However, I have been able to study the ship's chart and from the navigator's markings learn the name of the estuary and its exact position. The river is the Rio Save, and it lies 20* s8" south latitude and 35" 03" east longitude.

I will do all in my power to delay the sailing of this vessel, though at this moment I cannot think what that will be. If this letter reaches you in time, there will be no difficulty for an officer of your courage and experience to blockade the river mouth and seize this slave ship when she attempts to leave the river.

If we have sailed before your arrival, then I implore you to follow in the same course as the Captain of the Huron must set to round Good Hope, and I will pray for adverse winds and weather that will enable you to come up with us.

Robyn went on pouring out the tale of her capture, of the plague that had swept through the barracoons of her fear and hatred of the slavers, the detailed accounts of their barbaric practices and cruelties, and suddenly she realized that she had filled many pages with her account, and she began her last paragraph.

You were gracious enough to express your belief that our destinies were linked in some mysterious way. I know that you share with me the same hatred of this abominable trade, and for these reasons I have made bold enough to appeal to you, confident that you will hearken to my anguished cry.

Robyn paused again, and then searched swiftly in her pen case and found the pair of the earring which she had given to Clinton Codrington so many months ago.

I enclose with this letter a token of my friendship and trust which I hope you will recognize, and I will search every day to see the topsails of your fine ship hurrying to give succour to myself and to the other unfortunates who are my ship-mates on this cursed and iniquitous voyage.

She signed it with her bold, rounded signature and stitched the folded pages and the single item of cheap jewellery into a square of duck canvas.

There was only one address that she had for it. Clinton had told her that he was under orders to call at Zanzibar Island, and she knew that Her Majesty's Consul on the island was a man of substance and integrity, a staunch adversary of the slave trade, one of the few men that her father, Fuller Ballantyne, had ever written about with respect and affection.

When she had finished, she tucked the small canvas package up under her skirts, and went up on deck.

Mungo St. John was on his quarterdeck, gaunt and lean and pale, and he took a step towards her, but she turned from him immediately. Nathaniel, she called to the bosun. "I wish to visit the buggaloo. " She indicated the Arab dhow which was still anchored downstream from Huron. She's making ready to sail, ma'am. " Nathaniel knuckled his forehead. "She'll be gone before we can get across'She will if you continue talking, " Robyn told him briskly. "I must see if there is aught they need, the poor devils, before they sail."

Nathaniel glanced at his Captain, and after a moment's hesitation, Mungo, nodded his assent and turned back to watch the stream of slaves coming aboard through the entry port.

The Arab Captain of the dhow, just strong enough to take his place at the tiller, greeted her respectfully and listened attentively while she spoke.

Nathaniel was waiting in the gig, out of sight below the level of the dhow's deck, and Robyn made sure that they were shielded from a casual watcher on Huron's deck before she passed the canvas package to the Arab, and followed it with a gold English sovereign. There will be another sovereign for you, from the man You deliver it to, she told him, and the Arab bit the coin, and smiled wanly as he tucked it into a fold of his turban.

And I am Matabele. Induna of two thousand. My name is Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, son of Zulu, and I come with a bright spear and a red heart."

Zouga understood the words with difficulty, for they were spoken rapidly, in accents that were strange to his ears, but there was no misunderstanding the Induna's intention. His tone was clear, the murderous determination in his voice evident, and around him the circle of long black shields was unbroken and steadfast.

Unconsciously Zouga had straightened, forcing his aching muscles erect, and he held the Induna's gaze without flinching.

They stared at each other, and Zouga found himself exerting all his will, all the force of his personality, trying to stay the Induna's spear arm. He knew it needed only for the bright broad blade to drop and two hundred amadoda would sweep into the rudimentary camp. It would be over so swiftly, the resistance that Zouga and his tiny band could offer would be so puny that they would not even earn the compliment of disembowelment from the victors.

He knew that only his steady gaze and the corn pletely fearless mien that he offered to the Matabele had so far stayed the spear arm, but the silence was drawing out.

At any second the spell would snap. He must choose his next action and words as though his life depended upon them, as indeed they did.

Gandang watched the strange pale man before him with his features impassive, yet for possibly the first time in his life while on his father's service, he was uncertain.

The man who called himself Bakela had spoken familiar names. Tshedi and Manali, they were names that his own father revered, yet that in itself would not have been enough to stay his hand, for the King's orders were clear: all who entered the Burnt Land must die. It was more than that. He knew who this man was. The maiden who he would soon take as wife had spoken of him. This was the brother of the white woman who had delivered Juba to his care, and who he had called amekazi, mother.

Juba had spoken of the man Bakela as she lay beside him on her sleeping-mat. She had spoken of him with admiration and awe, as a mighty hunter of elephant, as a warrior honoured by an all-powerful Queen who lived far beyond great waters. Juba had spoken of this man Bakela as a friend and a protector.

So Gandang paused before giving the order "Bulala!

Kill themV A Matabele Induna is never influenced by the words of a woman, if he has fifty wives their voices are still as the chattering of the waters over the rocks in the shallow rapids of the Nyati river, and a man does not heed them, or rather it must never be apparent that he heeds them.

Juba had travelled to strange places and spoken of wonders and witchery, and Gandang while seeming not to listen had indeed listened and been impressed. The girl was not only comely and high bred, but sensible far beyond that mere simpering giggling sexuality to which he was accustomed in other girls of her age.

Gandang was learning that a Matabele Induna is never influenced by the whims and words of a woman, unless those words are spoken and the whims expressed on the privacy of the sleeping-mat, by a senior wife whose good sense has been proven.

Then it is folly not to hearken, for a senior wife can make a man's life unbearable, even if that man is an Induna of two thousand, and the favoured son of the most powerful monarch in Africa.

Behind the dark impassive mask of his handsome face, Gandang was thinking furiously. Instinct and Juba's words had warned him that it would be folly to slay this man, yet the warriors at his back knew his orders, and if he failed to carry them out, that failure would immediately be construed as weakness, and his treason reported to the King.

Before him the tattered figure took a pace forward, his whole being ludicrously arrogant. Gandang could see no trace of fear in the steady gaze of his strangely coloured eyes. I come as an emissary to the great King Mzilikazi, ruler of the Matabele people, and I bring greeting from the White Queen from across the waters At the words Gandang felt a small warm flame. of relief. The fact that the white man spoke the language of the people, albeit with a strange accent, made it more plausible that he was indeed an emissary. It was plausible, also, that this Queen of his would want to seek the protection and favour of a king as powerful as his father, and that she should be so ignorant as to send her emissary through the Burnt Land instead of along the open road from the south. Zouga saw the shift of mood in the Induna's eyes, that tiny crack in his determination.

Wait, he said. "There is something that I have for you. , In Zouga's writing-case still reposed the impressive handwritten letters, with seals of wax and scarlet ribbon, that had been provided him by the Under-secretary at the Foreign Office, in the usual form.

In the name of Her Britannic Majesty, Ruler of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, To the representatives of all foreign governments or to whosoever it may concern, We do, by these presents, request and require that our beloved Morris Zouga Ballantyne be allowed to pass freely without let or hindrance and that he be afforded that assistance of which he may stand in need.

Zouga turned his back on the silent menacing ranks of spears-men, and walked back slowly through the gap in the scherm of cut thorn branches.

Jan Cheroot was waiting for him, his face the colour of the watch-fire ash. He and the gunbearers were crouched below the thorn barrier, staring through the chinks with expressions of such utter terror that Zouga felt emboldened in comparison. Lay down those guns, " he snapped, for all the weapons were cocked and primed and a nervous finger on a hairtrigger could let fly the shot that brought a solid black wave of Matabele sweeping through the camp.

Gandang suddenly found himself in a position of uncertainty. From being the merciless bearer of the King's justice, he found himself waiting like a timid suitor outside the gate in the thorn barrier, and every second detracted from his dignity.

Behind him he heard the stir of one of his men, the soft tap of assegai spear on hide shield. His men were growing restless already, sensing the passing of, advantage to the little group of ragged starvelings they had surrounded. Gandang turned slowly, and his stony gaze passed over the ranks. They froze once more into utter stillness.

Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, Induna of two thousand.

Come forward The hail from beyond the thorn barrier was unexpected and startlingly loud, but it came the moment before Gandang reached the limit of his patience and loosed his eager warriors. Gandang moved forward to the gateway.

His plumes nodding about his head, his tread dignified, his carriage proud, so that no men might guess at his uncertainty. At the gateway he paused, and though his expression did not alter nor his gaze waver, he experienced a profound relief that his own wisdom and the words of his little dove had stayed his blade.

Before him stood a figure of almost incredible beauty.

It took him many seconds to recognize the ragged individual of a few minutes previously. The figure wore cloth of that same peculiarly rich shade of red of the bushshrike's chest, brighter than the colour of freshly spilled blood. Though this was enough to stop a man's breath, it was not all. Bright metal ornaments on breast and shoulders sparkled in the morning sunlight, the belt buckle was of the same metal. The belt and cross-straps were of the same blinding whiteness as an egret's wing.

The tall shako swept down to an elegant point between the eyes, and the helmet badge blazed like a sunrise upon the man's forehead.

There was no doubt now in Gandang's mind that here was indeed an important man, and a soldier of repute, as Juba had warned him, and he made a silent resolution to listen to her words in future with even greater attention. He felt a little shiver of dismay at the thought that he might have followed his first instincts and had this man cut down as though he was a worthless Mashona, a mere eater of dirt.

The magnificent figure took one pace towards him and lifted a hand to the peak of that beautiful helmet in a formal gesture that Gandang answered instinctively with a sweeping salute of his stabbing spear. I, Bakela, request that my token be conveyed to your father, the honoured and victorious Mzilikazi, and that he be informed that I request from him the right of the road, " said the man in his atrocious Sindebele and Gandang accepted the token from his hand, the small package with strange signs and marks upon it, bound up with strips of coloured cloth so beautiful that they would have delighted the heart of even the most vain and spoiled woman.

It shall be done, he agreed.

In the moments of his confrontation with Gandang, Zouga had been thinking as furiously as the Matabele and making his own calculations of survival. Now that he had fallen in with a border impi he knew he must put aside any thought of escaping southwards. Apart from the fact that they were completely surrounded and heavily outnumbered, he knew that no unmounted man could run ahead of these warriors. They were like machines built for the pursuit and the annihilation of an enemy.

The meeting had not taken him completely unprepared. There had been many a night in the preceding weeks when he had woken in the darkest hours, and he had lain on the hard earth and dreaded a moment such as this.

He had mentally rehearsed his actions, from the concealment of any fear while he won time to don his dress uniform, to the demand to be taken to the King's kraal.

When it had gone as he planned it, when the tall Induna had agreed, "It shall be done, it had taken another enormous extension of Zouga's will not to show relief. He had stood aloof, disinterested, while Gandang had picked and called out five of his swiftest runners and had recited a long message that they must memorize, and take to Mzilikazi.

It began with a long recitation of the King's praises which began, Great black elephant who shakes the earth with his tread -" went on to list the deeds that Gandang had performed since leaving the great kraal at Thabas Indunas, the march eastward, the battle at the pass and the slaying of Bopa, the slave master, right up to this day's encounter with the white man. After a flowery description of the man's magnificent finery (which Gandang knew would intrigue his father), it ended with a repetition of Bakela's request to be "given the road" to Thabas Indunas.

The chosen messengers, each in turn repeated the long message, and though he showed no change of expression

Zouga was amazed that each of them had it word-perfect.

It was an impressive demonstration of the developed memory of people who do not have the art of writing and reading.

Gandang handed them the sealed parchment envelope that contained Zouga's letter of credentials, and the messengers sprang to their feet from where they had squatted, saluted their Induna, formed file and trotted away towards the west.

Gandang turned back to Zouga. "You will stay encamped here until the King sends word. "When will that be? " Zouga asked, and Gandang answered him sternly. Whenever the King is pleased to do so."

Zouga's little party was left unmolested. Although there were a dozen Matabele amadoda positioned about the camp, guarding it day and night, not one of them attempted to enter the gateway in the thorn scherm.

Until the moment when they might slaughter them, the persons and property of their prisoners were inviolate.

The main body of the impi camped a quarter of a mile downstream. Each evening the tall Induna visited Zouga and they sat for an hour or so across the fire from each other, speaking gravely and seriously.

As the days of waiting became weeks so the two men developed each for the other a deep respect, if not actual friendship. They were both warriors, and they had common ground when they spoke of old campaigns and of skirmishes and battles fought. They recognized in each other the strengths, the essential decencies of men who live by and respect the laws of their society, though those laws might diverge widely. I account him a gentleman, " Zouga wrote in his journal. "One of nature's own."

While Gandang, speaking to Juba on the sleeping-mat said merely, "Bakela. is a man."

Gandang allowed Zouga's bearers to leave the enclosure, to cut and bring in thatch and timber to strengthen and improve the buildings, so that at last Zouga could sleep dry and warm. This, together with the rest and respite from endless marching brought an immediate improvement in Zouga's health. The deep wound in his cheek healed cleanly, leaving a pink shiny scar. The shoulder mended, the bruising abated, and he no longer needed a staff or a sling for his arm. Within a week he knew he was well enough to shoot the heavy four-tothe-pound.

One evening he proposed to Gandang that they hunt together, and the Induna. who by this time was finding the waiting as tedious as Zouga was, agreed with alacrity. Gandang's amadoda surrounded a herd of Cape buffalo, and drove them down in a bellowing, stampeding black wave to where they waited. Zouga saw the tall Induna rise from cover and race in, bare-footed, shieldless, and kill a mature bull buffalo with a single thrust of the broad-bladed assegai through the ribs behind the heaving shoulder. Zouga knew that he lacked both the skill and courage to emulate that feat.

Gandang watched when Zouga. stood to meet the squealing, thunderous charge of an enraged bull elephant, and when the beast went down to the crash of the shot, dropping on to its knees in a storm of dust, Gandang stepped past Zouga and touched the little black hole that punctured the elephant's thick grey hide an inch above the first crease at the top of the trunk.

Gandang inspected the smear of blood on the tip of his forefinger, and said "Hau! " quietly but with force, which is an expression of deep amazement. For Gandang, himself, owned a musket, a Tower Musket manufactured in London in i837. When he first acquired the weapon, Gandang had fired it at buffalo, elephant and Mashona, all of whom had fled headlong but unscathed.

Gandang understood that when firing it was necessary to close the eyes and the mouth firmly, to hold the breath and at the moment of discharge to shout a rebuke to the devil who lived in the gunpowder smoke, otherwise the devil could enter through the eyes or mouth and take possession of the marksman. In order to throw the musket ball to any distance, it was also necessary to pull the trigger with sudden and brutal force, as in hurling a spear.

Furthermore, to minimize the recoil of the weapon, the butt should not touch the shoulder, butbe held a hand's span from it. Despite all these precautions, Gandang had never succeeded in hitting the target at which he aimed, and had long abandoned the weapon to rust away, while he kept his assegai polished brightly.

Thus Gandang appreciated to the full the magnitude of the feat that Zouga performed with such apparent ease. So their mutual respect deepened with each day spent in each other's company, and became almost friendship. Almost, but not quite, there were chasms of culture and training between them that could never be bridged, and always the knowledge that on any day a swift runner might come from the west with a message for Gandang from his father. Bulala umbuna! Kill the white man! " And both of them knew that Gandang would hesitate not an instant longer.

Zouga had much time alone in camp, and he spent it planning his audience with the King. The longer he dwelt upon that the more ambitious became his plans.

The memory of the ancient disused mine-shafts returned to plague these idle hours, and at first merely to amuse himself, and then with truly serious intent, Zouga began to draw up a document which he headed:Exclusive Concession to mine gold and hunt ivory in the Sovereign territory of Matabeleland."

He worked on it each evening polishing and reshaping it in the gibberish that the layman takes for legal jargon and which he fondly believes will dignify his creation. Whereas 1, Mzilikazi, ruler of Matabeleland, hereinafter referred to as the party of the first partZouga had completed this document to his entire satisfaction when a fatal flaw in his plans became evident.

Mzilikazi could not sign his name. Zouga pondered this for a day and then the solution occurred to him. Mzilikazi should by this time have in hand the sealed package.

The crimson wax seals must surely impress him, and in his writing-case Zouga had two full sticks of sealing wax.

Zouga began to design a great seal for King Mzilikazi.

He sketched the design on the back cover of his journal, and the inspiration came from the first of the King's praise names. Great Black Elephant who shakes the earth."

In Zouga's design the centre of the field depicted a bull elephant, with long tusks raised and ears spread wide.

The upper border bore the legend, "Mzilikazi Nkosi Nkulu'. And the -lower border carried the translation, Mzilikazi, King of the Matabele'.

He started experimenting with various materials, clay and wood, but the results did not please him, and the following day he asked Gandang for permission to send a party of his porters under Ian Cheroot back to the ancient workings at the Harkness mine to retrieve the ivory buried there.

It took two days of careful consideration for Gandang to agree, and when he did, he sent fifty of his men to accompany the caravan, with orders to kill them all at the first hint ofilight or treachery. Jan Cheroot returned with the four huge tusks from the two bull elephants, and Zouga had not only the material from which to carve the King's great seal, but a gift fitting the King's importance.

Ivory was a treasure of which the Matabele had long ago realized the value in trade. It was, however, a scarce commodity, for even the bravest of men cannot kill a bull elephant with a stabbing spear. They had to rely on pick-ups from animals that had died of natural causes, or the very occasional victim of the pitfall.

Gandang's amazement when he saw the span and weight of the four tusks decided Zouga. The largest and most pleasingly shaped tusk would be Zouga's gift to Mzilikazi, if he were ever allowed to reach the great kraal at Thabas Indunas alive.

Not only was the threat of the King's wrath still hanging over him, but his supply of quinine powder was reduced to a few ounces. All around the camp steamed the swampy ground, fed each day by the interminable rains, and in the night he cou even smell the evil feverbearing vapours rising from the stagnant waters to waft over the camp. Yet he was forced to reduce his daily preventative dose of the bitter powder to perilously s mall quantities in an attempt to eke it out.

The inactivity and the dual threat of spear and disease wore on Zouga's nerves, until he found himself toying with suicidal plans to make an attempt to avoid the guarding impi and to escape on foot southwards. He thought of seizing Gandang and holding him as hostage, or using the remaining fifty pounds of black powder to manufacture a combustible with sufficient power to destroy the entire impi host at a blast. Reluctantly, one after another, he recognized these as plans of folly and abandoned them.

Gandang's impi came again in the dawn. Zouga was awakened by a stentorian voice calling him out of the Thorn scherm. Zouga threw a fur kaross over his shoulders and went out into the grey and icy drizzle of rain, sloshing through the red mud to the gate, and he knew at a single glance that the King had at last sent his reply. The ranks of silent Matabele surrounded the camp, still as statues carved from the black wild ebony.

Zouga judged how swiftly he could reach the loaded gun beside his cot in the little thatched hut behind him, and guessed that he would probably be cut down before he could fire a single shot, yet he knew he would still make the attempt. I see you Bakela, Gandang stepped from the dark and silent ranks. I see you Gandang. "The King's messenger has arrived-" Gandang paused a moment, solemn and stern , and then his perfectly square white teeth gleamed in the grey of dawn as he smiled. "The King has given you the road, and bids you attend him at Thabas Indunas."

The two men grinned at each other with relief, for both of them it meant life. The King had determined that Gandang had done his duty and correctly interpreted his commands, while Zouga had been accepted as an emissary and not as an enemy. We will march at once, Gandang smiled still. "Before the sun! " The King's summons brooked of no hesitations or delays. Safari! Zouga roused his camp. "We march at once! " A natural delicacy and tact had made Gandang keep little Juba out of sight and hearing of Zouga's camp, nor had he mentioned the girl's name to Zouga while sentence of death still hung over the white man. However, that first night of the journey to Thabas Indunas after they had camped, he brought Juba to Zouga's hut, and she knelt and greeted him as "Babo-father" and then with Gandang seated between them and listening attentively, he allowed them to talk for a short while.

Zouga was avid for news of his sister, and he listened in silence to the account of Fuller Ballantyne's death and his burial. It was better this way, and Zouga was already preparing his own fulsome tributes to the memory of his father.

While relieved also to hear that Robyn was safe, Zouga was less happy with the swift progress she seemed to be making. It must have been nearly three months since Juba last saw her, almost within sight of the eastern mountain range, and by this time Robyn must have surely reached the coast, and could be on board a Portuguese trade ship, well on her way to Good Hope and the Atlantic.

He did not know how long he would be delayed by the Matabele King, and then how long the overland journey down half the length of Africa might take him.

Robyn's manuscript could be in London a year or even more before his own.

Zouga had exchanged one worry for another, and on the following day's march he chivvied his porters, heavily laden though they were, to keep up with their captors. It was of little avail, and they struggled along behind the trotting impi until Zouga demanded of Gandang that his own bearers be ordered to help with the load of ivory and the even greater weightier package of bark and plaited grass which contained the granite bird which Zouga had plundered from the tomb of the Kings.

With each day's travel towards the west, so the land became drier, and the forests thinned out and gave way to level pasturage with sparsely dotted acacias, graceful, mushroom-shaped trees from whose branches hung the big protein-rich, bean-shaped pods so dearly loved by game and domestic animals alike.

The relief from the driving and endless rain-storms lifted their spirits, and the impi sang on the march, winding like a thick black serpent through the lovely park-like lands below the bald and rounded kopjes of granite.

Soon they came across the first of the King's herds.

The small hump-backed cattle whose origins lay far back beyond the veils of history, perhaps it had taken them and their drovers four thousand years to travel down from the valley of the Nile or from the fertile plains enclosed by the twin rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

The cattle were sleek, for the grass was dense and sweet, even here in the drier lands the rains had been good. The animals were of every colour and pattern, chocolate-red and black and white and yellow, piebald and skewbald, solid black or pure snowy white. They watched with a blank bovine stare as the column of men trotted past, and the small herd boys, naked except for the tiny apron of the beshu, came scampering to stare in silent wide-eyed awe at the fighting men in plume and tassel, for they were already pining for the day that they would be called into their own regiments and in turn follow the warriors" road.

They reached the first of the Matabele towns. It was situated on the banks of the Inyati river. Gandang explained that it was the headquarters of his own impi, the Inyati impi, and that it was not the largest of the regimental towns. The settlement was laid out around the central cattle-pen, a vast enclosure large enough to hold ten thousand head of the King's herds. The dwellings were of identical thatched beehive construction in the tradition that the wandering tribe had preserved since leaving their native Zululand. The outer stockade was of cut mopani poles, set deep in the earth and forming a stout defensive wall. The villagers streamed out to welcome the returning impi, lining both sides of the route, a singing, clapping and laughing thron& mostly of women and children. Most of the men and the marriageable maidens have left already for Thabas Indunas. In the full of this moon, the Chawala dance begins, and all the nation will assemble at the King's kraal. We will rest here only one night and then take the road again to reach Thabas Indunas before the moon."

The road from the Inyati westwards was now a populous highway, as the nation went in towards the King's capital city to celebrate the festival of the first fruits.

The men marched in their regiments, their distinctive dress and ornaments, the colour of their war shields identifying each from afar, from the scarred and silverheaded veterans who had fought the Basuto, the Griquas and the Boer in the south, to the young bloods eager for their first kill, eager to learn in which direction the King would hurl his war-spear at the conclusion of the Chawala, for that was the direction in which they would find their reputation, their manhood, their glory and possibly their deaths.

The regiments of young unmarried women, interspersed those of the warriors, and as they passed each other on the road, the girls preened and giggled, casting languorous sloe-eyes at the unmarried men, and the men pranced and leapt in the pantomime of battle, the Giya, showing bow they would wash their spears in blood and earn the privilege to go in to the women" and to wives.

With each day's march towards Thabas Indunas the roads became more congested, and their pace was reduced by the throng. They might wait half a morning to take their turn across a ford of the river, for the regiments drove the cattle which were their food supply ahead of them and dragged their baggage train behind.

Each warrior's finery, his tassels and plumes and feathers, were carefully packed and carried by the young apprentice who was his personal bearer.

At last in the sweltering noon of high summer, Zouga's little party, still borne along on the river of humanity, came over a crest of ground and saw laid out ahead of them the great kraal and capital city of the Matabele.

It was spread out over many square miles of open p below the bald-headed granite hills that gave it its name The Hills of the Chieftains'. The furthest hill was the evil, "Place of Killing', Bulawayo, and from its sheer cliffs those condemned to die were cast down.

The stockades formed concentric circles, dividing the city into its separate parts. Always the huge open cattlepens were the centre of Matabele life, their cattle the source and store of their wealth, and now that the outlying herds had been brought in for the festival, every pen was filled with the multi-coloured herds of fat beasts.

Standing at Zouga's shoulder, Gandang used his stabbing-spear to point out with pride the city's features.

There were sections for the unmarried girls, and the unblooded regiments, and another huge area for the married quarters; the huts were uniform in size and laid out in orderly patterns, the thatched roofs shining golden yellow in the sunlight. The earth between them was swept clean and beaten hard by the passage of bare feet. There is the King's hut. " Gandang pointed out a single huge conical structure in its own separate enclosure. And that is the compound of the King's wives, a hundred other huts, within a high guarding stockade, and it is death to any man who enters that gate."

Gandang led Zouga down to a small grove of acacia trees outside the main stockade. There was a stream within a few yards of it, and for the first time in days they were free of the close press of humanity. Although the plain without the city walls was thick with the temporary dwellings of the visiting impis, the area around the grove was empty, as if it had been placed out of bounds to the common people.

When will I see the King? " Zouga asked.

Not until after the festival, Gandang answered. There is ritual and cleansing that the King must undergo but he has sent you gifts, you are much honoured. " And he pointed with his blade at the line of young maidens that left a gate in the stockade. Each girl carried a large earthenware pot balanced easily upon her head, and she did not use a hand to maintain that balance.

The girls moved with that peculiar straight-backed grace, hips swinging in lazy rhythm, the hard unripe fruits of their breasts bouncing and jostling at each pace.

They came in to Zouga's little camp in the grove and knelt to offer the gifts they bore.

Some pots contained thick millet beer, tart and effervescent, others the clotted and soured cow's milk, imaas, that was so much a staple of the Nguni diet, and others again, big chunks of fatty beef, roasted on the open coals. You are much honoured by these gifts, Gandang repeated, apparently himself surprised by the King's generosity. "Yet Tshedi, your grandfather, was always his good and trusted friend."

Once the camp was set up, Zouga found himself again the victim of idleness, with long days of waiting to fill.

Here, however, he was free to roam about the city and its surrounds, save only the forbidden areas of the royal enclosure and women's quarters. He sketched the fascinating bustle of preparation for the festival. During the heat of the day the banks of the rivers were lined with men and women, their velvety black skins shimmering with water as they bathed and cleansed themselves for the dances. Every tree for miles about was hung with the kilts and furs, the feathers and plaited ornaments that were airin& the creases and rumples of travel and packing were being allowed to drop out of them as they billowed and flapped in the light breeze.

He passed groups of young girls plaiting each other's hair, smearing and rubbing each other's bodies with oil and coloured clays, and they giggled and waved at Zouga as he passed.

At first the problem of hygiene that this huge assembly presented puzzled Zouga, until he realized that there was an area of thick undergrowth beyond the city walls where both men and women went at dawn and in the short twilight. This area had its own population of crows and kites, of jackal and hyena that served as the city's cleansing service.

Interested further in the running of the city, he found that all bathing and washing of clothing was allowed only below a certain spot on the riverbanks marked by a distinctively large tree or other feature, and that the women filled the water pots for drinking and cooking above this point.

Even the huge cattle-pen in its very heart helped to keep the city clean. It acted as a vast fly-trap. The insects laid their eggs on the fresh cattle dung, but before they could hatch most of them were deeply trampled'by the hooves of the milling herds. The brilliant sunlight and the untainted wind completed the process of keeping the area relatively clean and the smells interesting but not Unbearable.

Zouga should have been content to have reached this haven, instead of leaving his assegai-riven corpse for a hyena's feast in the wilderness, but he was not.

He set himself tasks to fill the waiting days. He drew sketches and maps of the city, noting weaknesses in the fortifications, and where an attack would have the best chance of penetrating these and reaching the King's private quarters.

He sketched the uniforms of the various impis. He noted the colours of their shields and other means of identifying them in the field. Asking innocentseeming questions of Gandang, he was able to estimate the number of warriors each regiment contained, the ages and battle experience of the warriors, the names and personal idiosyncrasies of their Indunas, and the location of their regimental towns.

He found that much had changed in Matabeleland since old Tom Harkness had drawn his map, and Zouga noted these changes and drew his conclusions from them.

As a further exercise to pass the waiting days he began drawing up a battle plan for a campaign against the old King Mzilikazi, the requirements in men and weapons, the logistics of supply and resupply, the lines of march, and the most expedient methods of bringing the impis to battle, for Zouga was a soldier, a soldier with a dream which might one day become reality only through military action.

Unsuspecting, Gandang was flattered by Zougals interest and he answered every question with pride. in his nation's might and its achievements. Despite this work Zouga had given himself, the days dragged past. The King will not give you audience until after the festival, Gandang repeated, but he was wrong.

The evening before the festival began, two elderly Indunas, blue heron feathers nodding above the silvery woollen caps of close-cropped hair, entered the camp in the acacia grove and Gandang greeted them with deep respect, listened to them attentively, and then came to Zouga. They have come to take you to the King, he said simply.

There were three small fires burning before the King's hut, and over the middle one crouched a wizened apelike figure, who crooned a low incantation through toothless gums, rocking on his haunches and occasionally adding a pinch of powder, or a sprig of herb into one of the large earthenware pots that bubbled over the flames.

The witchdoctor was festooned with the grisly accoutrements of his profession, the dried skins of reptiles, the claws of eagle and leopard, the inflated bladder of a lion, the skull of ape and the teeth of crocodile, small stoppered gourds of potions and powders, the horn of duiker to be used as a blooding cup, and other unidentifiable charms and elixirs.

He was the orchestrator of the entire festival, the most important event in the Matabele calendar, the gathering of the first fruits of the harvest, the blessing of the nation's herds, and the setting of the warlike campaigns which would occupy the amadoda during the coming dry season. Thus the assembled Indunas watched his preparations with attention and awe.

There were thirty or so men in the squatting circle of elders, the senior Indunas of the nation, the King's privy council. The small courtyard was crowded. The tall thatched sloping side of the King's hut towered thirty feet or so above them all, the top of it lost in darkness.

The thatching was skilfully done, with intricate patterns worked into the grass, and before the low doorway stood an armchair of European design and construction.

With a small prick of recognition Zouga realized that this must be the same chair given to the King by his own grandfather Moffat, Tshedi, nearly twenty years before. Bayete!

Mzilikazi, the bull elephant of the Matabele."

Gandang had coached Zouga in the correct etiquette, the formal greetings and the behaviour which the King would expect.

As Zouga crossed the narrow yard of bare earth, he intoned the King's praise names, not shouting them aloud, not crawling on his kneel; as a subject would have done, for he was an Englishman and an officer of the Queen.

Nevertheless, at a distance of ten feet from the King's chair Zouga squatted down, his own head below the level of the King's, and waited.

The figure in the chair was much smaller than he had expected for a warrior of such fearsome reputation, and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Zouga saw that the King's feet and hands were small and delicately shaped, almost feminine, but that his knees were grotesquely swollen and distorted by the gout and arthritis that was attacking them.

The King was an old man now, nobody knew how old, but he had been a fighting warrior at the turn of the century. His once fine muscles had sagged so that his belly bulged out on to his lap, the skin stretched and riven with stria like that of a pregnant woman His head seemed too big for the narrow shoulders, and the neck hardly strong enough to support it, but the eyes which watched Zouga intently from the seams of wrinkles and loose, bagged skin, were black and bright and lively. How is my old friend Tshedi? " the King asked in a piping high-pitched voice.

Zouga had last seen his maternal grandfather twenty years previously; the only memory that persisted was of a long flowing white beard.

hHe is well and happy, Zouga replied. "He sends You his greeting and respect."

The old man in the armchair nodded the big ungainly head contentedly. You may present your gifts, he said, and there was a buzz of comment from the Indunas, and even the witchdoctor at the fire looked up as the ivory tusk was carried in by three of Gandang's warriors, staggering under its weight, and laid before the King's chair.

The witchdoctor clearly resented this interruption of the ritual cleansing and the diversion of interest and attention from himself, and now with two of his assistants to help him he made an officious show of carrying one of the steaming pots from the fire and placing it between the King's feet.

Then he and his assistants raised a large kaross of stitched leopard skins and spread it like a tent over the King and his chair so the steam from the pot was trapped beneath it. Within a minute, there was a paroxysm of gasps and coughing from under the fur blanket, and when at last the witchdoctor removed it, the King was streaming sweat and choking for breath, his eyes inflamed and pouring tears, but any demons had been expelled by the coughing, and impurities washed away by the sweat and tears.

The gathering waited in respectful silence, while the King recovered his breath, and the witchdoctor withdrew to prepare the next potion. With his breath still wheezing and whistling in his throat, Mzilikazi reached into the small chest beside his chair and brought out the sealed package which Zouga had sent him. Speak the words. " The King handed it to Zouga, demanding that he read the letter.

Although he was illiterate, the King understood clearly the uses of the written word. For twenty years he had corresponded with Zouga's grandfather, who always sent one of his mission students to deliver his letters, to read them to the King, and to record the King's reply.

Zouga stood erect and opened the package. He read aloud, translating from the English as he went along, and adding a few small embellishments to the original text.

When he had finished, there was a respectful silence from the tribal elders, and even the King studied the tall and magnificently attired figure before him with new attention. The firelight danced on the burnished brass buttons and badges of Zouga's dress uniform, the scarlet cloth of his coat seemed to glow like the very flames of the fire.

The witchdoctor would have intervened again, coming forward with a brew of steaming medicine for the King to swallow, but Mzilikazi waved him away irritably.

Knowing that this was the moment when the King's interest was at its zenith, Zouga asked smoothly, "Does the King see these signs of my Queen? They are her special marks, and every ruler should have such a mark to prove his power and the rocklike nature of his words Zouga turned and beckoned the bearer who knelt in the gateway behind him and the terrified man crawled to Zouga's feet, not daring to look up at the King, and handed to Zouga the small tea caddy that contained the carved ivory seal and the sticks of wax. I have prepared one of these for the King, that his dignity and power may be known to all men Mzilikazi was unable to contain his interest; he craned forward in his chair and called Zouga closer. Kneeling before him, Zouga prepared the wax, melting it on to the lid of the tea caddy with a taper lit from the fire. Then.

he made the impression of the seal upon it, and when it had hardened, handed it up to the King. It is an elephant. " The King recognized the beast with unconcealed amazement. The great black bull elephant of the Matabele, Zouga agreed. Speak the words. " The King touched the lettering on the border, and commanded Zouga to translate it. Mzihkazi, Nkosi Nkulu! " The King clapped his hands with delight, and passed the seal to his senior Induna. Soon they were all clucking and exclaiming over the imprint, the wax impression passing from hand to hand. Bakela, " the King told Zouga, "you must come to me again on the day following the Chawala ceremony. You and I have much to discuss."

Then with a wave of his hand he dismissed the splendid young man from his presence, and patiently, resignedly, gave himself up to the ministrations of the hovering doctor.

The full moon rose well past midnight, and the fires were stacked with new logs to welcome it, and the singing; and drumming began. No man nor woman had dared to pick a single grain of corn from the harvest before this moment, for the rise of the moon heralded the Chawala, the dance of the first fruits, and the entire nation gave itself up to rejoicing.

The ceremony began in the middle of the first morning. The massed regiments assembled before their King, filing in column into the vast arena of the cattle stockade, and the earth shook to the crash of bare feet lifted in unison, twenty-five thousand at a time, lifted to the level of the shoulder and then brought down with the full force of the muscular, hardened bodies of highly trained warriors.

Bayete! " they greeted the King with the royal salute.

Bayete! " the crash of feet once more.

Bayete! " a third time, and then the dancing began.

One regiment at a time coming forward in swaying, singing ranks, to perform before Mzilikazi's armchair throne. The perfect timing and execution of the intricate steps made it seem as though they were a single living organism, the shields interlocking and revolving and twisting together like the scales of some gigantic reptile, the dust rising and swirling through their ranks like smoke so that they appeared as wraiths, and their cloaks of furs and their kilts of civets" tails and monkeyskins, of the pelts of foxes and cats, swirled about their legs so they appeared to be divorced from earth, suspended above it on the moving cloud of dust and the soft waves of fur.

From the ranks sprang the great champions and the heroes of each regiment, to giya in their pride. Leaping as high as their own heads, and stabbing furiously at the air, screaming challenge and triumph, the sweat greased their muscles and flew in explosive droplets in the sunlight.

Mzilikazi was caught up in the building sea of excitement, and he quaffed from the beer pots that the maidens brought him until his eyes rolled in his head and he could not contain himself further. He struggled from his chair, and hobbled out on his swollen and deformed legs, and the champions fell back to give him place. My father is the finest dancer in all of Matabeleland, said Gandang, squatting beside Zouga.

The old King tried to leap, but his feet did not leav the ground. He shuffled back and forth, making little pawing gestures, hacking at the air with his toy war spear. Thus I struck down Barend the Griqua, and thus his sons died."

The nation roared. The bull elephant dances, and the earth shakes."

And the slamming of ten thousand feet goaded the King to circle in a painful and pathetic parody of the young champions" wild gyrations. Thus I spurned the tyrant Chaka, and thus I cut the plumes from the headdress of his messengers and sent them back to him, squealed Mzilikazi. Bayete! " thundered the nation.

"THe father of the world."

Exhausted within minutes, the ancient King sank into the dust, and Gandang and two other of the King's sons leapt to their feet from the half circle of Indunas and raced to his side.

Gently they bore him up and carried him back to his chair, and Lobengula, the King's senior son, held a beer pot for him to drink from. The beer dribbled from his chin and ran down the King's heaving chest. Let the nation dance, gasped the King, and Gandang returned to Zouga's side and squatted beside him. After war, my father loves best the dance, he explained.

The maidens came, rank upon lovely rank, their naked skin shimmering in the glaring sunlight of noon. The tiny beaded apron that barely covered their little triangular sex was all they wore, and their singing was sweet and clear.

Mzilikazi hoisted himself from his chair once more, and hobbled out to dance with them, passing along the foremost rank, directing the singing with his ritual warspear pointed to the skies. The King danced until he dropped once more, and was again carried back to his chair by his sons.

By nightfall, Zouga was exhausted. His sweaty neck was chafed by the high stock of his dress coat, and sweat had soaked through the thick scarlet serge in dark patches. His eyes were bloodshot and inflamed from the dust and the glare, his head ached from the cacophony of drums and the roar of Matabele voices, his tongue felt thick and furry from the draughts of sorghum beer that had been pressed upon him and his back and legs ached from the unfamiliar squatting attitude he had been forced into all that day, but the King was still dancing, bobbling and prancing and squeaking on those twisted and deformed legs of his.

The following morning Mzilikazi was on his throne again, so undaunted by the previous day's exertions, that when the Chawala bull was loosed into the arena his sons had bodily to restrain him from rushing out to slay it with his bare hands.

A champion from each regiment had been chosen, and stripped down to a loincloth. They waited in squatting ranks on each side of Mzilikazi's chair.

The bull came into the ring at the charge, homed head held high, red dust spurting from under his hooves, and his wild eyes glaring. He was pure, untainted black, with a huge humped back and glossy burnished hide.

Carefully picked from all the King's herds, he was the finest animal in the whole of Matabeleland and he made an arrogant circuit of the arena, stepping high, snorting and dropping his head to hook with curved horns at anything in his path.

The King, held by his sons, but struggling against their grip, was almost incoherent with excitement, and now he lifted his spear and his arms shook violently as he screamed, Tulala inkunzi! Kill the bull! " The waiting men leapt to their feet, saluted the King, and then raced out, spreading into a half-moon-shape line, instinctively adopting the fikela, the movement of encirclement.

The black bull swung to meet them, came up short on locked front legs, his head swinging as he measured his charge; then the great rounded quarters bunched under him and he surged forward, picking a man in the centre of the line and thundering down on him.

The man he had chosen stood his ground, spreading his arms in a welcoming gesture and the bull dropped his head and hit him. Clearly Zouga heard the brittle snap of bone as the warrior absorbed the shock of impact against his chest, and then locked his arms around the animal's neck and held on.

The bull tried to toss him, hooking and throwing his head high, but the man held on, and was cruelly thrown about, but his body blocked the bull's sight and brought him to a halt. The racing line closed about him instantly, and abruptly the bull's great humped body was smothered by the rush of naked black men.

For long seconds the bull struggled to remain upright, but they bore him down and tore his legs out from under him so he hit the dusty earth with a heavy thump and a groaning bellow. A dozen men seized the long horns, and, using their leverage, began to twist them against the massive inert weight of his pinned body. Slowly, sweating and straining, they forced his head around, and the bull kicked his hooves in the air, his bellows becoming more desperate and strangled.

The King leapt up and down in his chair, screaming with excitement, and the roar of voices was like the sound of surf on a gale-driven coast of rock.

inch by inch, the huge homed head revolved, and then suddenly there was no longer resistance. Zouga heard the crack of the vertebrae, sharp as a musket shot even above the thunder of the assembled nation. The homed head flicked through another half turn, the legs stiffened skywards for a moment, and the bull's bowels voided in a liquid green stream.

The sweat-drenched warriors lifted the carcass shoulder high and bore it bodily across the arena to lay it at Mzilikazi "s feet.

On the third and -last day of the ceremony, Mzilikazi stalked out into the centre of the cattle-pen. He made a frail and bent figure in the vast open space, and the noon sun burned down from above so that there was almost no shadow under him. The nation was quiet, forty thousand human beings watching one old man and there was not a whisper, nor a sound of breathing.

in the centre of the arena Mzilikazi paused and raised his war-spear above his head. The watching ranks stiffened as he revolved slowly, and then stopped facing towards the south. He drew back his spear arm, poised for a moment while the tension in the watchers was a palpable emanation from forty thousand charged bodies.

Then the King gave a little hop, and began slowly to revolve, the crowd sighed and swayed and then grew silent as again the King poised with his blade pointed towards the east. Then another little hop as he teased them deliberately, drawing out the moment with the timing of a natural showman.

Then suddenly his spear arm shot forward and the tiny toylike weapon flew from his hand in a high sparkling parabola, and dropped to bury its point in the baked earth. To the north! " thundered the nation. "Bayete! The great bull has chosen the north! "We go northwards to raid the Makololo, Gandang told Zouga. "I will leave with my impi in the dawn. " He paused, and then smiled briefly. "We will meet again, Bakela. "If the gods are kind, " Zouga agreed, and Gandang laid one hand on his shoulder, squeezed briefly, and then turned away.

Slowly, without looking back, Gandang walked away into the darkness which was clamorous with the singing and the sound of the drums.

"Your guns would be terrible weapons if they did not have to be reloaded, Mzilikazi piped in his querulous old man's voice. "But to fight with them a man must have a fast horse, so that he may fire and then gallop away to reload."

zouga squatted by the King's chair in the royal enclosure as he had for almost thirty successive days. The King sent for him each day, and he must listen to Mzilikazi's wisdom and eat huge quantities of half-raw beef washed down by pot after pot of beer. Without a horse my warriors will overrun them before they can reload, even as we did to the Griquas, and afterwards we picked up over three hundred of their precious guns from the battlefield."

Zouga. nodded his agreement, smiling inwardly as he imagined the amadoda trying those tactics on a square of British infantry.

Mzilikazi broke off to lift the beer pot. and then as he lowered it the sparkle of one of Zouga's tunic buttons caught his eye, and he leaned across to pluck at it.

Resignedly Zouga took the clasp knife from his pocket and carefully cut the threads that held the button. He handed it to the King, and Mzilikazi grinned with pleasure and held it to the sunlight. Only five to go, Zouga thought ironically. He felt like the Christmas turkey being plucked a feather at a time.

His lapel badges and field officer's pips had long since been taken by the King, as had his belt buckles and helmet badge. The paper, Zouga started and the King waved airily, dismissing the reference to the concession.

He might be on the verge of senility and certainly he was an alcoholic, drinking seven gallons of beer each day, by Zouga's count, but still Mzilikazi possessed a cunning and devious intellect with a natural grasp of his own bargaining weaknesses and strengths. He had teased Zouga for thirty days, just as he had teased the watching nation on the third day of the Chawala, while they had waited for him to burl the war-spear.

Now the King turned away from Zouga. at the mention of the concession, and transferred his attention to the young couple who knelt before him. They had been accused, and come before the King for judgement.

That day, in between chatting with Zouga, Mzilikazi had received emissaries bearing tribute from two of his vassal chieftains, he had rewarded a young herdboy for saving his herd from a marauding lion, he had sentenced to death another who had been seen drinking milk directly from the udder of one of his charges, he had listened to the reports of a messenger from the impis campaigning in the north against the Makololo, and now his attention was on the accused couple before him.

The girl was a lovely creature, with long delicately formed limbs and a sweetly rounded face with full flaring lips over small very white teeth. She kept her eyes tightly closed, so as not to look upon the King's wrath, and her body was shaken with tremors of terror as she knelt before him. The man was a finely muscled young warrior, from one of the unmarried regiments, who had still to win the honour of being allowed to "go in to the women. Rise up, woman, that the King may see your shame, the voice of the accuser rang out, and hesitantly, timidly, still with her eyes tightly closed, the girl lifted her forehead from the dusty earth, and sat back on her heels.

Her naked stomach, drum tight and round as a ripening fruit, bulged out above the tiny beaded apron.

The King sat hunched in his chair, brooding silently for many minutes, then he asked the warrior, Do you deny this thing?

"I do not deny it, Nkosi Nkulu. "Do you love this wench? As I love life itself, my King. " The man's voice was low and husky, but firm and without a quaver to it.

The King brooded again.

Zouga had sat by and watched the King give judgement on a hundred such occasions. Sometimes the decision had been worthy of a black Solomon, at others Zouga had been appalled by the barbaric savagery of the sentence.

Now the King stared at the man before him, and he fiddled with the toy spear in his right hand, frowning and shaking his head softly, then he reached a decision, and leaning forward he proffered the weapon to the man who knelt before him. With this blade, open the womb of the woman you love, take out from it that which offends against law and against custom, and place it in my hands."

Zouga did not sleep that night, and once he threw off his blankets and hurried to the fringe of the acacia grove to retch and heave, vomiting up his horror at what he had witnessed.

In the morning the memory of the girl's screams had not faded but the King was jocular and garrulous, pressing pot after pot of sour beer on Zouga's rebellious stomach, recounting episodes from his long and eventful life, describing vividly the scenes from his childhood and youth in far-off Zululand with a certain old man's wistful nostalgia.

Then suddenly, without any prior hint that he would do so, he commanded Zouga, "Speak the words of your paper."

He listened silently as Zouga translated the terms of the concession he was seeking, and at the end he mused a moment. To hunt elephant and to dig a hole, " he mumbled at last. "It is not so very much you wish for. Write that you will do these things only in the land below the Zambezi, east of the Inyati River and above the Limpopo."

Not quite convinced that the King was this time serious, Zouga quickly added the proviso to the foot of his home-grown legal document.

Then he directed the King's trembling hand to form the big uncertain cross below it. Alzilikazi: his mark."

The King's pleasure in affixing the wax seal beside his mark was childlike and unaffected. After it was done he passed it to his Indunas to admire, and leaned forward towards Zouga. Now that you have what you want from me, you will wish to leave. " There was regret in the rheumy eyes, and Zouga felt a pang of guilt, but he replied directly. I cannot hunt in the rains, and there is much work for me to accomplish in my own land across the sea. I must go, but I shall return, Nkosi Nkulu. "I give you the road to the south, Bakela the Fist. Go in peace and return to me soon, for your presence pleases me, and your words are wise for one still so youngStay in peace, Great Elephant. " Zouga rose and left the King's courtyard, and his step was as light as his spirits were gay. He had the concession buttoned into the breastpocket of his tunic, fifty-six pounds of native gold in his chest, the stone bird of Zimbabwe, and three fine tusks of ivory to buy his way. The road to the south, to Good Hope and to England lay open before him.

The wind was offshore, a faint backlash of the monsoon, but the sky was low and grey and the twisting squalls of rain fell from it like pearl dust.

Ensign Ferris, Black joke's most junior officer, was taking his sights off the traverse board as the gunboat closed the land, calling them quietly to the signals yeoman who swiftly worked out the distance offshore, and wrote this down on the navigation slate, so that any moment the Captain could glance down at it to confirm his own observations.

There was a man in the bows with a leadline, chanting the depth as he read it from the markings on the line, then twirling the weight and hurling it out ahead of Black joke's creeping bows, letting it sink and then reading the mark again as the ship passed over it. By the deep six."

Clinton Codrington was conning his ship in by the leadsman's chant, by the angles that Ferris was shooting off the land features which they had identified, by the colour shadings of the water, by the break and swirl of the tide on shoal and bank, and by a seaman's instinct.

The chart surveyed thirty years previously by Captain Owen, R. N he trusted not at all. Bring her around a point, he told the bel quietly, and as the ship swung towards the land, they smelt it on the wind. Slave stink! exclaimed Denham fiercely, and as he said it the masthead lookout sang out sharply, Smoke! Smoke from the right bank of the river. "How far up stream? "Two miles or more, sir!

" For the first time since sailing from Zanzibar harbour, Clinton allowed himself to believe that he was in time, that he had reached the Rio Save in time to answer the heartrending appeal of the woman he loved. We will clear for action, if you please, Mr. Denham, but don't run out the guns. " He kept his voice level and formal, but his Lieutenant grinned at him. A fair cop, by Jove.

Congratulations, sir, and the crew laughed and skylarked as they lined up at the arms chest to receive their pistol and cutlass.

As Black Joke breasted the breaking white water of the bar, touched sand bottom for a moment and then broke the grip of it, and surged forward into the dark green and still waters of the estuary, Clinton nodded at Denham. You may run out the guns now."

He had delayed until this moment to avoid altering the ship's trim during the critical passage of the bar.

With the carriages rumbling ominously, Black joke bared her fangs and under fighting sail, her bronze propeller thrashing exultingly, her crew armed and eager, she went into the labyrinth of the Rio Save like a ferret into the warren.

Clinton took her around the first bend, following the deep green sweep of the channel between the paler sandbanks. it was two hours past low tide and the flood was pushing strongly, the leadsman calling good bottom and Clinton was trying to conceal his impatience and eagerness by the calm controlled tone in which he called his orders to the helm. Would you just look at that! exclaimed Ferris, and pointed over the side. Beside them floated what looked like an ebony log. It was only as they passed and it bobbed and rolled in their wake that Clinton realized that it was a human corpse, stomach distended, round and shiny with gas and limbs twisted like the branches of a tree blasted by lightning. Clinton transferred his attention back to the ship, with a small grimace of distaste. Meet her, he told the hehnsman and then as they tore around the broad curve of water between the mangrove forests and the full stretch of the estuary opened ahead of them, he said, "Midships! " His voice was flat, unemotional, neither triumphant nor dejected. Smoke rose from the bank of the river, and through his glass he could see the smouldering remains of a series, of long low buildings, roofs burned through and collapsed inwards. They seemed to have been deliberately fired.

in the smoke soaring and circling on spread wings rose a host of birds, buzzards and kites and vultures and the carrion-eating marabou storks. They seemed to reach up with the smoke to the belly of the lowering monsoon clouds, dimming the light of day with their wings. The oppressive towering silence was broken only by the faint high cries of the birds, and the river was empty.

Clinton and his officers stared silently at the wide deserted sweep of the Rio Save, green and smooth from bank to mangrove-clad bank. No one spoke as Black Joke bore on, close in to the ruined and blackened barracoons.

They stared at the piles of corpses, their faces stiff and expressionless, concealing their horror at the foul plague that lurked there in the palm groves, concealing also their disappointment and chagrin at finding the anchorage deserted and Huron gone. Stop engine, Clinton broke the silence. "Let go port anchor."

Denham and Ferris turned to look at their Captain their carefully controlled expressions cracking with disbelieving dread; he was going to send a party ashore. They would come back aboard carrying the plague with them, they would all be doomed.

The bow anchor hit the mud of the estuary bottom, and Black Joke turned sharply, the flow of the tide swinging her across the narrow channel in her own length, the anchor holding her head until she was pointed directly back down the river towards the sea. Immediately Clinton gave the order, "Slow ahead, and, as the ship breasted the tide, "Up anchor, and the steam winch clattered merrily. The officers relaxed visibly, and Denham allowed himself to smile with relief. The Captain had used the anchor merely to turn the ship as swiftly as possible without going through the dangerous business of backing and filling in the narrow channel against the push of the tide.

As the anchor came back aboard with the gluey black mud clinging to its flukes, Clinton gave another series of orders. Half ahead. " That was as fast as he dared push for the open sea. Secure from action stations."

There was no enemy to fight and as the heavy longbarrelled thirty-two pounder guns were run in, Black Joke handled more easily. Mr. Ferris, we will fumigate the ship."

The smoke from the pails of burning sulphur would redden all their eyes and for days would taint the food and water, but Clinton's dread of smallpox outweighed such small considerations as comfort, and, besides, he smiled wryly to himself, any change to the taste of Black lake's bullied beef and hard bread could only be an improvement.

The smile was fleeting. He was sickened by his brief glimpses of the barracoons, and his anger was a cold sharp thing like the blade of the cutlass on his belt. Mr. Denham, he said quietly, "please plot a course for Good Hope. We'll come on to it the moment we clear the land He moved to the rail, half his mind on the job of conning Black Joke out of this stinking green river into the open sea, the other half of his mind running swiftly over the problem of bringing his ship into action against Huron.

How long was the start that the tall clipper had over his gunboat? Robyn Ballantyne's letter had been dated 16th November, today was the 27th November. Eleven days. That was too much. He could only hope that Robyn had been able to delay the sailing, as she had promised.

Clinton glanced back over his shoulder at the blue smoke column that blurred the horizon. How long had those fires in the barracoons been burning? Not more than three or four days, he guessed, with more hope than conviction. Yet even that was still too long a start. He had seen Huron on a wind and she was swift as a swallow, and light as a witch. Even with eight hundred slaves in her holds, and her water casks filled, she would toy with Black joke in any wind better than a light breeze.

His only advantage would be in the offing that Huron must make to get on the trades and weather the bulge of the continent, while Black joke could cut across the other arm of the triangle, hugging the land. It was small advantage, a few hundred leagues, and in the end it would all depend on the wind.

Clinton found he was pounding his clenched fist on the ship's rail, that he was glaring ahead with such ferocity that the idle hands of the lee rail were watching him curiously.

With an effort he forced his features to relax, and linked his hands at the small of his back, beneath the tails of his uniform coat, but his eyes still glittered pale sapphire blue and his lips were chalky with stress. It seemed too long for his patience before he could at last bring Black Joke on to her true course, and bend to the engine room voice-tube.

I want all the speed you can squeeze out of her, he told his engineer. "There is twenty thousand pounds of prize money just below the horizon, but it's running like a fox and I'll need every pound of steam you can give me."

He straightened up and the wind whipped his pale golden hair against his sun-gilded cheeks and forehead.

He glanced up at the sky and saw the ponderous roll of the monsoon clouds on the wind.

Huron would have it full and boisterous on her port beam, with that hull and rigging it was probably her best point of sailing.

He knew that there was not the remotest chance of finding the clipper on the open sea, there were millions of square miles of ocean to cover, not even a battle fleet with a full squadron of frigates ideally placed ahead of the fugitive would have much chance of finding a single ship in that infinity of water.

Clinton knew that his only chance was to reach the southern tip of the continent ahead of Huron and to take up station athwart the narrow shipping-lane that was threaded around Cape Point. However, once Huron rounded the southern cape, the whole of the wide Atlantic would lie ahead of her and she would be gone again.

Clinton's jawline clenched spasmodically at the thought of the American escaping into that limitless expanse of sea. If she had indeed eleven days, lead on him with this wind holding fair, she could even at this moment be raising the rocky cliffs of Cape Point. He put the thought from his mind and concentrated on coaxing every inch of speed from his ship over the long days and nights ahead.

Robyn had searched in vain for a subterfuge to delay Huron's departure from the Rio Save, even though she knew that if she succeeded she would be endangering the lives of all aboard her. However, Mungo St. John had swiftly regained his energy and determination as his wound healed and the effects of the inoculation passed.

Affected by Robyn's warning about the danger of battlefield plagues, he forced the pace of his crew in loading the slaves. They worked through the night by the light of tar-dipped rope torches, as well as by day, the crew every bit as eager as their Captain to be away from, this cursed river. Four days after the loading began, Huron's slave-decks were in place and her cargo of slaves aboard, and that evening at the full of the tide, using the last of the light and the first gusts of the offshore night breeze, Huron slipped over the bar, shook out her reefs and settled down to make her offing during the night.

At dawn they caught the steady push of the trades and Mungo brought her round on to a more southerly heading, close-hauled to make good their eastings before running for the bulge of Agulhas with the wind on the beam.

The sweet clean air of the open sea that had travelled thousands upon thousands of miles since last having touched land, swept through the ship, cleansing it of the dreadful stench of the plague barracoons, and Mungo's strict hygienic discipline helped to keep the holds free of the slave stink and impressed even Robyn, though reluctantly, with his forethought and his precautions.

By sacrificing a single slave deck, raising the space between each from the traditional 20 inches to 32 inches, he allowed not only greater comfort but easier access. In these mild conditions of wind and sea, the slaves were exercised during all of the daylight hours, the higher headroom and wider ladderways enabled even those in the lowest decks to be brought up on deck in batches of fifty at a time. On the maindeck they were forced to dance to the rhythm of a tribal drum beaten by a tattooed naked tribesman, the rattle and clink of their chains made a mournful background music to the drum and the sweet sound of the singing slaves. Funny business, that tattooing. " Nathaniel stopped to chat with Robyn as she stood watching the dismal show. They started tattooing their children to make them repulsive to us slavers, some of them file or knock out their teeth like that one there. " He pointed at a muscular black man in the circle of dancing slaves whose teeth had been filed to sharp points like those of a shark. Some of them put bones through the noses of their daughters, and others stretch their tits, begging your pardon at the plain speaking, ma'am, or they put rings of copper around their necks until they look like giraffes, all so the slavers will leave them alone. They do say now that these have become marks of beauty amongst the heathen. No accounting for taste, is there, ma'am? " Robyn saw how the extra space and regular exercise would affect the well-being of the slaves, and while they were up on the maindeck, in the open air, their empty slave decks were flushed out with sea water from the ship's pumps and then scrubbed down with a strong lye mixture. Though even this was not enough to prevent the slave stink slowly impregnating the ship.

Each slave spent two hours on deck each second day, and while they were there, Robyn held clinic and examined each of them for any signs of disease or injury.

Before going below once more, they were each forced to drink a decoction of molasses and lime juice to supplement the plain diet of boiled farina and water, and to ward off the dreaded scourge of the scurvy.

The slaves responded well to this treatment, and, incredibly, began to put on the weight that they had burned off during the fevers that were the result of the inoculation against the smallpox. The mood of the slaves was resigned and compliant, although there were isolated incidents.

One morning, while a batch of slaves were being brought up, one of them, a fine-looking naked woman, managed to work free the shackle of her chain and the moment she reached the deck she rushed to Huron's side and leapt over it, into the creaming blue wake of the racing clipper.

Despite the fact that she still wore the iron cuffs on her wrists, she managed to keep afloat for many long minutes; her struggles were pitiful to watch as she was slowly drawn down lower and lower in the water.

Robyn had run to the rail to watch the woman's efforts, expecting Mungo to heave-to and lower a boat to rescue her, but he remained detached and silent on his quarterdeck, barely glancing over the stern before occupying himself once more with the management of his ship, while Huron tore away and the woman's head dwindled to a speck on the blue water, then was drawn inevitably below the surface by the weight of her iron cuffs.

Although Robyn realized that it would have been impossible to stop the clipper and reach the woman before she drowned, yet she glared at Mungo across the length of the deck, wishing that there were words to express her fury and indignation.

That night she lay awake in her tiny cabin, hour after hour, xacking her imagination for some ruse that could be used to delay the tall clipper's full flight towards the Southern Cape.

She thought of stealing one of the ship's boats and casting herself adrift during the night, forcing Mungo to turn back and to search for her. It took only a few minutes" reflection to realize that it would take a dozen strong men to free the whaler from its lashings and lower it on its davits over the ship's side, and even if she managed to accomplish that, it was far from certain that Mungo would delay even a minute. He was more likely to sail away and leave her, as he had left the slave woman.

She thought of setting fire to the ship, overturning a lantern in the mainsail locker, and creating so much damage that Huron would be obliged to call at the nearest port, Loureng Marques or Port Natal, to effect repairs, and to give Black joke an opportunity to come up with her. Then she imagined eight hundred chained slaves burning to death in the hold when the fire got out of control, and she shuddered, thrust that idea from her and hopelessly composed herself to a sleep which would not come.

In the end her opportunity came from a most unexpected source, Tippoo.

The huge mate had a weakness, a single weakness that Robyn could observe. He was a trenclierman and, in his own taste, a gourmet. Half the lazaretto was filled with delicacies that Tippoo had hoarded and which he shared with no others. There were dried and smoked meats and sausages, cheeses the smell of which brought tears to the eyes, and wooden crates of cans and bottles of preserved foods, though as a strict Moslem, he took no alcohol. He made up what he lacked in the glass with his spoon.

His appetite was one of the ship's jokes, and Robyn had heard Mungo chaffing him across the wardroom table. Were it not for the tucker you brought aboard, Mr. Mate, we'd have room for another hundred blackbirds in our hold. "I'll wager that belly of yours costs you more to sustain than a harem of extravagant wives. "Sweet merciful heavens, Mr. Tippoo, but whatever you are eating should have been given a Christian burial a month ago."

One of Tippoo's favourite appetizers was a particularly virulent bloater paste, packed in half-pound tins. The instruction printed on the tin read "Spread thinly on biscuit or toast', and Tippoo would spoon it directly from the tin, consuming the entire half pound without once breaking the rhythmic dip and lift of his soup spoon, his eyes half closed and a cherubic smile buckling the wide line of his toad's mouth.

The fourth night out of the Rio Save he began his dinner with a can of bloater paste, but as he pierced the lid with his clasp knife, there was a sharp hiss of escaping gas, and Mungo St. John glanced up from his own plate of pea soup.

It is blown, Mr. Tippoo. I would not eat it if I were you. "No, Tippoo agreed. "But you not me."

They called Robyn a little before midnight. Tippoo was in convulsions, doubled up with agony, his belly swollen and hard as a yellow agate boulder. He had vomited until now he was retching only a little blood-flecked bile.

It's ptomaine poisoning, Robyn told Mungo St. John.

It was the first time she had spoken directly to him since that morning in the Rio Save, and her voice was cool and formal. "I do not have the medicines to treat it. You will have to put into a port where he can receive treatment. There is a military hospital at Port Natal. "Doctor Ballantyne, Mungo answered her as formally, but his infuriating smile lurked behind the gold-flecked eyes. "Mr. Tippoo's mother was an ostrich, he can digest stones, nails and lumps of broken glass. Your concern, touching as it may be, is entirely misplaced. He will be ready to fight, flog, or devour an ox by noon tomorrow. "And I tell you that without proper treatment he will be dead in a week."

However, Mungo's prognosis proved to be correct, for by morning the vomiting and retching had abated and Tippoo seemed to have purged his bowels of the poisoned fish. Robyn was forced to a decision which she made on her knees in her cabin. Forgive me, oh Lord, but there are eight hundred of your children chained below decks in this foul prison, and I will. not kill him, at least, with your help, I will not kill him."

Then, off her knees she went briskly to work. She used a solution of peppermint tincture to disguise the taste, and let fall fifteen drops of essence of ipecacuanha into the medicine glass, which was three times the recommended dosage for the most powerful emetic known to the medical science. Drink it down, she told Tippoo. "It will soothe your stomach, and cure the diarrhoea."

Late that afternoon she repeated the dose, but the wardroom steward had to help her lift Tippoo's head from the bolster and pour the draught down his throat. The effect was enough to alarm even Robyn.

An hour later she sent for Mungo, and the steward came back with the message, "Captain says as how the ship's safety demands all his attention at the moment, begging your pardon, Doctor."

When Robyn herself went on deck, Mungo was at the weather rail, sextant in hand, waiting for the sun to appear in a gap in the clouds.

Tippoo is dying, she told him. And this will be my first sight of the day mungo replied without taking his eye from the eyepiece of the instrument. I at last believe that you are a monster with no human feelings, she whispered fiercely, and at that moment blazing sunlight struck the deck, as the sun showed briefly through the ragged hole in the cloud. Stand by the chronometer, " Mungo called to the signals yeoman, and then "Mark! as he brought the sun's image down to bounce lightly as a green rubber ball on the dark line of the horizon. Excellent, he murmured with satisfaction, as he lowered the sextant and read off the height of the sun, and called it to the yeoman to mark on his slate. Only then did he turn back to Robyn. I am sure you have misjudged the severity of Tippoo's ailment See for yourself, " she invited. That is my intention, Doctor."

Mungo stooped into Tippoo's cabin, and paused. His expression changed, suddenly the light mocking smile was gone. It was evident that Tippoo was indeed dangerously ill. How are you, old friend? " Mungo asked quietly. It was the first time Robyn had ever heard him use that form of address. He lifted his hand and laid it on the mate's sweat-headed forehead.

Tippoo rolled the bald yellow cannon ball of his head towards Mungo, and he tried to smile. It was a brave effort. Robyn felt a terrible guilty pang, at the suffering she was inflicting and at being the witness to this private, and strangely intimate, moment between these two hard and dangerous men.

Tippoo tried to lift himself, but the effort brought a long dragging groan rattling up his throat, and he clutched at his stomach with both hands, drawing his knees up with agony, and then desperately twisting his head as a fresh bout of heaving and retching racked his body.

Mungo snatched the bucket off the deck and with one arm around Tippoo's shoulders held it for him, but all that Tippoo could bring up was a little splash of blood and brown bile, and when he fell back on the bunk he was gasping unevenly, bathed in fresh sweat and his eyes rolled back in his skull until only a little half moon of the iris still showed.

Mungo stood beside his bunk for a full five minutes, bowed and attentive, swaying slightly to the ship's movement, but otherwise still and silent. His brow was creased with thought and his gaze remote, and watching him, Robyn knew he was making the dire decision, the throw of the dice of life, friendship against the loss of his ship and perhaps even his own liberty, for to go into a British port with slaves in his holds was an awful risk.

Strange, now that he was showing this gentler side of his nature, that her affection came flooding back at full strength, she felt mean and cheap for playing on his deepest emotions, and for torturing the huge yellow Moslem on the narrow bunk.

Mungo swore quietly but decisively, and, still stooped under the low deck, strode from the cabin.

Robyn's affection turned to disgust and disappointment. Disgust that even the LIFE of an old and loyal friend meant nothing to this cruel and merciless man whom she was doomed to love, and intense disappointment that her ruse had failed, that she had inflicted this dangerous suffering on Tippoo to no avail.

She sank down wearily and bitterly beside his bunk, took a cloth soaked in sea water and bathed the sweatbasted yellow head.

During their long voyage down the Atlantic, Robyn had grown sensitive to all Huron's moods, to the feel of the deck underfoot at every point of sailing, and to the sounds that her hull made in different sea and wind conditions, and now abruptly she felt the deck cant sharply beneath her. She heard the stamp of bare feet on the deck above as her yards were trained around and Huron's action became easier, the sounds of her hull and rigging muted as she took the wind in over her stern quarter and rode more easily. He's altered course towards the west, she breathed as she lifted her head to listen. "It worked. He is going in to Port Natal. Oh thank you Lord, it worked."

Huron anchored well offshore, out on the thirty-fathom line of the shelving coast, so that she could not benefit from the shelter of the huge whale-backed bluff that protected Port Natal's natural harbour. Even with a powerful telescope, a watcher on the shore would be unable to make out any significant details of Huron's cargo, nor of her true occupation. However, the ship paid for her offshore berth by taking the unfettered scend of the sea and the wind. She pitched and she rolled and she jerked at her anchor chain.

At her peak she flew the stars and stripes of her country, and below that the yellow "Quebec', the plague flag which warned, "Stay away from me! I have plague on board! " Mungo St. John placed an armed watch on both sides of the ship and others at her bow and stern , and, despite Robyn's strident protest, she was confined to her cabin for the duration of the ship's call, with another armed guard outside her door. You are very well aware of the reason, Doctor Ballantyne. " Mungo answered her protests calmly. "I do not wish you to have any communication whatsoever with your countrymen ashore."

The whaler, when it took Tippoo ashore, was rowed by men that Mungo selected personally, and they were instructed to inform the Harbour Master that there was smallpox aboard, and to request that no other vessel be allowed near Huron. I can only wait three days for you. " Mungo stooped over the litter on which Tippoo was carried on deck.

That is all I can risk. If you are not sufficiently recovered by then, you will have to stay here until my return.

That cannot be more than five months. " He tucked a leather draw-string purse under Tippoo's blanket. "And that will pay your expenses in the meanwhile. Get well, Mr. Tippoo, I need you."

Robyn had administered another dose of the peppermint and ipecacuanha a few minutes previously, and Tippoo could reply only in an agonized whisper.

I will wait for you, Captain Mungo, as long as she takes Mungo's voice was husky as he straightened and spoke to the seamen carrying the litter. Handle him easy, you hear me."

For three days Robyn sweated and fretted in the stuffy little cabin, trying to occupy her time with writing up her journals but distracted by any loud noise from the deck above, her heart pounding as she both hoped for and dreaded the hail from a British gun-boat, or the rush of a boarding-party coming in over Huron's side.

On the third morning Tippoo was rowed back to the ship, and he climbed up the side and in through the entry port unaided. Without further doses of ipecacuanha, his recovery had amazed the military surgeons ashore, but he was so thin that the skin hung in folds from his jowls like a bulldog, his belly had shrunk so that he had tied his breeches with a length of rope to keep them from sinking down past his flattened belly, but still they flapped around his shrunken buttocks.

His skin was the pale yellow of ancient ivory, and he was so weak he had to pause to rest when he reached the deck. Welcome aboard, Mr. Tippoo, " Mungo called from the quarterdeck. "And if you have finished your holiday ashore, I'll thank you to get this ship under way immediately Twelve days later, having struggled with flukey and variable winds, Mungo St. John played the field of his glass down the open gaping maw of False Bay. On his right hand rose the distinctive curved black peak of Hangklip, shaped from this angle like a shark's dorsal fin, and directly opposite it across the mouth of the bay the southernmost tip of the African continent, Cape Point, with its lighthouse perched high above the steep wet Cliffs.

It was a magnificent Cape summer's day, a light and fickle breeze scratching dark patches on the surface of the rolling dark blue sea, leaving the rest of it with a satiny gloss. There were seabirds working, their wings twinkling like flurrying; snow flakes in the sunlight, huge flocks of them that stretched low across the horizon.

Creeping along on the breeze, lying for minutes at a time completely becalmed, Huron took half a day to round the point and came on to west-northwest and a point north, the course that would carry her up the Atlantic, across the equator and finally into Charleston Roads.

Once they were on their new course, Mungo St. John had leisure to inspect the other sails that were in sight.

There were nine, no, ten other vessels in view now, for there was another far out to sea, just her topsails showing. They were small fishing craft out from Hout Bay and Table Bay, and the seabirds clouded the air about them, most of them were between Huron and the land, and all of them were bare-masted or under working sail as they plied their lines or their nets. Only the vessel furthest out was carrying topsails, and though she was hull down she gave to Mungo's seaman's eye the impression of being a bigger ship than the rest of the fishing fleet. There's a ship for you! " Tippoo exclaimed, touching Mungo's arm to draw his attention and when he swung his glass back towards the land Mungo murmured with pleasure as a square-rigged East Indiaman came into view around the headland that guarded the entrance to Table Bay itself.

She was as splendid a sight as Huron was herself, canvas piled to the sky and her paintwork glearrung in snowy white and Burgundy red, the two lovely ships on reciprocal courses passed each other by two cableslength, the officers eyeing each other through their telescopes with professional interest and appraisal as they paid passing honours.

Robyn was also at Huron's rail, pining towards the land. The proximity of the beautiful ship interested her hardly at all, it was that flat-topped mountain from which she could barely tear her gaze. It was so very close, marking as it did her one hope of succour, her friends there, the British Governor and the Cape Squadron, if they only knew that she was a prisoner aboard this slave ship.

The thought was interrupted by an abrupt movement that she caught from the corner of her eye, strange how receptive she was to Mungo St. John's smallest movement, to his slightest change of expression, and now she saw that he had turned his back on the East Indiaman as she dwindled away astern, and instead he was peering intently over Huron's port side, his expression rapt, his whole body seemed charged with latent energy, and the hands that gripped the barrel of the telescope were ivory knuckled with tension.

Quickly she followed his gaze, and for the first time noticed a tiny shred of white on the horizon that did not fade like the white caps of the waves, but stood constant and bright in the sunlight, though even as she watched it seemed to alter its shape slightly and, was it her imagination, or was it a thin dark wavering line that seemed to appear behind it and spread slowly away in the direction of the wind? Mr. Tippoo, what do you make of that sail?

She heard the timbre of concern and alarm in Mungo St. John's tone, and her heart leapt wildly, with hope and a Judas dread.

For Clinton Codrington it had been a desperate run down the eastern coastline of southern Africa, long days and sleepless nights of unceasing strain, when hope and despair pendulumed against each other. Each shift or change in the wind either alarmed or encouraged him, for it would either aid or hinder the tall clipper ship he was racing to head. The calms elated him, and the revival of the south-easterly prevailing winds sent his spirits plunging.

On the last days there was another worry to plague him. He had burned his coal like a spendthrift on the long thousand-mile run southwards, and his engineer came up on deck, a small red-headed Scot with the grease and coal-dust etched into his skin so that he seemed to be suffering from some debilitating and incurable disease. The stokers" shovels be hitting the bottom of the bunkers already, he told Clinton with mournful relish. "I warned ye, sir, that we'd not make it if you- Burn the ship's furniture if you must, Clinton snapped at him. "You can start with my bunk, I'll not be needing it."

And when the engineer would have argued further Clinton added, "I don't care how you do it, Mr. MacDonald, but I want a full head of steam on your boiler until I reach Cape Point, and another full head of steam when I bring this ship into action."

They raised the Cape Point lighthouse a few minutes after midnight the following night, and Clinton's voice was hoarse with fatigue and relief as he stooped over the voice pipe. Mr. MacDonald, you can let your fires damp down, but keep your furnaces warmed and ready to stoke. When I ask for steam again, I'll need it in a hurry. "You'll be calling at Table Bay to take on fresh bunkers, of course, sir? "I'll let you know when, Clinton promised him, and snapped the lid of the speaking tube closed and straightened up.

The Cape naval base, with all its amenities lay only a few hours steaming away. By dawn he could be filling Black fake with coal and water and fresh vegetables.

However, Clinton knew that within minutes of dropping anchor in Table Bay, Admiral Kemp or one of his representatives would be on his way out to the ship, and Clinton's term of independent command would be over.

He would revert to being a very junior commander, whose recent actions needed a great deal of explanation.

The closer that Clinton drew to Admiralty House, the louder the warnings of Sir John Bannerman rang in his ears, and the more soberly he was forced to review his own position. The excitement of storming Arab barracoons and of seizing slave-laden dhows on the high seas had long ago cooled, and Clinton realized that once he entered it he would not be able to escape again from Table Bay for weeks, or possibly months. It would not even suit his immediate plans to be seen and recognized from the land, for a boat would immediately be sent out by Admiral Kemp to order him in to face judgement and retribution.

Clinton felt not the least trepidation about the Navy's ultimate judgement, he was so- indifferent to the threat hanging over his career that he surprised even himself.

There was only one desire, one object in his mind, that overshadowed all else. He must have his ship in position to intercept Huron as she rounded the Cape, if she had not already done so. Nobody and nothing must prevent him from doing so. After that he would face his accusers with complete equanimity. Huron and Robyn Ballantyne first, beside them all else was pale and insignificant. Mr. Denham, he called his Lieutenant across the dark deck. "We will take up night patrol station ten miles off Cape Point, and I am to be called immediately the lights of any ship are sighted."

As Clinton threw himself down, fully dressed and booted, upon his bunk, he experienced the first peace of mind since leaving Zanzibar harbour. He had done all that was in his power to reach Cape Point ahead of Huron, and now the rest was in the hands of God, and his trust in God was implicit.

He fell asleep almost instantly, and his steward woke him again an hour before dawn. He left the mug of coffee to grow cold beside his bunk and hurried on deck, reaching it a few seconds ahead of Lieutenant Denham. No ships during the night, sir, Ferris, who had the watch, saluted him. Very well, Mr. Ferris, Clinton acknowledged. "We will take up our daylight patrol station immediately."

By the time the light was strong enough for a watcher on the shore to make out any details, Black joke had retreated tactfully below the horizon and it would have taken a sharp eye to pick out the occasional flash of her topsails, let alone to identify the gunboat and to speed a report to Admiral Kemp that his prodigal had returned.

From Black joke's masthead the land was a low irregular distortion Of the horizon, but a ship rounding the Cape would be many miles closer than the land.

Huron's mainmast was almost one hundred and fifty feet tall, her sails would shine like a flaming beacon and as long as the fog did not come down, which was unlikely at this season of the year, Clinton was confident that she could not slip by him.

The only disquiet that scratched him like a burr as he paced his deck, and the gunboat settled down into the regular four-sided box-patterried legs of her patrol, was that Huron had long ago flown northwards on this fine wind that at last bore steadily out of the south-east at almost gale force, and that she was already lost in the endless watery green wastes of the southern Atlantic Ocean, leaving Black joke to guard the gate of an empty cage.

He was not left long to brood, the first sighting was called down to the deck from the look-outs in the crow's nest at the main peak, and Clinton's nerves jumped tight and his expectations flared.

What do you make of her? " he called up through the voice trumpet. Small lugger-" and his expectations plunged. A fishing-boat out of Table Bay, there would be many of them, but each time he could not control the wild surge of excitement when another sail was sighted, so that by nightfall his nerves were ragged, and his body ached with exhaustion as he gave the order for Black joke to take up her inshore patrol station for the night.

Even then be could not rest, for three times during the night he was called from his bunk, and he stumbled owleyed on deck as Black Joke went down to investigate running lights that winked ruby red and emerald green out of the darkness.

C Each time the same leap of expectation, the steeling of nerves for instant orders and swift action, and then the same let down as the lights proved to belong to small trading vessels, and the gunboat sheered away quickly, test she be recognized and her presence off the Cape be reported in Table Bay.

In the dawn, Clinton was on deck again, as the gunboat moved further offshore to take up her daylight patrol station. He was distracted by the sighting reports as his masthead look-out picked up the first sails of the fishing fleet coming out for the day's business, and by the lugubrious report of his coal-stained Scottish engineer.

Ye'll not last out the day, sir, MacDonald told him. Even though I am burning just enough coal to keep the furnace warm, we've not more than a bucket or two left. "Mr. MacDonald, Clinton interrupted him, trying to keep his temper under control and to disguise his exhaustion. "This ship will stay on station until I give the order, I don't care what you burn, but you are to give me steam when I ask for it, or kiss good-bye to the fattest bundle of prize money that will ever come your way."

Despite this brave promise and threat, Clinton's hopes were sinking swiftly. They had been on station for more than a day and a night already, he could not bring himself to believe that he had beaten the swift clipper to the Cape by that margin, not unless she had been somehow miraculously delayed, and every hour increased the certainty that she had run clear away from him, taking her cargo and the woman be loved out of his life for ever.

He knew he should go below to rest, but his cabin was stifling in the rising summer heat, and in it he felt like a trapped animal. He stayed on deck, unable to keep still for more than a few moments at a time, poring over the chart table and fiddling with the navigational instruments before throwing them down and resuming his nervous pacing, shooting quick glances up at the masthead, and then roaming the ship so obviously intent on finding fault or criticizing the ship's running that his officers followed his lanky figure with troubled expressions, while the watch on deck was silent and subdued, not one of them daring to glance in his direction until Clinton's voice rose in a coldly furious cry that froze them all. Mr. Denham, " the Lieutenant almost ran to the summons, "this deck is a pig-sty. What animal is responsible for this filth? " On the white holystoned deck planking was a brown splash of tobacco juice, and Denham stared at it for an instant before wheeling away to bellow a series of orders that had a dozen men scampering. The activity was so intense, the atmosphere electric, as Captain and Lieutenant stood over four men on their knees scrubbing furiously at the offending stain while others carried buckets of sea water and still others rigged the deck pump, that the hail from the masthead was almost ignored, It was left to Ferris to acknowledge it, and to enquire through the voice trumpet, What do you make of her? "She's bull down, but she's a four-masted ship, square rigged-The activity on the deck ceased instantly, every head hfting as the look-out went on elaborating on his sighting. She's on a course to weather the Cape, now she's coming round on to a heading of north-northwest or thereabouts."

Clinton Codrington was the first to move. He snatched the telescope out of Lieutenant Denham's hand and ran to the ratlines. With the telescope tucked in his belt he began to climb, hand over hand.

He went up steadily, never pausing nor faltering, not even when he reached the futtock shrouds and for a few moments hung over backwards one hundred feet above the swaying deck. However, when he reached the crow's nest at the main peak and tumbled into it thankfully, his breath was sawing dryly in his throat and the blood sang in his ears. He had not climbed like that since he had been a midshipman.

The look-out tried to make himself as small as possible, for they were crowded together in the canvas bucket, and he pointed out the ship to his Captain. There she be, sir."

Black joke's roll was emphasized up here on the tall pendulum of the mast, and the horizon swung giddily through the field of Clinton's telescope as he tried to keep it focused. It was an art that he had never completely mastered, but that was of little consequence for the first time the little regular white pyramids popped up in the field of his glass the last doubts were dispelled, and Clinton felt his heart leap fiercely against his ribs.

His voice was strangled with triumphant emotion as he shouted down at the tiny foreshortened figures on the gleaming white quarterdeck far below. Bring her round to due east, Mr. Denham. Order a full head of steam on the boiler-Though he had not yet fully recovered his breath, he threw himself out of the crow's nest and scrambled down faster than he had climbed. In his haste he slid the last fifty feet down the backstay and barely noticed the rough hempen rope scorching the palms of his hands.

By the time his feet hit the deck, Black joke was coming around on to her new heading, and in anticipation of Clinton's next order, Denham had already called the watch below, and they came boiling out on to the deck. And we will clear for action, Mr. Denham, if you please, gasped Clinton, his face dark with blood under his deepwater tan and the sapphire eyes alight with battle lust.

All Black joke's officers carried swords on their belts, only Clinton had selected a cutlass, for he preferred the stouter and heavier weapon, and he fiddled with the hilt even now as he spoke to them quietly and seriously. Gentlemen, I have documented proof that the ship ahead of us has a cargo of slaves aboard her."

Denham coughed nervously and Clinton forestalled him. "I am also aware that she is an American vessel, and in ordinary circumstances we would be helpless to oppose her passage. " Denham nodded with relief, but Clinton went on remorselessly, "However, I have received an appeal from one of Her Majesty's subjects, Dr. Robyn Ballantyne whom you all know well, who is being abducted aboard the Huron against her will. I am certain what my duty is in these circumstances. I intend to board her, and if she resists me, I intend to fight her."

He paused and their faces were shocked, strained. "Those of you who have objections to this course of action should immediately note them in the ship's log, and I will sign them."

Their relief and gratitude was immediate, few other captains would he so lenient.

He. signed his name neatly beneath the entry in the ship's log, and then returned the pen to its holder. Now that the formalities have been seen to, gentlemen, shall we get on with earning our hire? "And Clinton was smiling for the first time since they sailed from Zanzibar harbour as he indicated the pile of snowy white sails that was now clearly visible from the deck ahead of Black joke's bows, and as he spoke there was an eruption of dark tarry-smelling smoke from the tall single stack above them, and the engine telegraph clanged sharply as the pointer moved to "Engine Standing Byposition on the repeater. Black joke had steam in her boiler.

Clinton stepped to the telegraph, thrust the handle fully around the dial to the "Full ahead" position, and the deck vibrated under his feet as the propeller shaft began to spin and Black Joke lunged forward eagerly, breaking the swells off her shoulders in explosions of white spray. By God, he's got us pinned against the land -1 Mungo drawled the words out nonchalantly, even smiling slightly at Tippoo as he lowered the glass from his eye for a moment and polished the Lens on his shirt-sleeve. We'll have to run like the very devil to get round him, and make the open sea. Mr. Tippoo, will you be good enough to shake out every last reef and crack on all the sail we can carry right up to the sky sails? " He lifted the glass to his eye again as Tippoo began bellowing the orders. "It's a little bit too much luck for any one man, " Mungo murmured aloud. "It's too much coincidence that the one man I would not wish to meet be lying in the one place on all the oceans where I would not wish to meet him. " Again he lowered the glass and strode to the poop rail to look down on to the maindeck.

Robyn Ballantyne was at the ship's side, staring out across the indigo blue waters at the sail and the smear of dark smoke, still far out to sea, but every moment converging on them, beaded to a point far ahead of Huron's elegant bows where the courses of the two ships would meet. She sensed Mungo's eyes upon her, and she lifted the shawl off her head so that her dark russet hair tumbled out and snapped and danced around her cheeks.

Her skirts were flattened against her legs by the wind, so that she had to lean slightly forward to balance herself.

She lifted her chin and stared up at Mungo, her expression defiant and she watched him as he carefully bit the end off one of his long thin black cheroots and cupped his hands around the sulphurous flare of the Vesta match and lit the cheroot without once breaking the steady gaze that held her own.

Then he sauntered easily down the poop-ladder to her side. A friend of yours, Doctor Ballantyne? " The smile was on his lips alone. His eyes were frosty. I have prayed every night for him to come. Ever since I sent the letter that summoned him. "You do not deny the betrayal?

"I am proud I was able to perform my Christian duty. "Who carried your letter? "No member of your crew, sir. I sent it by the master of the Omani buggaloo. "I see. " His voice was low, but stinging as dry ice. "And what of Tippoo's illness, would a physician, perchance, stoop to poisoning a patient? " She dropped her eyes, unable to meet that accusation. Will you be so kind, Doctor Ballantyne, as to return to your cabin immediately and stay there until I give you permission to leave it. There will be an armed guard at the door."

I am to be punished? "No man would blame me for dropping you over the side, and leaving you to be picked up by your countrymen. However, it is your safety I am thinking of. This deck could become an unhealthy spot in the very near future, and we will all be too much occupied to care for YOU.

His attention left her, and he was staring ahead, and then glancing back at Black Joke's smoke, judging speeds and angles with a seaman's eye. Then he smiled. Before you go, I would like you to know that all your efforts have really been a fine waste of time, look there! He pointed ahead along the sheer and mountainous coastline, and following his arm she saw for the first time that ahead of them the sea was as black and broken as new coal cut from the face, glittering with wild jumping wavelets, each flecked with pretty white crests. There is the wind, " Mungo said. "That's where it comes through the mountains, and we will be into it before you are safely tucked up in your cabin. " He chuckled now comfortably, confidently. "Once we get on that wind, there are few ships on all the oceans, either steam or sail, that would match Huron for a moment, and God knows, there are none who could run her down. " He gave her a small mocking bow, parody of gracious southern manners. "Take a good look at that ugly little steam packet, before you go, ma'am, you'll not be seeing her again. And now, if you'll be good enough to excuse meHe turned from her and ran lightly back up the poopladder.

Tears of anger dimming her eyes, Robyn clutched the rail and stared across the narrowing strip of sea at the bustlin& puffing little gunboat, already she could catch glimpses of the hull, and its painted chequer-board gunports. She began to hope that Mungo St. John's boast had been mere bravado, for Black Joke seemed to be keeping pace with the tall clipper, the wind was still a long, long way ahead.

There was a respectful touch on Robyn's shoulder, and old Nathaniel stood beside her. Captain's orders, ma. I am, and I am to see you safe in your cabin."

Clinton leaned forward, all his weight on the balls of his feet, almost as though he were trying to urge his ship on by the balance of his body, the way a rider leans forward into the jump. He also had seen the wind pattern on the surface of the sea, and knew what it heralded.

The tall clipper ship looked lazy now, indolent in her flounces and ruffles as a lady of high fashion, and Black Joke was snorting and snuffling busily down the short leg of the triangle. If they both maintained this speed and course they would meet about eleven nautical miles ahead. Clinton could visualize the exact spot clearly just beyond the spit of land marked on his chart as "Bakoven Point'.

Huron was committed to her present course. She could not bear up for the land lay close under her weather rail, and the chart showed breaking shoals well offshore there was one of them now, close on her starboard beam, showing its round black granite back and blowing like a whale. Huron was in a trap, and her only escape would be to find the extra turn of speed which would carry her away out of gunshot range, and there it was, the wind, less than three miles ahead of her.

There was a loud banging from the deck below Clinton's feet and he glanced irritably at Ferris. See what that is, he snapped, and turned his full attention back to the clipper. Three short miles she had to go, but even as Clinton stared at her through his glass he saw her huge square mainsail quiver and then shake gently as she luffed in the flukey airs below the mountains. Please God! " Clinton whispered, and Huron's speed bled off perceptively, all her sails were losing their taut clean shape and she checked away, baulking like a weary animal. She's found a hole in the wind, " Lieutenant Denham called exultantly. "We've got her now, by God! "I'll thank you not to blaspheme on this quarterdeck, Mr. Denham, Clinton told him sharply, and Denham's expression was instantly crestfallen. I beg your pardon, sir. " At that moment Ferris arrived breathlessly back on deck. The stokers, sir, be panted. "They are knocking out all the furniture from the officers" quarters. Your bunk's gone, sir, and your desk also."

Clinton barely glanced at him, he was studying the clipper, evaluating each yard of difference in their speeds, judging as finely as he dared the angle of his interception.

Yes, he decided, with Huron's loss of speed, he could edge in a touch more. Bring her up a point to starboard, he told the helmsman, and then he glanced up at his own sails that were helping the big bronze screws under the stern to hurl Black joke forward. The alteration of course had affected them. Mr. Ferris, see to the trim of your jib, if you please."

Ferris bellowed an order to the foredeck watch, and watched critically as they hardened up the long triangular sail.

All Huron's sails shivered, and then refilled, once more taking on their true shape, and she spurted away, a curl of white sparkling under her bows. The dark windswept water was much closer ahead of her.

It had been Denham's unnecessary blasphemy, Clinton was sure of it, and he glanced darkly at his Lieutenant, and then reluctantly gave the order. Let her fall off a point."

Huron was head-reaching again. If Black joke held on she would be aiming to cut behind the clipper's stern . The alteration was an acknowledgement of the advantage changing hands once again.

The engine voice pipe squealed, and it was a relief to have even the small distraction. Engine room, Captain, " he snapped into the mouthpiece. "Coal long ago gone, sir. Pressure down to 100 pounds, sir, and falling. "Burn everything you can find. "Wood goes up like paper, sir. No body to it, and it chokes the flue. " MacDonald seemed to relish the gloomy news, and Clinton felt his irritation turn to anger. Do your best, man, nobody can ask more than that, and he snapped the voice pipe closed.

Was he close enough yet to try a shot with his bowchaser, he wondered?

The long sixteen-pounder had almost twice the range of the big thirty-two pounders that made up Black joke's main armament. A lucky shot might carry away one of the clipper's spars, might even bring down a yard, and at that moment he distinctly felt the change in the engine vibrations coming up through the deck, Black joke was faltering, the steam in her boilers losing pressure. Mr. Ferris, break out the colours, if you please."

As the Ensign unfurled at the peak, spread gloriously against the pale blue sky, crimson and silky white, shouting a challenge on the wind, Clinton felt that tightness in his chest, that swell of pride which never failed him. Huron's replying, Denham muttered, and Clinton lifted his glass, and watched the American's colours k bloom like a flower high above her shimmering piles of white canvas. And be damned, Denham interpreted the show of colours. Huron was scorning their challenge. Mr. Ferris, we'll give her a gun now, Clinton decided grimly. "Put one over her bows. " And Ferris scrambled away to the bows to supervise the loading and laying of the bow-chaser.

The shot when it came was a puny little pop of sound, muted by the wind and the long spurt of grey powder smoke was whipped-away almost before it could form.

Though they were all watching avidly through the telescopes, not one of them could spot the fall of shot, and Denham spoke aloud for all of them. She's not altering. She's ignoring us. "Very well. " Clinton kept his voice low. "We'll try one into her rigging."

The sixteen-pounder banged again, like an unlatched door in a high wind, and this time they both exclaimed in unison. A pinprick of light appeared in one of the Huron's studding sails, pierced by shot; it held its shape for an instant and then burst like a paper packet and was blown to tatters.

Clinton saw the bustle of Huron's seamen on the decks and yards, and before the bow-chaser could be reloaded, the ruined sail was hauled down and another clean new sail spread open in its place. The speed with which the sail change was made impressed even Clinton. The devil is a good sailor, I'll grant him that-, And then he broke off, for Huron was turning boldly, seeming to aim to cut the gunboat's bows, and Clinton realized what her Captain was doing. He was anticipating the rush of the wind, and as Clinton watched it struck her.

It came roaring aboard the clipper, howling through her rigging, like a pack of hunting wolves, and the tall ship heeled and seemed almost to crouch, gathering herself like a blood stallion feeling the cut of the lash, and then she hurled herself forward and was away.

The dark wind-scoured sea burst open before the long lithe knifing hull, and joyously Huron tossed the dashing white spray over her bows. She's making twenty knots, Denham cried with disbelief, as Black Joke seemed to come up dead in the water, a wallowing log when compared to the swift and lovely ship that cut daringly across her bows, just out of cannon shot, and dashed away into the open Atlantic Ocean.

Through his glass Clinton saw that the seamen who lined Huron's yards were gambolling and waving their caps, mouths wide open and they cheered and jeered, and then he focused the glass on Huron's deck.

There was a tall figure at Huron's near rail, clad in a plain dark blue jacket. Clinton could not make out the man's features at this distance, but he recognized the set of wide shoulders, the arrogant carriage of head, that he had last seen over the sights of a duelling pistol.

The acid bile of hatred rose to scald his throat as the figure lifted a hand in a laconic salute, a taunting gesture of farewell, and then turned away from the rail unhurriedly.

Clinton snapped his telescope closed. stern chase! he ordered.

"We'll keep after her!

He did not dare look at his officers" faces, lest one of them wore an expression of pity.

Lying on her bunk, her arms held stiffly at her sides and hands clenched painfully, Robyn heard the creak and squeal from the deck below her that meant Huron was altering course, and that the eight-inch thick rudderlines were running through their blocks as the helmsmin spun the wheel. It was a sound she had long become accustomed to, and she braced herself instinctively as the rudder lines attached to the panties trained around the enormous wooden rudder under Huron's stern and the ship altered her action through the water.

Seconds later there was a thunderous commotion from the deck above her, the blustering roar of the gale socking into the rigging, the crash of tackle coming up taut, the slam of the great sails as their awesome power was transferred into the hull, and Robyn was almost hurled from her bunk as Huron heeled wildly.

Then the cabin was filled with the exultant tbnlrnming of the bull through water, as though she were the body of a violin as the bow was drawn across the bass strings, and Huron trembled with life, lifting and dropping to the new urgency of her run.

Very faintly Robyn could hear above it all the sound of men cheering. She jumped from the bunk and clutching for handholds crossed the cabin and pounded her fist upon the door. Nathaniel, " she called. "Answer me this instant.

"Captain says as how I'm not to talk to you. " His voice was muffled. You cannot torment me so, " Robyn yelled back. "What is happening? " A long pause while Nathaniel considered his duty and then weighed it against his affection for this spirited young woman. We are on the wind, ma'am, " he told her at last. "And going like all the devils of hell with a crackerjack tied to their tails. "What of Black joke? " she pleaded. "What of the British gunboat? "Ain't nothing will catch us now. Reckon the puffing Billy will be out of sight before nightfall. From here she looks like she's dropped her anchor."

Slowly Robyn leaned forward until her forehead pressed against the planking of the door. She closed her eyes very tightly, and tried to fight down the black waves of despair that threatened to overwhelm her.

She stayed like that for a long time until Nathaniel's voice roused her. It was rough with concern. Are you all right then, missus? "Yes, thank you, Nathaniel. I'm just fine, she replied tightly, without opening her eyes. "I'm going to take a little nap now. Don't let anybody disturb me. "I'll be right here, missus. Ain't nobody going to get past me, he assured her.

She opened her eyes and went back to the bunk, and knelt before it and began to pray, but for once she could not concentrate. jumbled images kept intervening, and, when she closed her eyes, the face of Clinton Codrington was there, with those pale beautiful eyes in the darkly tanned mahogany of his face that accentuated the sun bleached platinum of his hair. She longed for him as she had never done before, he had become a symbol for her that was good and clean and right.

Then her mind darted away and it was that distant mocking smile, the taunting gold-flecked eyes of Mungo St. John. She trembled with humiliation, the man who had violated her and turned her own emotions traitor, who had dallied with her and allowed her to hope, nay, to pray that she could bear his children and become his wife. Her despair turned to hatred once again, and hatred armed her. Forgive me, Lord, I'll pray later, but now I have to do something! " She started to her feet, and the cramped little cabin was a cage, suffocating and unbearable. She hammered her fists on the door and Nathaniel replied immediately. Nathaniel, I cannot bear it in here a moment longer."

she cried. "You must let me out."

His voice was regretful but firm. "Can't do that, missus. Tippoo would have a look at my back boneV She flung away from the door, angry, confused, her mind in a turmoil. I cannot let him carry me away to-" She did not go on, for she could not imagine what awaited her at the end of this voyage unless, and she had a vivid mental image of Huron coming into dock, while standing on the quay was a beautiful tall and aristocratic French woman in crinolines and velvets and pearls with three small sons standing at her side waving up at the tall arrogant figure on Huron's quarterdeck.

She tried to close her mind to it, and she concentrated instead on the sound that Huron made as she bore away joyously on the wind, the drumming of her hull, and the pop and creak of her planking, the clatter of tackle and the stamp of bare feet on her deck as a party of seamen walked away with a fall, training one of the yards more finely to the wind. From beneath her feet came another muted squeal, like a rat in the cat's jaws, as the helmsman made a small-adjustment to Huron's heading, and the rudder tackle ran protestingly through the blocks.

The sound triggered a memory, and Robyn froze, trembling again, but this time with anticipation. She remembered Clinton Codrington describing to her how as a young Lieutenant he had been in command of a cuttingout party sent into a river estuary that was crammed with small slaving craft, buggaloos and dhows. I didn't have enough men to take them all as prize at once, so we jumped from one to the other, cut their rudder lines and left them drifting, helplessly, until we could pick lem up later, those that hadn't gone aground, that is."

Robyn roused herself from the memory and rushed to the corner of her cabin. She had to wedge her back against the bulkhead and push with both her feet to move her wooden chest into the centre of the cabin.

Then she dropped to her hands and knees.

There was a small trap-door in the deck, so neatly fitted that its joints were knife edges, but there was a small iron ring let flush into the woodwork. Once on the long voyage down the Atlantic, she had been disturbed. by a very apologetic carpenter's mate and she had watched with interest while he had dragged her chest aside and opened the hatch, to descend through it with a grease pot.

She tried now to open it, but the hatch was so tightfitting, that it resisted her efforts. She snatched a woollen shawl from her chest, and threaded it through the iron ring. Now she could get a fairer purchase. Once more she strained back, and the hatch moved inchingly and then abruptly flew open with a crash that she was sure must have alerted Nathaniel. She froze again, listening for a half minute, but there was no sound from beyond the cabin door.

On her hands and knees again she peered into the open hatchway. There was a faint breeze of air coming up out of the dark square hole, and she could smell the thick grease, the reek of the bilges and the awful slave stink that not all the lye and scrubbing had been able to cleanse, her gorge rose at the taint. As her eyes adjusted, she made out the low and narrow tunnel that housed Huron's steering gear. It was just high enough for a man to crawl along, running fore and aft along the hull.

The rudder lines came down from the deck above, ran through heavy iron blocks bolted into one of Huron's main frames, and then changed direction and ran directly astern down the narrow wooden tunnel. The pulley wheels of the blocks were caked with black grease, and the rudder lines were of new yellow hemp. They seemed as thick as a man's leg, and she could sense the enormous strain on them, for they were as rigid as steel bars.

She looked around for a means of damaging them, a knife, one of her scalpels, perhaps, and almost immediately realized the futility of anything so puny. Even a strong man with a double-headed axe would be hard pressed to hack his way through those cables, and there was no room in which to swing an axe in that narrow tunnel. Even if a man had succeeded in severing one of them, he would have been cut to bloody tatters as the cable whiplashed.

There was only one means, one sure means, and she quailed at the thought of what would happen if it got out of control, and if Black Joke was not very swiftly alongside to render assistance with her steam-driven pumps and hoses. She had once already rejected the idea of using fire, but now with help so close astern, with the last chance rapidly fading, she was ready to accept any risk.

She reached across and pulled off the wooden bunk one of her grey woollen blankets and wadded it into a bundle, then she stood up and lifted the oil lamp from its gimbals in the deck above her. Her fingers were clumsy with haste as she unscrewed the cap of the oil reservoir in the base of the lamp.

She soaked the blanket, and then looked round for anything else that was inflammable, her journals? No, not them, but she pulled her medical manuals out of the chest and ripped the pages out of them, crumpling them so they would burn more readily, and she made a sack of the oil-soaked blanket and wadded the paper into it.

She stuffed it down the hatch and it fell across the straining rudder lines, and entangled itself in the iron pulleys.

The mattress on the bunk was filled with coir, the dry coconut fibre would burn fiercely; she dragged it off the bunk and pushed it into the hatch. Then the wooden slats off the bunk followed it, then the navigational books from the narrow bookshelf behind the door. She looked about her swiftly, but there was nothing else in the cabin that would burn.

The first Swan Vesta that she dropped burning down the hatchway flickered once and then went out. She tore the end sheet out of her journal and twisted it into a spill, when it was blazing strongly she let it fall into the dark square opening, and as it floated down it illuminated the gloomy recesses of Huron's bilges, and the rough planking of her underbelly.

The burning spill landed on the oil-soaked blanket, and pale blue flames fluttered over it as the evaporating gases flashed off, then a crumpled ball of paper caught and little orange flames peaked up and danced merrily over the blanket and the linen covering of the mattress.

A rush of heat came up through the hatchway, scorching Robyn's cheeks, and the sound of the flames was higher than that of the rushing seas along the outside of the hull.

Using all her strength, Robyn swung the hatch cover over and let it drop back on to its seating with a thump that alarmed her anew, but immediately the sound of the flames was cut off.

Panting with the effort and a savage excitement, Robyn backed away and leaned against the bulkhead to rest. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that the blood in her ears nearly deafened her, and suddenly she was afraid.

What if Black joke had abandoned the unequal contest, and there was nobody to rescue the eight hundred miserable souls chained below Huron's decks before the flames reached them?

That first wild assault of the wind, as it came boiling down off the mountains, had settled to a steady blast, not so furious, but constant and reliable.

There will be no flukes or holes in this gale of wind, Mungo thought with satisfaction, pausing in his pacing to look up at the small scudding wind-torn shreds of cloud that seemed to scrape the tops of his masts, and then turning to survey an indigo Atlantic that stretched to every corner of the horizon, dark with the wind rush and dappled with the prancing white horses that curled from every wave crest.

His leisurely survey ended over Huron's stern rail. The land was already out of sight, so swiftly had Huron run the great flat-topped mountain below the horizon, and Black joke was hull down. Only her topsails showed, not a trace of furnace smoke.

The absence of smoke puzzled Mungo a little and he frowned, considering it, and finding no plausible answer, he shrugged and resumed his pacing. Black Joke would be out of sight, even from Huron's towering masthead, before sunset, and Mungo was planning the evolutions he would make during the night to confuse thoroughly any pursuit, before settling on to his final course to run through the doldrums and cross the equator. Deck, masthead. " A faint hail reached him, breaking his line of thought, and he stopped again, threwback his head and with both hands on his hips stared up at the masthead as it dipped and swung across the sky.

Tippoo answered the hail with a bull bellow, and the look-out's voice was strained, his anxiety evident even against the wind and at that remove. Smoke! "Where away? " Tippoo's voice was angry, the reply should have given both distance and bearing from Huron already every man on Huron's deck was twisting his head to sweep the horizon. Dead astern. "That will be the gunboat, Mungo thought comfortably. "She's got her boiler going again, and much good may it do her. " He dropped his fists from his hips and took one more pace before the look-out's voice rang out again. Smoke dead astern, we are trailing smoke! " Mungo stopped dead in his tracks, his foot still an inch from the deck. He felt the icy spray of fear chill his guts.

Fire! " bellowed Tippoo.

It was the one most dreaded word to men who lived their lives in the tinder hulls of wooden ships, whose seams were caulked with tar and pitch, and whose sails and rigging would burn like straw. Mungo completed that suspended pace, spinning on the ball of his foot as it struck the deck, and the next pace carried him to Huron's rail. He leaned far out, peering back over the stern , and the smoke was a pale wisp, thin as sea fret, lying low against the dark blue sea, drifting away behind them, and dissipating even as he watched it.

Dry oak planks burn with a fine clean flame and little smoke, Mungo knew that, he knew also that the first thing he must do was starve the flames of air, heave the ship to, to reduce the wind of her passage while the extent of the flames could be explored and the ship's pumpsHe turned again, his mouth opening to begin shouting his commands. The quartermaster and his mate stood directly ahead of him, both of them balancing easily before the massive mahogany and brass wheel. Larger than the driving-wheel on a steam locomotive, it required the strength of two men to hold Huron's head in this wind and on this point of sailing, for the huge spread of her canvas was opposed by the massive oak and copper rudder under her stern .

Down in the steering tunnel, the flames were being fed by the strong breeze that the canvas scoops on Huron's foredeck were directing down into her own slave-decks in an attempt to keep them sweet.

The draught forced its way through the companionways and ladderways, through the ports and cracks in Huron's bulkheads, and this steady breeze at last found its way into the long narrow tunnel that housed her steering-gear.

The bright rustling flames were almost smokeless, but intensely hot. They frizzled the loose fibres of hemp off the thick hairy rudder lines, and then swiftly blackened the golden brown cords, began to eat through them so that here a strand parted with a snap that was lost in the rising crackle of burning timbers and the strand unravelled, spinning upon itself and bursting in another tiny new explosion of light.

The two quartermasters were ten feet from where Mungo, stood, poised to give his commands, composing the orders in his head, when suddenly the massive wheel no longer resisted the thrust of the brawny men who held it over.

Deep down in Huron's hull, in the long wooden tunnel that had been turned into a raging blast furnace, the rudder lines had burned through, and as they snapped, they snaked and whipped viciously, smashing through the burning deck timbers, scattering flaming brands into the hold below, and letting in a fresh whistling gush of air that forced the flames higher.

Under the helmsman's hands the wheel dissolved in a spinning blur of glittering brass and the quartermaster was hurled the length of the deck, striking the bulwark with jarring force that dropped him to the planking wriggling feebly as a crushed insect. his mate was less fortunate, his right arm was caught in the polished mahogany spokes of the wheel and it twisted like a strip of rubber, the bone of his forearm breaking up into long sharp splinters whose points thrust out whitely through the tanned skin, and the head of the long humerus bone was plucked from its socket in the scapula and the whole upper arm screwed up in a twist of rubbery flesh.

With the press of the rudder under the stern no longer controlling the rush of Huron's hull through the water, the tremendous pressure of the wind in her sails took over unopposed, and Huron became a giant's weathercock. She spun in almost her own length, her bows flying up into the wind and every man on her deck was hurled to the planking with stunning force.

The yards came crashing about, tackle snapping like cotton, one of the upper yards tearing itself loose, falling in a twisted web of its own canvas and rigging, and Huron was taken full aback, the neat geometrical pyramids of her sails disintegrating into flapping, fluttering chaos, wrapping around the stays and halyards, flogging against their own yards and masts.

With the gale of wind flying fully into the front of the sails, from the diametrically opposite direction to that for which they had been designed, the tall masts flexed and arched dangerously backwards, the backstays; drooping slackly, adding to the confusion of sail and rigging, while all the forestays were humming with unbearable tension, and one of them parted with an ear-laming crack and the foremast shifted a few degrees and then hung askew.

Mungo St. John dragged himself to his feet and clung to the rail. The screams of the maimed helmsman dinning in his ears, he looked, about him, and disbelief turned to bitter despair, as he found his beautiful ship transformed to an ungainly shambles. Wallowing drunkenly, Huron was beginning to make sternway, as the wind pushed her backwards and the waves came tumbling aboard her.

For long seconds Mungo stared about him numbly.

There was so much damage, so much confusion, and so much mortal danger, that he did not know where to begin, what his first order must be. Then over Huron's heaving bows, in the opposite direction to which he had last seen it, the distant but suddenly dreadfully threatening speck that was Black fake's topsails showed in a pale flash above the horizon, and it galvanized Mungo. Mr. Tippoo, Mungo called. We'll reef the mains and send down all her top hamper."

The logical sequence of orders began to arrange themselves in his mind, and his voice was calm and clear, without the strained and panicky timbre they had expected. Mr. O'Brien, go below and give me a fire report, quick as you like. "Bosun, rig port and starboard pumps, and stand by to hose down the fire. "Mr. Tippoo, send a party to batten all her hatches and strike the air scoops. " They must try to prevent air reaching the flames, he was sealing the hull. Coxswain, have the whaler off her davits and launch her. " He would attempt to tow the heavy boat astern, to act as a drogue, a sea-anchor. He was not sure that it would provide a solution, but he intended to work Huron's bows around with the delicate use of her forward sails, and with the drogue holding her tail in place of the rudder, he might be able to run directly before the wind. It was not his optimum course, and it would be fine and dangerous work with the deadly risk of gibing and broaching, but at the least it would give him respite while he rigged the emergency steering tackle to her useless rudder, and get Huron under control once more.

He paused for breath, but once more glanced forward.

Huron was moving rapidly astern, dipping and staggering into the swells so they came flurrying aboard her in spray and solid green gouts of water, while over her bows the British gunboat was closer, so close that Mungo glimpsed a little sliver of her painted hull, and it seemed that her action through the water was more boisterous and cocky, like a game rooster erecting its coxcomb and ruffling its feathers as it bounces across the sandy floor of the cockpit.

Unable to endure the company of his junior officers a moment longer, stifled and filled with a sense of helplessness by his inability to prevent the tall American clipper from romping away from him, desperate for some activity to help his nerves from fraying further, Clinton Codrington had taken his telescope and gone forward into Black joke's bows.

Oblivious to the spray that splattered over him, soaking the thin linen shirt and chilling him so that his teeth chattered even in the brilliant sunlight, Clinton clutched for a hand hold in the ratlines, balancing on the narrow bulwark and staring ahead through eyes that swam not only with the stinging spray and wind, but as much with humiliation and frustration.

Just perceptibly, Huron's tower of canvas was sinking below the irregular watery horizon, by sunset she would be gone. She and Robyn Ballantyne. His chance had come and he had missed it. His spirits could sink no lower.

To add to his suffering, his streaming eyes were playing him false, and what he could still make out of the clipper became distorted, changing shape as he still stared after her. Then the hail from the look-out high above him broke the grip of his despair, Chase is altering! " Clinton could not yet believe the high-pitched shriek from the masthead. "She's coming about! The hail was almost incoherent with excitement and surprise.

Clinton whipped the telescope to his eye, and once again doubted his eyesight. Huron's masts had been almost dead in line, but now they showed individually She was coming about, already Huron was almost broadside, and Clinton stared. For a few moments more the orderly mass of sails retained their perfect snowy shape, and then the pattern began to break up. The ponderous belly of the mainsail wobbled and trembled, then began to flutter and shake like a pennant in the gale, it spilled its wind and collapsed like a bursting paper bag and lashed itself in a petulant fury around its own mast.