"This is where my grandfather Frankie Courtney fought his last battle with the Dutch. Here, they made him prisoner and took him down to Good Hope to perish on the gallows," he told Sarah. "My sacred oath, they were tough old devils those ancestors of mine," he said with pride.



Sarah smiled at him. "Are you suggesting that you are a milk toast and a caitiff when compared with them?" Then she shaded her eyes and peered up at the hillside that rose above the lagoon. "Is that your famous post stone?"



Half-way up the hill a prominent lump of grey stone the size of a hayrick had been painted with a large, lop-sided letter P in scarlet paint, so that it was visible to any ship anchored in the lagoon.



"Oh, take me ashore immediately. I feel certain that there is a letter from Jim awaiting us."



Tom was certain that her hopes were doomed to disappointment, but they rowed to the beach in the longboat. Sarah was first over the side with the water reaching to her thighs and soaking her skirts. Tom had difficulty keeping up with her as she lifted the sodden cloth to her knees and scrambled up the hillside. "Look!" she cried. "Someone has placed a cairn of stones on the summit. That surely is a sign that a letter is waiting for us."



A hollow space had been burrowed out beneath the post stone, and he entrance to it was blocked with smaller ones. She pulled these apart and beyond them she found a bulky parcel. It was stitched up in a wrapper of heavy tarpaulin and sealed with tar.



*t i l knew it! Oh, yes, I knew it," Sarah sang, as she dragged the parcel otn its hiding-place. But when she read the inscription on it her face



fell. Without another word she handed the packet to Tom and started back down the hill.



Tom read the inscription. It was in an ill-formed hand, misspelled and crude: "Hail, you tru and worfy sole who doth this miss if find. Tak it with you to London Town and gif it over to Nicolas Whatt Esquire at 51 Wacker Street close by the East Hindia Dok. He shall gif you a giny for it. Opun not this pa ket Fayle me nefer! If you do so, then I do rot your balls and dam your eyes! May your mannikin never rise, you God forsaken boger!" The message was signed, "Cpt Noah Calder abord the Brig Larkspur out bound for Bombay, 21 May in the year of ow Lord Jassus 1731."



"Words well chosen, and sentiments sweetly expressed." Tom smiled as he replaced the packet in the recess and covered it with the stones. "I am not headed for old London Town, so I will not risk the dire consequences of failure. It must wait for a bolder soul heading in the right direction."



He went down the hill, and half-way to the beach he found Sarah sitting forlornly upon a rock. She turned away as he sat down beside her, and tried to stifle her sobs. He took her face between his big hands and turned it towards him. "No, no, my love. You must not take on so. Our Jim is safe."



"Oh, Tom, I was so sure it was his letter to us, and not that of some oaf of a sailor."



"It was most unlikely that he would come here. Surely he will be heading further north. I do believe he had set upon Nativity. We shall find him there, and little Louisa with him. Mark my words. Nothing can befall our Jim. He is a Courtney, ten feet tall and made from billets of cast iron covered with elephant hide."



She laughed through her tears. "Tom, you silly man, you should be upon the stage." "Even Master Garrick could not afford my fee." He laughed with her. "Come along now, my own sweet girl. There is no profit in pining, and there is work to do if we purpose to sleep ashore this night."



They went back down to the beach, and found that Dorian and his party from the Gift had already come ashore. Mansur was unloading the water casks into the longboat. He would refill them from the sweet water stream that flowed into the top end of the lagoon. Dorian and his men were building shelters on the edge of the forest, weaving frameworks of saplings. They were thatching these with new reeds, fresh cut from the edge of the water. The smell of sweet sap perfumed the air.



After the trying weeks at sea in rough weather the women needed comfortable quarters on dry land in which to recuperate. It was over a



year since the brothers had visited the lagoon on their last trading expedition along the coast. The huts they had built then they had burned to the ground when they sailed, for by now they would have been infested by scorpions, hornets and other unpleasant flying insects and crawling creatures.



There was a brief alarum when they heard a succession of musket shots banging out from the top end of the lagoon, but Dorian reassured them quickly: "I told Mansur to bring us in fresh meat. He must have found game."



When Mansur returned with the refilled water casks, he brought with him the carcass of a half-grown buffalo. Despite its tender age the beast was the size of an ox, enough to feed them all for weeks once it was salted and smoked. Then the other longboat returned from the edge of the channel where Tom had sent five of the crew to catch fish. The bins amidship were filled with sparkling silver mounds, still quivering and twitching.



Sarah and Yasmini set to work at once with their servants to prepare a suitable feast to celebrate their arrival. They ate under the stars, with sparks from the campfire rising into the dark sky in a torrent. After they had eaten their fill, Tom sent for Batula and Kumrah. They came ashore from the anchored ships and took their places, sitting cross-legged on their prayer mats in the circle around the fire.



"I ask your forgiveness for any disrespect," Tom greeted the two captains. "We should have heard the news you bring sooner than this. However, with the need to sail from Good Hope with such despatch, and the gale that assailed us since then, there has been no opportunity."



"It is as you say, effendi," Batula, the senior captain, replied. "We are your men and there was never any disrespect."



The servants brought coffee from the fire in brass kettles, and Dorian and the Arabs lit their hookahs. The water in the bowls bubbled with each breath of the perfumed Turkish tobacco smoke they drew.



First they discussed the trade and the goods that the captains had gathered during their last voyage along this coast. As Arabs they were able to travel where no Christian ship was allowed to pass. They had even sailed on past the Horn of Hormuz into the Red Sea as far as holy Medina, the luminous city of the Prophet.



On their return journey they had parted company, Kumrah in the Maid turning eastwards to call in at the ports of the empire of the Moguls, there to deal with the diamond merchants from the Kollur mines, and to buy bales of silken rugs from the souks of Bombay and Delhi. Meanwhile, Batula sailed along the Coromandel coast and loaded his ship with tea and spices. The two ships met again in the harbour of



Trincomalee in Ceylon. There, they took on board cloves, saffron, coffee beans and choice packets of blue star sapphires. Then, in company, they had returned to Good Hope, to the anchorage off the beach of High Weald.



Batula was able to recite from memory the quantities of each commodity they had purchased, the prices they had paid, and the state of the various markets they had visited.



Tom and Dorian questioned them carefully and exhaustively, while Mansur wrote everything in the CBTC journal. This information was vital to their prosperity: any change in the state and condition of the markets and the supply of goods could spell great profit or, perhaps, even greater disaster to their enterprise.



"The largest profits still lie in the commerce of slaves," Kumrah summed up delicately, and neither captain could meet Tom's eye as he said it. They knew his views on their trade, which he called 'an abomination in the face of God and man'.



Predictably Tom rounded on Kumrah. "The only piece of human flesh I will ever sell is your hairy buttocks to the first man who will pay the five rupees I ask for them."



"Effendi!" cried Kumrah, his expression a Thespian masterpiece: an unlikely mixture of contrition and pained sensibility. "I would rather shave off my beard and feast on pig flesh than buy a single human soul from the slave block."



Tom was about to remind him that slaving had been his chief enterprise before he entered the service of the Courtney brothers, when Dorian, playing the peace-maker, intervened smoothly: "I hunger for news of my old home. Tell me what you have learned of Omani and Muscat, of Lamu and Zanzibar."



"We knew that you would ask us this, so we have saved this news for the last. Those lands have been overtaken by momentous events, al Salil." They turned to Dorian eagerly, grateful to him for having diverted Tom's wrath.



"Good captains, tell us all you have learned," Yasmini demanded. Until now she had sat behind her husband and held her peace as a dutiful Muslim wife should. Now, however, she could restrain herself no longer, for they were speaking of her homeland and her family. Although she and Dorian had fled the Zanzibar coast almost twenty years ago, her thoughts often returned there and her heart hankered for the lost years of her childhood.



It was true indeed that not all of her memories were happy ones. There had been times of loneliness in the isolation of the women's zenana, although she had been born a princess, daughter of Sultan Abd



Muhammad al-Malik, the Caliph of Muscat. Her father had possessed more than fifty wives. He showed interest only in his sons, and could never bother himself to keep track of his daughters. She knew that he was barely aware of her existence, and could not remember any word he had spoken to her, or even a touch of his hand or a kindly glance. In all truth, she had laid eyes on him only on state occasions or when he visited his women in the zenana. Then it had been only at a distance, and she had trembled and covered her face in terror of his magnificence and his godlike presence. Even so she mourned and fasted the full forty days and nights stipulated by the Prophet when news of his death reached her in the African wilderness whence she had fled with Dorian.



Her mother had died in Yasmini's infancy, and she could not remember a single detail about her. As she grew older she learned that she had inherited from her the startling streak of silver hair that divided her own thick midnight black tresses. Yasmini had spent all her childhood in the zenana on Lamu island. The only maternal love she had known was given to her unstintingly by Tahi, the old slave woman who had nursed her and Dorian.



In the beginning Dorian, the adopted son of her own father, was with her in the zenana. This was before he reached his puberty and underwent the ordeal of the circumcision knife. As her adopted elder brother, he protected her, often with his fists and feet from the malice of her blood brothers. Her particular tormentor was Zayn al-Din. When Dorian defended her, he had made a mortal enemy of him; the rancour would persist througout their lives. To this day Yasmini remembered that dire confrontation between the two boys in every detail.



Dorian and Zayn had been only a few months short of puberty, and their departure from the zenana and entry into manhood and military service was looming large. That day Yasmini was playing alone on the terrace of the old saint's tomb, at the end of the zenana gardens. This was one of her secret places where she could escape from the bullying of their peers, and find solace in daydreams and childish games of fantasy. With Yasmini was her pet vervet monkey, Jinni. Zayn al-Din and Abubaker, both her half-brothers, had discovered her there.



Plump, sly and vicious, Zayn was bravest when he had one of his toadies with him. He wrested the little monkey from Yasmini and threw him into the open rainwater cistern. Though Yasmini screamed at the top of her lungs and jumped on his back, pummelling his head and trying to scratch lumps out of his skin, he ignored her and began systematically to drown Jinni, ducking the monkey's head each time he surfaced.



oummoned by Yasmini's screams Dorian came racing up the staircase



from the garden. He took in the scene at a glance, then launched himself at the two bigger boys. Before his capture by the Arabs, his brother Tom had coached Dorian in the art of boxing, but Zayn and Abubaker had never before come into contact with bunched, flying fists. Abubaker fled from this terrible attack, but Zayn's nose burst in a spray of scarlet at the first punch, while the second sent him somersaulting down the steep staircase. When he struck the bottom, one of the bones in his right foot snapped. The bone set ill, and he would limp for the rest of his life.



In the years after he had left behind his childhood and the zenana, Dorian had become a prince in his own right and a famous warrior. Yasmini, however, was forced to remain behind, at the mercy of Kush, the head eunuch. Even after all these years, his monstrous cruelty lived vividly in her memory. Yasmini grew to lovely womanhood while Dorian fought his adopted father's enemies in the Arabian deserts far to the north. Covered in glory he had returned at last to Lamu, but he had almost forgotten his adopted sister and childhood sweetheart. Then Tahi, his ancient slave nurse, had come to him in the palace and reminded him that Yasmini was still languishing in the zenana.



With Tahi as a go-between they had arranged a dangerous tryst. When they became lovers they were committing a double sin from the consequences of which not even Dorian's exalted position could protect them. They were adopted brother and sister and, in the eyes of God, the Caliph and the council of mullahs, their union was both fornication and incest.



Kush had discovered their secret, and planned a punishment for Yasmini so unspeakably cruel that she still shuddered when she thought about it, but Dorian had intervened to save her. He killed Kush and buried him in the grave the eunuch had dug for Yasmini. Then Dorian disguised her as a boy and smuggled her out of the harem. Together they escaped from Lamu.



Many years later, after his father Abd Muhammad al-Malik had died of poisoning, Zayn still limping from the injury Dorian had inflicted ascended the Elephant Throne of Oman. One of his first acts as caliph was to send Abubaker to find and capture Dorian and Yasmini. When Abubaker caught up with the lovers there had been a terrible battle in which Dorian had killed him. Yasmini and Dorian had escaped once again from Zayn's vengeance and been reunited with Tom. However, Zayn al-Din sat on the mighty Elephant Throne to this day, and was still Caliph of Oman. They knew they were never entirely safe from his hatred.



Now, sitting by the campfire on this wild and savage shore, she



reached out to touch Dorian. It was almost as though he had read her thoughts, for he took her hand and held it firmly. She felt strength and courage flowing from him into her like the balmy influence of the kusi, the trade wind of the Indian Ocean.



"Recount!" Dorian ordered his captains. "Tell me these momentous tidings you bring from Muscat. Did you hear aught of the Caliph, Zayn al-Din?"



"Our tidings are all of Zayn al-Din. As Allah bears witness, he is Caliph in Muscat no longer."



"What is this you say?" Dorian started up. "Is Zayn dead at last?"



"Nay, my Prince. A shaitan is hard to kill. Zayn al-Din lives on."



"Where is he, then? We must know all of this affair."



"Forgive me, effendi." Batula made a gesture of deep respect, touching his lips and his heart. "There is one in our present company who knows all this far better than I do. He comes from the bosom of Zayn al-Din, and was once one of his trusted ministers and confidants."



Then he is no friend of mine. His master has tried on many occasions to kill me and my wife. It was Zayn who drove us into exile. He is my mortal enemy, and he has sworn a blood feud against us."



"All this I know well, lord," Batula replied, 'for I have been with you since that happy day when the man who then was Caliph, your sainted adoptive father al-Malik, made me your lance-bearer. Do you forget that I was at your side when you captured Zayn al-Din at the battle of Muscat and you roped him behind your camel and dragged him as a traitor to face the wrath and justice of al-Malik?"



"That I will never forget, as I will not forget your loyalty and service to me over all these years." Dorian's expression became sad. "Pity it is that my father's wrath was so short-lived, and his justice too heavily tempered with mercy. For he pardoned Zayn al-Din and clasped him once again to his bosom."



"By God's Holy Name!" Batula's anger matched that of his master. "Your father died from that show of mercy. It was Zayn's effeminate hand that held the poisoned cup to his lips."



"And Zayn's fat buttocks that sat on the Elephant Throne when my father was gone." Dorian's handsome features were marred by an expression of ferocity. "Now you ask me to accept into my camp the minion and minister of this monster?"



"Not so, Highness. I said that this man was once all those things to Zayn al-Din. But no longer. Like all who know him well, he became sickened to the heart by the monstrous cruelty of Zayn al-Din. He watched while Zayn tore the sinews and the heart of the nation to shreds. He watched helplessly while Zayn fed his pet sharks with the



flesh of good and noble men, until they were almost too bloated to swim. He tried to protest when Zayn sold his birthright to the Sublime Porte, to the Turkish tyrants in Constantinople. In the end he was one of the chief conspirators in the plot against Zayn that overturned his throne and drove him out through the gates of Muscat."



"Zayn is overthrown?" Dorian stared at Batula in astonishment. "He was Caliph for twenty years. I thought he would stay in power until he died of old age."



"Some men of great evil possess not only the savagery of the wolf but also that beast's instincts of survival. This man, Kadem al-Juri, will tell you the rest of the story if you will allow it."



Dorian glanced at Tom, who had been following every word with intense interest. "What do you think, brother?"



"Let us hear the man's story," Tom said.



Kadem al-Juri must have been awaiting their summons for he came within minutes from the crew's encampment at the edge of the forest. They all realized that they had seen him often during the stormy voyage up from Good Hope. Although they had not known his name, they had understood that he was Batula's newly hired writer and purser.



"Kadem al-Juri?" Dorian greeted him. "You are a guest in my camp. You are under my protection."



"Your beneficence lights my life like the sunrise, Prince al-Salil ibn al-Malik." Kadem prostrated himself before Dorian. "May the peace of God and the love of his last true Prophet follow you all the days of your long and illustrious life."



"It is many years since any man has called me by that title." Dorian nodded, gratified. "Rise up, Kadem, and take a place in our council." Kadem sat beside Batula, his sponsor. The servants brought him coffee in a silver cup and Batula passed him the ivory mouthpiece of his pipe. Both Dorian and Tom studied the new man carefully while he enjoyed these expressions of hospitality and favour.



Kadem al-Juri was young, no more than a few years older than Mansur. He had a noble face. His features reminded Dorian of his own adoptive father. Of course, it was not impossible that he was a royal bastard. The Caliph had been a man indeed, and prolific with his seed. He had ploughed and sowed wherever the ground pleased him.



Dorian smiled faintly, then put aside the thought, and once more regarded Kadem with his full attention. His skin was the colour of fine polished teak. His brow was deep and wide, his eyes clear, dark and penetrating. He returned Dorian's scrutiny calmly and, despite his protestations of loyalty and respect, Dorian thought he recognized in his gaze the disconcerting gleam of the zealot. This is a man who lives by



the Word of Allah alone, he thought. Here is one who places scant value in the law and opinions of men. He knew well how dangerous such men could be. While he composed his next question he looked at Kadem's hands. There were telltale calluses on his fingers and his right calm. He recognized these as the stigmata of the warrior, the gall of bowstring and sword hilt. He looked again at his shoulders and arms and saw the development of muscle and sinew that could only have been built up during long hours of practice with bow and blade. Dorian let none of these thoughts show in his own eyes as he asked gravely, "You were in the service of Caliph Zayn al-Dini"



"Since childhood, Lord. I was an orphan and he took me under his protection."



"You swore a blood oath of loyalty to him," Dorian insisted. For the first time Kadem's steady gaze shifted slightly. He did not reply. "Yet you have reneged on this oath," Dorian persisted. "Batula tells me you are no longer the Caliph's man. Is that true?"



"Your Highness, I swore that oath nearly twelve years ago, on the day of my circumcision. In those days I was a man in name only, but in reality I was a mere child and a stranger to the truth."



"And now I can see that you have become a man." Dorian went on appraising him. Kadem was supposedly a writer, a man of papers and ink, but he did not have that look. There was a latent fierceness about him, like a falcon at roost. Dorian was intrigued. He went on, "But, Kadem al-Juri, does this release you from a blood oath of fealty?"



"My lord, I believe that fealty is a dagger with two edges. He who accepts it has a responsibility towards he who offers it. If he neglects that duty and responsibility, then the debt is cancelled."



"These are devious semantics, Kadem. I find them too convoluted to fathom. To me an oath is an oath."



"My lord condemns me?" Kadem's voice was silky, but his eyes were cold as obsidian.



"Nay, Kadem al-Juri. I leave judgement and condemnation to God."



"Bismallahl' Kadem intoned, and Batula and Kumrah stirred.



There is no God, but God," said Batula.



"God's wisdom surpasses all understanding," said Kumrah.



Kadem whispered, "Yet I know that Zayn al-Din is your blood enemy. That is why I come to you, al-Salil."



Yes, Zayn is my adopted brother and my enemy. Many years ago he swore to kill me. Many times since then I have felt his baleful influence touch my life," Dorian agreed.



I nave heard him relate to his courtiers how he owes his crippled foot to you," Kadem went on.



"He owes me much else besides." Dorian smiled. "I had the great pleasure of placing a rope around his neck and dragging him before our father to face the Caliph's wrath."



"Posterity and Zayn al-Din remember this deed of yours well." Kadem nodded. "This is part of the reason that we chose to come to you."



"Before it was "I", but now it is "we"?"



"There are others who have repudiated their oaths of fealty to Zayn al-Din. We turn to you, for you are the last of the line of Abd Muhammad al-Malik."



"How is that possible?" Dorian demanded, and suddenly he was angry. "My father had countless wives who bore him sons, and they in turn had sons and grandsons. My father's seed was fruitful."



"Fruitful no longer. Zayn has harvested all his father's fruits. On the first day of Ramadan there was such a slaughter as to shame the Face of God and astound all Islam. Two hundred of your brothers and nephews were gathered up by Zayn al-Din's reapers. They died by poison, that coward's tool, and they died by steel and rope and water. Their blood soaked the desert sands and tinted the sea to rose. Every person who had a blood claim to the Elephant Throne in Muscat perished in that holy month. Murder was compounded ten thousand times by sacrilege."



Dorian stared at him in horrified disbelief, and Yasmini choked back her sobs: her brothers and other kin must be among the dead. Dorian put aside his own shocked grief to comfort her. He stroked the silver blaze that shone like a diadem in her sable locks, and whispered softly to her before he turned back to Kadem. "This is hard news and bitter," he said. "It takes great effort for the mind to encompass such evil."



"My lord, neither were we able to treat with such monstrous evil. That is why we repudiated our vows and rose up against Zayn al-Din."



"There has been a rising?" Although Batula had already warned him of this, Dorian wanted Kadem to confirm it: all this seemed too far beyond the frontiers of possibility.



"A battle raged within the walls of the city for many days. Zayn al Din and his adherents were driven into the keep of the fort. We believed that they would perish there but, alas, there was a secret tunnel under the walls that led down to the old harbour. Zayn escaped by this route, and his ships bore him away."



"Whither did he flee?" Dorian demanded.



"He sailed back to his birthplace on Lamu island. With the help of the Portuguese and the collusion of the minions of the English East India Company at Zanzibar, he has seized the great fort and all the Omani settlements and possessions along the Fever Coast. Under the



threat of the English guns his forces in those possessions have remained loyal to him, and have resisted our efforts to cast down the tyrant."



"In God's name, you and your junta in Muscat must be preparing your fleet to exploit these successes and to attack Zayn in Zanzibar and Lamu, is that not so?" Dorian demanded.



"My lord prince, our ranks are riven by dissent. There is no successor of royal blood to head our junta. Thus we lack loyal support from the Omani nation. In particular the desert tribes are hesitating to declare against Zayn and join our standard."



Dorian's expression became wooden and remote as he realized where Kadem's protestations were heading.



"Without a leader our cause grows weaker and more divided each day, while each day Zayn regains his stature and strength. He commands the Zanzibar coast. We have learned that he has sent envoys to the Great Mogul, the Supreme Emperor in Delhi, and to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople. His old allies are rallying to support him. Soon all of Islam and Christendom will unite against us. Our victory will drain away into the sands, like the ebb of the spring tide."



"What do you want from me, Kadem al-Juri?" Dorian asked softly.



"We need a leader with a rightful claim to the Elephant Throne," Kadem replied. "We need a tried warrior who has commanded the desert tribes in battle: the Saar, the Dahm and the Karab, the Bait Kathir and the Awamir, but most of all the Harasis who hold within their sway the plains of Muscat. Without these there can be no ultimate victory."



Dorian sat quietly but his heart had beaten faster as Kadem recited those illustrious names. In his mind's eye he saw again the battle array, the glint of steel in the dust clouds and the banners unfurled. He heard the war-cries of the riders, "Allah Akbar! God is great!" and the roaring of the ranks of camels racing onwards across the sands of Oman.



Yasmini felt his arm tremble under her hand, and her heart quailed. I believed in my heart that the dark days were past for ever, she thought, that I might never again hear the beat of the war drums. I hoped that my husband would always stay beside me and never again ride away to war.



The company was silent, each of them thinking their own thoughts. Kadem was watching Dorian with that glittering, compulsive stare.



Dorian shook himself back to the present. "Do you know these things are true?" he asked. "Or are they merely the dreams born of desire?"



Kadem answered straight, without lowering his eyes: "We have been m council with the desert sheikhs. They who are often divided all speak with a single voice. They say, "Let al-Salil take his place at the head of our armies, and we will follow wherever he leads."



Dorian stood up abruptly and left the circle around the campfire. None of the others followed him, neither Tom nor Yasmini. He paced along the edge of the water, a romantic figure in his robes, tall and shining in the moonlight.



Tom and Sarah whispered together, but the others were silent.



"You must not let him go," Sarah told Tom quietly, 'for Yasmini's sake and ours. You lost him once. You cannot let him go again."



"And yet I cannot stop him. This is between Dorian and his God."



Batula packed fresh tobacco in the bowl of the hookah, and it was almost consumed to ash before Dorian came back to the fire. He sat cross-legged with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in both hands, staring into the leaping flames.



"My lord," Kadem whispered, 'give me your answer. With the trade winds standing fair, if you sail at once you can mount the Elephant Throne in Muscat at the beginning of the Feast of Lights. There can be no more propitious day than that to begin your reign as Caliph."



Dorian was silent still, and Kadem went on his tone was not wheedling, but strong and sure of his purpose: "Your Highness, if you return to Muscat, the mullahs will declare jihad, a holy war, against the tyrant. God and all of Oman will be at your back. You cannot turn aside from your destiny."



Dorian raised his head slowly. Yasmini drew a long slow breath and held it. Her nails sank into the hard muscles of his forearm.



"Kadem al-Juri," Dorian replied, 'this is a terrible decision. I cannot make it alone. I must pray for guidance."



Kadem fell forward, prostrating himself on the sand before Dorian. His arms and legs were spread wide. "God is great!" he said. "There can be no victory without His benevolence. I shall wait for your answer."



"I will give it to you tomorrow night at this same time and place."



Yasmini let out her breath slowly. She knew that this was only a reprieve, and not a pardon.



Early the next day Tom and Sarah climbed to the top of the grey rocks that guarded the entrance to the lagoon, and found a sheltered nook out of the wind but full in the sun. The Ocean of the Indies was spread beneath them, raked with creamy furrows. A sea bird used the wind to hang like a kite above the green waters. Suddenly it folded its wings and plunged from on high, hitting the surface with a tiny splash, rising again almost immediately with a silver fish wriggling in its beak. On the rocks above where they lay, the



hvrax sat in the sun, rabbity brown balls of fluff watching them with huge, curious eyes.



"I want to have serious speech with you," Sarah said.



Tom rolled on to his back and locked his fingers behind his head, grinning at her. "Fool that I am, I thought you had brought me here to have your wicked way with me, to ravish my tender flesh."



Tom Courtney, will you never be serious?"



"Aye, lass, that I will, and I thank you for the invitation." He reached for her, but she struck away his hand.



"I warn you, I shall scream."



"I will cease and desist, for the moment at least. What is it that you wanted to discuss with me?"



"Tis Dorry and Yassie."



"Why does this not come as any great surprise to me?"



"Yassie is sure that he will sail to Muscat to take up the offer of the throne."



"I am sure she would not hate the thought of becoming a queen. What woman would?"



"It will destroy her life. She explained it all to me. You can have no conception of the intrigues and conspiracies that surround an Oriental court."



"Can I not?" He raised an eyebrow. "I have lived twenty years with you, my heart, which has given me good training."



She went on as though he had not spoken: "You are the elder brother. You must forbid him to leave. This offer of the Elephant Throne is a poisoned gift, which will destroy them and us also."



"Sarah Courtney, you do not truly believe that I would forbid Dorian anything? It is a decision that only he can make."



"You will lose him again, Tom. Do you not remember how it was when he was sold into slavery? How you thought he was dead, and part of you died with him?"



"I remember it well. But this is not slavery and death. It's a crown and power unbounded."



"I think you begin to relish the thought of him going," she accused him.



Tom sat up quickly. "No, woman! He is blood of my blood. I want only what is best for him."



"You think this may be best?"



It was the life and the destiny for which he was trained. He has become a trader with me, but I have known all along that his heart is not truly in our enterprise. For me it is meat and wine, but Dorry hankers after more than we have here. Have you not heard him speak



of his adoptive father and the days when he commanded the army of Oman? Do you not sometimes see the regret and longing in his eyes?"



"Tom, you look for signs that are not there," Sarah protested.



"You know me well, my love." He paused, then went on, "It is my nature to dominate those around me. Even you."



She laughed, a gay pretty sound. "You do try, I grant you that."



"I try with Dorry too, and with him I succeed better than I do with you. He is my dutiful younger brother, and over all these years I have treated him like that. Perhaps this summons to Muscat is what he has been waiting for."



"You will lose him again," she repeated.



"No, there will be only a little water between us, and I have a fast ship." He lay back in the grass and pulled his hat down over his eyes to shield them from the sun. "Besides, it will not be bad for business to have a brother able to issue licences for my ships to trade in all the forbidden ports of the Orient."



"Tom Courtney, you mercenary monster. I do truly hate you." She leaped on him and pummelled his chest with clenched fists. He rolled her easily on to her back in the grass and lifted her skirts away from her legs. They were still strong and shapely as those of a girl. She crossed them firmly.



"Sarah Courtney, show me how much you really hate me." He held her down with one hand while he unbuckled his belt.



"Stop this at once, you lecherous knave. They're watching us." She struggled but not too hard.



"Who?" he asked.



"Them!" She pointed at the ring of staring rock rabbits.



"Boo!" Tom shouted at them, and they shot down the entrances to | their burrows. "They aren't watching now!" said he.



Sarah uncrossed her legs.



The gathering at the campfire that night was solemn and fraught with uncertainty and anxiety. No one in the family knew what Dorian had decided. Yasmini, sitting beside her husband, answered the silent question that Sarah flashed to her across the fire lit circle with a resigned lift of her shoulders.



Tom alone was determinedly cheerful. While they ate grilled fish with chunks of new baked bread, he retold the story of their grandfather Francis Courtney, and the capture of the Dutch East India galleon off



Cape Agulhas nearly sixty years before. He explained to them where Francis had hidden his booty, in a cave up at the head waters of the stream that ran into the lagoon, near where Mansur had shot the buffalo the previous day. Then he laughed as he pointed out the trenches and overgrown excavations all around their encampment that the Dutch had dug in their efforts to find and retrieve the plundered treasure. "While they sweated and swore, our own father, Hal Courtney, had spirited away the booty long before," he told them, but they had heard the story often enough not to be amazed by it. In the end even Tom was defeated by the silence, and instead of regaling them further he addressed himself to the bowl of spiced buffalo stew that the women had served after the fish.



Dorian ate little. Before the silver coffee-pot was brought from its cradle over the coals he told Tom, "If you agree, brother, I will speak to Kadem now and give him my decision."



"Aye, Dorry," Tom agreed. "Twould be best to have done with the whole business. The ladies have been sitting on a nest of ants since yesterday." He shouted for Batula. "Tell Kadem he might join our council, if he has a mind."



Kadem came striding down the beach. He walked like a desert warrior, lithe and long-limbed, and prostrated himself before Dorian.



Mansur leaned forward eagerly. He and Dorian had left the camp earlier that day and passed many hours alone together in the forest. Only they knew what they had discussed. Yasmini looked at her son's shining face and her heart sank. He is so young and beautiful, she thought, so bright and strong. Of course he pines for such an adventure as he sees here. He knows only the ballad singers' romantic vision of battle. He dreams of glory, power and a throne. For, depending on the choice Dorian makes this evening, the Elephant Throne of Oman might one day be his.



She drew the veil over her face to hide her fears. My son does not understand what pain and suffering the crown will bring him all the days of his life. He knows nothing of the poison cup and the assassin's blade. He does not understand that the caliphate is a slavery more oppressive than the chains of the galley slave or those of the worker in the copper mines of Monomatapa.



Her thoughts were interrupted when Kadem greeted Dorian. The rrophet's blessing upon you, Majesty, and the peace of God. May he bless our undertakings."



It: 1S eary to sPeak of Majesty, Kadem al-Juri," Dorian cautioned him. Wait rather until you have heard my decision."



Your decision has already been made for you by the prophet and



saint Mullah al-Allama. He died in his ninety-ninth year, in the mosque on Lamu island, praising God with his last breath."



"I did not know he was dead," Dorian said sadly, 'though, in all truth, at that venerable age it could not have been otherwise. He was a holy man indeed. I knew him well. It was his hand that circumcised me. He was my wise councillor, and a second father to me."



"In his last days he thought of you, and made a prophecy."



Dorian inclined his head. "You may recite the words of the holy mullah."



Kadem had the gift of rhetoric, and his voice was strong but pleasing. "The orphan from the sea, he who won the Elephant for his father, shall sit upon its back when the father has passed, and he shall wear a crown of red gold." Kadem spread his arms. "Majesty, the orphan of the prophecy can mean no other than you. For you are crowned now in red gold, and you were the victor of the battle that gave the Elephant Throne to your adoptive father, Caliph Abd Muhammad al-Malik."



A long silence followed his ringing speech, and Kadem stood with arms outspread like the Prophet himself.



Dorian broke the silence at last. "I have heard your pleas, and I will give you my decision that you must take back to the sheikhs of Oman. But first I must tell you how I have reached it."



Dorian placed his hand upon Mansur's shoulder. "This is my son, my only son. My decision touches him deeply. He and I have discussed it in every detail. His fierce young heart is hot for the enterprise, just as mine was at the same age. He has urged me to accept the invitation of the sheikhs."



"Your son is wise far beyond his years," said Kadem. "If it please Allah, he shall rule in Muscat after you."



"BismalWi!" cried Batula and Kumrah together.



"If God pleases!" cried Mansur in Arabic, his expression rapt with joy.



Dorian held up his right hand, and they fell silent again. There is another who is touched deeply by my decision." He took Yasmini's hand. "The Princess Yasmini has been my companion and my wife all these years, from childhood to this day. I swore an oath to her long ago, a blood oath." He turned to her. "Do you remember my marriage vows to you?"



"I remember, my lord husband," she said softly, 'but I thought you might have forgotten."



"I swore two vows to you. The first was that, even though the law ana the prophets allow it, I would take no other wife than you. I have kept that vow."



Yasmini was not able to speak, but she nodded. At the movement a



tear that trembled on her long eyelashes detached itself and splashed upon the silk that covered her bosom, leaving a wet stain.



The second oath I swore that day was that I would not cause you pain if it was in my power to prevent it." Yasmini nodded again.



"Let all of you here present know that if I were to take up the invitation of the sheikhs to the Elephant Throne, it would cause the Princess Yasmini pain more poignant than the pain of death itself."



The silence drew out, tingling, in the night, like the threat of summer thunder. Dorian stood up and spread his arms. This is my reply. May God hear my words. May the holy prophets of Islam bear witness to my oath."



Tom was amazed by the transformation that had overtaken his younger brother. Now he looked like a king indeed. But Dorian's next words shattered that illusion. Tell them that my love and admiration is with them still, as it was at the battle of Muscat and every day since then. Despite this, the burden they would place upon me is too heavy for my heart and my shoulders. They must find another for the Elephant Throne. I cannot take up the caliphate and keep true to my oath to the Princess Yasmini."



Mansur gave a small involuntary cry of distress. He leaped to his feet and ran into the night. Tom jumped up and might have chased after him had not Dorian shaken his head. "Let him go, brother. His disappointment is sharp, but it will pass." He sat down again and turned to smile at Yasmini. An expression of adoration shone upon her lovely face. "I have kept both my oaths to you," Dorian said.



"My lord!" she whispered. "My own heart."



Kadem stood up again, his face expressionless. He bowed deeply to Dorian. "As my prince commands," he agreed softly. "Would that I could call you "Majesty". It saddens me, but that is not to be. God's will be done." He turned and strode away into the darkness, heading in the opposite direction to that taken by Mansur.



It was the time of the evening prayers and the man who called himself Kadem al-Juri performed his ritual ablutions in the salt waters of the lagoon. Once he was cleansed, he climbed to a high place on the rocks above the ocean. He spread his prayer mat, recited the first prayer and made the first prostration.



For once neither the act of worship nor submission to the will of God could calm the anger that seethed within him. It required all his self iscipline and dedication to complete the prayers without letting his



unruly emotions mar them. When he had finished, he built a small fire from the faggot of wood he had gathered on the way up the hill. When it was burning brightly Kadem sat cross-legged on the mat in front of it and gazed through the curtain of shimmering heat at the glowing wood.



Rocking slightly, as though he were riding a racing camel across the desert, he recited the twelve mystical sura of the Qur'an, and waited for the voices. They had been with him since childhood, since the day of his circumcision. Always they came to him clearly after praying or fasting. He knew they were the voices of God's angels and of his prophets. The first to speak was the one he dreaded most.



"You have failed in your task." He recognized the voice of Gabriel, the avenging archangel, and quailed before the accusation.



"Highest of the high, it was not possible that al-Salil could spurn the bait that was so carefully prepared for him," he murmured.



"Hear me, Kadem ibn Abubaker," said the angel. "It was your overweening pride that led you into failure. You were too certain of your own powers."



The angel used his true name, for Kadem was the son of Pasha Abubaker, the general Dorian had slain in the battle on the banks of the river Lunga twenty years before.



Pasha Abubaker had been the half-brother and boon companion of Zayn al-Din, the Caliph of Oman. They had grown up together in the zenana on Lamu island, and it was there that their destinies had first become entangled with those of Dorian and Yasmini.



Much later, in the palace at Muscat, when their royal father was dead and Zayn al-Din was caliph, he had appointed Abubaker supreme military commander and a Pasha in the service of the caliphate. Then he had sent Abubaker with his army to Africa to hunt down and capture Dorian and Yasmini, the incestuous runaway couple.



At the head of his cavalry squadrons Abubaker had caught up with them as they were trying to escape down the river Lunga and reach the open sea in Tom's tiny ship, the Swallow. Abubaker had attacked them while they were stranded on the sandbar at the mouth of the river. The battle was fierce and bloody, with Abubaker's cavalry squadrons charging through the shallows. But the ship had been armed with cannon and Dorian had touched off the blast of grape-shot that blew off Pasha Abubaker's head and drove off his troops in disarray.



Although Kadem had been an infant at the time of his father's death, Zayn al-Din had taken him under his protection and shown him the favour and preference he offered his own sons rather than treating him as a nephew. In doing so he made Kadem his liege man, his blood bondsman. He fettered him with chains of steel that could never be



broken. Despite what Kadem had told Dorian at the campfire, the strength of his oath to Zayn al-Din was matched only by his awareness of his duty to take vengeance on the man who had slain his father. This was a holy duty, a blood feud imposed on him by God and his own conscience.



Zayn al-Din, who loved few men, loved Kadem, his nephew. He kept him close, and when he became a true warrior he made him the commander of the royal bodyguard. Only Kadem, of the possible heirs to the caliphate, was spared from the Ramadan massacre. During the uprising that followed, Kadem had fought like a lion to protect his caliph, and in the end it was Kadem who had led Zayn al-Din through the maze of underground passages, under the palace walls to the ship waiting in the harbour of Muscat. He had carried his master safely to the palace on Lamu island off the Fever Coast.



Kadem was the general who had overwhelmed the forts along the coast that attempted to rise in support of the revolutionary junta in Muscat. Kadem had negotiated the alliance with the English consul in Zanzibar, and Kadem had urged his master to send envoys to Constantinople and Delhi to garner support. During these campaigns along the Fever Coast, Kadem had captured most of the leaders of the factions who opposed Zayn. As a matter of course, the prisoners were handed over to his inquisitors so that they could extract from them all the information and intelligence they could.



In this way, by the intelligent and judicious application of the bastinado, the screw and the garotte, the inquisitors dredged up a precious gem: the whereabouts of al-Salil, the murderer of Pasha Abubaker and the sworn blood enemy of the Caliph.



Armed with this knowledge, Kadem pleaded with Zayn al-Din to allow him to be the instrument of retribution. Zayn consented, and Kadem would entrust his sacred duty to none of his underlings. He alone devised the stratagem of luring al-Salil into the Caliph's realm and power by impersonating an envoy of the rebel junta who still held the capital city of Muscat.



When Kadem revealed his plan to Zayn al-Din, the Caliph was delighted and gave the enterprise his blessing. He promised Kadem the title of pasha, like his father before him, and any other reward Kadem could ask for, if he succeeded in bringing al-Salil and his incestuous wife las mini back to Lamu island to face his wrath and retribution. Kadem asked only one reward; that when the time came for al-Salil to die, Kadem should be given the honour of strangling him with his own hands. He promised Zayn that the ga rotting would be slow and agonizing. Zayn smiled and granted this boon also.



Kadem had learned from the inquisitors that the trading ship, Gift of Allah, which called often at the ports of the Fever Coast, belonged to al-Salil. When next it arrived in the port of Zanzibar Kadem inveigled himself into the confidences of Batula, al-Salil's old lance-bearer. Kadem's plot had unfurled smoothly, until now, with the prize almost within his grasp, when he had been thwarted by al-Salil's unfathomable refusal to accept the lure. Now Kadem had to answer the accusation of God's angel.



"Highest of the high, I have indeed committed the sin of pride." Kadem made the sign of penitence by wiping his face with open hands, as though washing away the sin.



"You believed that without divine intervention, you alone could bring the sinner to justice. This was vanity and foolishness."



The accusations thundered in his head until it felt that his eardrums must burst. Kadem bore the pain stoically. "Merciful one, it did not seem possible that any mortal man could spurn the offer of a throne." Kadem prostrated himself before the fire and the angel. "Tell me what I should do to make amends for my arrogance and stupidity. Command me, O highest of the high."



There was no reply. The only sounds were the crashing of the high surf on the rocks below and the mewing of the gulls as they circled overhead.



"Speak to me, holy Gabriel," Kadem pleaded. "Do not desert me now, not after all these years when I have done as you commanded." He drew the curved dagger from his belt. It was a magnificent weapon. The blade was of Damascus steel and the hilt was rhinoceros horn covered with pure gold filigree. Kadem pressed the point of the blade into the ball of his own thumb, and blood flowed out.



"Allah! Allah!" he cried. "With this blood I entreat you, give me guidance."



Only then, through his pain, the other voice spoke, not the thunder of Gabriel but calm and measured, melodious. Kadem knew that this was the very voice of the Prophet, terrible in its quiet simplicity. He trembled and listened.



"You are fortunate, Kadem ibn Abubaker," said the Prophet, 'for I have listened to your confession and been moved by your cries. I will allow you one last chance of redemption."



Kadem threw himself down on his face, not daring to answer that voice. It spoke again. "Kadem ibn Abubaker! You must wash your hands in the heart blood of the murderer of your father, the traitor and heretic, the sinner who wallows in incest, al-Salil."



Kadem beat his head against the earth, weeping for joy at the mercy



the Prophet had shown him. Then he sat back on his heels and held up his hand with fingers and thumb spread. The blood still dribbled from the self-inflicted wound. "God is great," he whispered. "Show me a mark of your favour, I beseech you." He stretched out his hand and held it in the leaping flames, which engulfed it. "Allah!" he chanted. The One!



The Only!"



In the flames the flow of bright blood shrivelled and dried. Then miraculously the wound closed like the tentacled mouth of a sea anemone. His flesh healed before his eyes.



He lifted his hand out of the flames, still chanting God's praises, and held it aloft. There was no mark where the wound had been. There was no redness or blistering from the flames. His skin was smooth and flawless. It was the sign he had asked for.



"God is great!" he exulted. "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his last true Prophet!"



An they had eaten the evening meal with the rest of the family, Dorian and Yasmini took their leave. Yasmini embraced Sarah first, then her own son, Mansur. She kissed his eyes and stroked his hair, which gleamed in the firelight like molten copper poured from the melting pot.



Tom hugged Dorian so hard that his ribs creaked. "Damn my eyes, Dorian Courtney, I thought we had got rid of you at last, and could pack you off to Oman."



Dorian hugged him back. "Are you not the unlucky one? I will be here to plague you for a while yet."



Though Mansur embraced his father briefly, he did not speak or look into his eyes, and the line of his lips was hard with bitter disappointment. Dorian shook his head sadly. He knew that Mansur had set his heart on glory, and his own father had snatched it from him. The pain was still too intense to be assuaged by words. Dorian would console him later.



Dorian and Yasmini left the campfire, and started down the beach together. As soon as they were out of the ruddy light of the flames Dorian placed his arm round her. They did not speak, for they had said it all. The physical contact expressed their love more than words ever could. At the turning of the sandbar, where the deeper channel ran close in to the beach, Dorian stripped off his robes and unwound his turban. He handed his clothing to Yasmini and waded naked into the water. The tide was flowing strongly between the rocky heads and the water was chilled with



the memory of the open ocean. Dorian dived into the deep channel and surfaced again, gasping and snorting with the cold.



Yasmini sat on the sandbar and watched him. She did not share his love of cold water. She held his clothes in a bundle, then almost stealthily buried her face in them. She inhaled the masculine odour of her husband and delighted in it. Even after all these years she had never tired of it. The smell of him made her feel safe and secure. Dorian always smiled when she picked up the discarded robe he had worn all day and donned it in preference to her nightdress.



"I would wear your skin if it were possible," she replied seriously to his gentle teasing. "This way I can be close to you, part of your raiment, part of your body."



At last Dorian waded ashore. The phosphorescence of the tiny plankton in the lagoon sparkled upon his body, and Yasmini exclaimed with delight. "Even nature decks you in diamonds. God loves you, al Salil, but not as much as I do."



He stooped over her, kissed her with salty lips, took his turban from her and used it to dry himself. Then he wound it round his waist as a loincloth, and let his long wet hair hang down his back.



"This night breeze will finish the job before we reach our hut," he told her, and they walked back along the sand to the encampment. The sentry greeted them and called a blessing as they passed the watch fire Their own hut was well separated from that of Tom and Sarah. Mansur preferred to sleep with the ship's officers and the men.



Dorian lit the lanterns, and Yasmini carried one when she went behind the screen at the far end of the room. She had furnished the hut with Persian carpets, silk draperies, silk mattresses and cushions filled with wild-goose down. Dorian heard the purl of water from the jug into the basin, and Yasmini hummed and sang softly as she washed. Dorian felt his loins stir: this was Yasmini's prelude to lovemaking. He threw his robe and damp turban aside and stretched out on the mattress. He watched her silhouette, thrown by the lamplight on to the design of birds and flowers that decorated the Chinese screen. She had placed the lamp artfully and knew he was watching her. When she stood in the basin and bent over to wash her intimate parts, she turned so that he could watch the shadow show, and see how she was sweetening and preparing the way for him.



When at last she came out from behind the screen she hung her head demurely, allowing her hair to hang forward over her face like a dark silver-shot curtain. She covered her pudenda with both hands, then tilted her head and peeped at him with one eye through the veil. It was huge and luminous with the light of passion.



"You succulent, salacious little houri," he said, and stiffened into full arousal. She saw what she had done to him, and tinkled with laughter. She let her hands fall to her sides, and her own sex was meticulously plucked free of hair. It was a plump and naked cleft below the ivory smooth curve of her belly. Her breasts were small and pert, so her body seemed that of a young girl.



"Come to me!" he commanded, and she obeyed with joy.



Much later in the night Yasmini felt him stir beside her and came fully awake immediately. She was always sensitive to his moods or needs. "Are you well?" she whispered. "Is there anything you need?"



"Sleep on, little one," he whispered back. "Tis only your friend and fervent admirer who demands to be taken in hand." He stood up from the mattress.



"Please convey to the friend my respectful salaams and my wifely duty," she whispered. He chuckled sleepily and kissed her lightly before he rose from their mattress. Dorian would only use the chamber-pot in the gravest emergency. Squatting was the woman's way. He slipped out through the back door, to the pit latrine which stood fifty yards from their hut, screened by the trees of the forest verge. The sand was cool under his bare feet, the night air soft and perfumed by forest flowers and the fret off the ocean. When Dorian had relieved himself, he started back. But he stopped before he reached the rear door of the hut. The night was so beautiful and the blaze of the stars so dazzling that they mesmerized him. He stared up at them and, slowly, he found himself transported into a deep sense of peace.



Until this moment he had been storm-tossed by doubts. Had his decision to turn his back on the Elephant Throne been selfish, and unfair to Mansur? Had he failed in his duty to the peoples of Oman who were grinding under the cruel yoke of Zayn al-Din? He knew deep in his heart that Zayn had murdered their father. Did not the laws of man and God also place upon him the blood duty of retribution for the terrible crime of patricide?



All these doubts receded as he stood now under the stars. Even though the night was chilly and he was naked as a newborn, he was still warm from the arms of the only woman he had ever loved. He sighed with contentment. Even if I have sinned, it was the sin of omission. My first duty is to the living, not the dead, and Yasmini needs me as much if not more than all the others.



He started back towards the hut and at that moment he heard Yasmini scream. It was a shocking sound, terror and mortal agony blending.



A Dorian left the hut Yasmini sat up and shivered. The night had turned cold, much colder than it should have been. She wondered if it was a natural cold or the cold of evil. Perhaps some baleful spirit hovered over them. She believed implicitly in the other world, which overlapped their own so intimately, the realm in which the angels, the djinni and the shaitans existed. She shivered again, this time more in dread than with cold. She made the sign to avert the evil eye with thumb and forefinger. Then she stood up from the mattress and turned up the wick of the lantern, so that Dorian would have light when he returned. She went to where Dorian's robe hung over the screen and slipped it over her naked body. Sitting on the mattress, she wound his turban round her head. It had dried but it still smelt of his hair. She lifted a fold of his robe to her nose, and smelt the odour of his sweat floating up from the cloth. She inhaled it with pleasure, and the comfort it imparted to her forced back the premonition of lurking evil. Just the faintest twinge of unease lingered.



"Where is Dorry?" she whispered. "He should not take so long." She was about to call out to him through the thatched wall when she heard a stealthy sound behind her. She turned and was confronted by a tall figure clad in black, a black head cloth swaddling its face. It seemed to be some evil manifestation, a djinni or a shaitan, rather than a human. It must have entered through the other door, and its ghastly influence seemed to fill the room with a choking, cloying emanation of pure evil. In its right hand a long curved blade glinted, reflecting the dim lantern light.



Yasmini screamed with all her strength and tried to rise, but the thing sprang towards her and she did not see the knife stroke for it was so swift as to cheat her eye. She felt the blade go in, so sharp that her tender flesh offered little resistance to its entry. There was only a stinging sensation deep in her bosom.



The assassin stood over her as she sagged down on legs that were suddenly without strength. He made no effort to pull out the long blade. Instead he cocked his wrist and held it rigid, so the blade was angled upwards. He allowed the razor edge to slice its own way out, enlarging the wound, cutting through muscle, vein and artery. When at last the blade came free, Yasmini fell back upon the mattress. The dark figure looked about, seeking the man who should have been present, but was not there. He had only realized that his victim was a woman when she



screamed- but by then it was too late. He stooped and pulled the turban loose from Yasmini's face. He stared at her lovely features, now so pale and still in the lantern-light that they seemed carved from ivory.



"In God's Holy name, only half my work is done," he whispered. "I have killed the vixen but missed the fox."



He whirled and ran for the door through which he had entered the hut. At that moment Dorian burst naked into the room behind him. "Guards!" Dorian shouted. "Succour! On me! Here!"



Kadem ibn Abubaker recognized the voice and turned back on the instant. This was the victim he was seeking, this man and not his woman dressed in his robes. He leaped at Dorian who was slow to react, but threw up his right arm to deflect the blow. The blade raked him from shoulder to elbow. His blood sprang darkly in the lamplight and he yelled again, then dropped to his knees. His arms dangling at his sides, he looked up with a piteous expression at the man who was killing him.



Kadem knew that his victim was twice his age, and from his first reaction that the years had slowed him, that now he was helpless. This was his chance to end it swiftly and he sprang forward eagerly. But he should have been warned by the warlike reputation of al-Salil. As he stabbed down, going once more for the heart, two steely arms shot out, swiftly as striking adders. He found his knife arm trapped in a classic wrist block.



Dorian came to his feet, splattering blood from the long wound down his arm, and they whirled together. Kadem was intent on breaking the lock, so that he could stab again. Dorian was trying even more desperately to hold him, as he shouted for help. Tom!" he screamed. Tom! On me! On me!"



Kadem hooked his heel behind Dorian's foot and lunged against him to trip him and throw him over, but Dorian changed his weight smoothly to the other foot, and turned inside him, twisting the wrist of his knife hand back against the joint, straining the sinews and tendons. Kadem grunted with pain, and fell back a pace against the unbearable pressure. Dorian pressed forward. Tom!" he yelled. Tom, in God's Name."



Kadem yielded to the pressure on his wrist. The release gave him just enough latitude to turn his hip into Dorian, and throw him across it. He broke Dorian's grip and sent him cartwheeling across the floor of the hut. Like a ferret on a rabbit, he went at him, and Dorian was only just able to catch his knife wrist again as he fell back. Once more they were chest to chest, but now Kadem was on top of him, and the difference in their ages and their state of martial fitness began to tell. Remorselessly



Kadem forced the point of the curved blade down towards Dorian's chest. The assassin's face was still covered by the head cloth Only his eyes glittered above the black folds, just inches from Dorian's.



"For my father's memory," grated Kadem, his breath coming hard with the effort, "I perform my duty."



All Kadem's weight was behind his knife arm. Dorian could not hold it longer. His own arm buckled slowly. The knife point pricked the bare skin of his chest and slid on, deeper and still deeper, up to the hilt.



"Justice is mine!" Kadem cried in triumph.



Before the cry had died in Kadem's throat, Tom charged through the doorway behind him, furious and powerful as a black-maned lion. He took it all in at a glance, and swung the heavy pistol he carried in his right hand, not daring to fire it for fear of hitting his brother. The steel barrel crunched across the back of Kadem's skull. Without another sound he collapsed on top of Dorian.



As Tom stooped to drag the Arab off his brother's inert body, Mansur dashed into the hut. "For the love of God, what's amiss?"



"This swine set upon Dorry."



Mansur helped Tom to lift Dorian into a sitting position. "Father, are you hurt?" Then they both saw the terrible knife wound in his bare chest. They stared at it in horror.



"Yassie!" Dorian wheezed. "Look to her."



Tom and Mansur turned towards the small figure curled on the mattress. Neither of them had noticed her until then.



"Yassie is all right, Dorry. She's sleeping," Tom said.



"No, Tom, she is mortal hurt." Dorian tried to shrug off their restraining hands. "Help me. I must attend to her."



"I will see to Mother." Mansur jumped up and ran to the mattress. "Mother!" he cried, and tried to lift her. Then he reeled back, staring at his hands, which were shining with Yasmini's blood.



Dorian crawled across the floor, dragged himself on to the mattress and lifted Yasmini in his arms. Her head lolled lifelessly. "Yassie, please don't leave me." He wept tears of utter desolation. "Don't go, my darling."



His entreaties were in vain for Yasmini's elfin spirit was already well sped along the fatal way.



Sarah had been awakened by the uproar. She came swiftly to join Tom- A quick examination showed her that Yasmini's heartbeat had stilled, and she was past any help. She stifled her grief, and turned to Dorian for he was still alive, if only just.



At Tom's curt order, Batula and Kumrah dragged Kadem out of the hut. Using rawhide thongs, they tied his elbows and wrists behind his back. Then they pulled his ankles to his wrists and bound them together. His spine arched painfully as they riveted a steel slave collar round his neck and chained him to a tree in the centre of the encampment. As soon as the dreadful tidings of the assassination flashed through the camp, the women gathered around Kadem to curse and spit at him in anger and revulsion: they had all loved Yasmini.



"Keep him secure. Do not let them kill him, not yet, not until I order it," Tom told Batula grimly. "You sponsored this murderous swine. The duty is with you, on your own life."



He went back into the hut to give what help he could. This was not much, for Sarah had taken charge. She was highly skilled in the medical arts. She had spent much of her life tending broken bodies and dying men. She only needed his strength to pull the compression bandages tightly enough to stem the bleeding. For the remainder of the time Tom hovered in the background, cursing his own stupidity for not anticipating the danger and taking precautions to forestall it.



"I am not an innocent child. I should have known." His lamentations hampered rather than helped, and Sarah ordered him out of the hut.



When she had dressed Dorian's wound and he was lying more comfortably Sarah relented and allowed Tom to return. She told him that although his brother was gravely injured, the blade had missed his heart as far as she could divine. She thought it had pierced the left lung, for there was bloody froth on his lips.



I have seen men less robust than Dorry recover from worse wounds. Now it is up to God and time." That was the best reassurance she had for Tom. She gave Dorian a double spoonful of laudanum, and, once the drug had taken effect, left him with Tom and Mansur to tend him. Then she went to start the heartbreaking process of laying out Yasmini's body for burial.



The Malay servant girls, also Muslim, helped her. They carried i as mini to Sarah's own hut at the far end of the encampment, laid her on the low table, and placed a screen round her. They took away the bloodied robe and burned it to ash on the watch fire They closed the



lids of those magnificent dark eyes, from which the luminosity had faded. They bathed Yasmini's childlike body and anointed her with perfumed oils. They bandaged the single dreadful wound that had stabbed through to her heart. They combed and brushed her hair, and the silver blaze shone as brightly as ever. They dressed her in a clean white robe and laid her on the funeral bier. She looked like a child asleep.



Mansur and Sarah, who after Dorian had loved her best, chose a burial site in the forest. With the crew of the Gift, Mansur stayed to help dig the grave, for the law of Islam decreed that Yasmini should be buried before sunset on the day of her death.



When they lifted Yasmini's bier and carried her from the hut, the lamentations of the women roused Dorian from the sleep of the poppy and he called weakly for Tom, who came at the run. "You must bring Yassie to me," Dorian whispered.



"No, brother, you must not move. Any movement could do you terrible ill."



"If you will not bring her, then I will go to her." Dorian tried to sit up, but Tom held him down gently, and shouted for Mansur to bring the funeral bier to Dorian's bedside.



At his insistence, Tom and Mansur supported Dorian so he could kiss his wife's lips for the last time. Then Dorian worked free from his own finger the gold ring over which he had spoken his wedding vows. It came off with difficulty for he had never before removed it. Mansur guided his father's hand as he placed it on Yasmini's slim tapered finger. It was far too large for her, but Dorian folded her fingers around it so that it would not slip off.



"Go in peace, my love. And may Allah take you to His bosom."



As Tom had warned, the effort and sorrow exhausted Dorian and he sank back on to the mattress. Bright new blood soaked into the bandages about his chest.



They carried Yassie out to the grave, and lowered her into it gently. Sarah placed a silk shawl over her face, and stood to one side. Tom and Mansur would let no one else undertake the harrowing task of covering her with earth. Sarah watched until they had finished. Then she took Tom's hand on one side and Mansur's on the other and led them back to the camp.



Tom and Mansur went directly to the tree where Kadem was chained. Tom was scowling darkly as he stood over the captive, arms akimbo. There was a large swelling on the back of Kadem's head from the blow with the pistol barrel. His scalp was split and the blood was already congealing into a black scab over the laceration. However, Kadem had recovered consciousness and he was once more alert. He stared up at Tom with a steely, fanatical gaze.



Batula came and prostrated himself before Tom. "Lord Klebe, I deserve all your wrath. Your accusation is just. It was I who sponsored this creature and brought him into your camp."



"Yes, Batula. The blame is indeed yours. It will take you the rest of your life to redeem yourself. In the end it may even cost you your own life."



"As my lord says. I am ready to repay the debt I owe," Batula said humbly. "Shall I kill this eater of pig flesh now?"



"No, Batula. First he must tell us who he truly is and who was the master who sent him to carry out this vile deed. It may be difficult to make him tell us. I see by his eyes that this man lives not on an earthly plane, as other men."



"He is ruled by demons," Batula agreed.



"Make him speak, but make certain he does not die before he has done so," Tom reiterated.



"As you say, lord."



Take him to some place where his cries will not affright the women."



"I will go with Batula," said Mansur.



"No, lad. It will be grisly work. You will not want to watch it."



"The Princess Yasmini was my mother," Mansur said. "Not only will I watch but I shall delight in every scream he utters, and glory in every drop of his blood that flows."



Tom stared at him in astonishment. This was not the winsome child he had known from birth. This was a hard man grown to full maturity in a single hour. "Go with Batula and Kumrah then," he agreed at last, 'and note well the replies of Kadem al-Juri."



They took Kadem in the longboat to the head-waters of the stream over a mile from the camp and found another tree to which to chain him. They tied a leather strap round his forehead, then back around the hole of the tree, twisting it tightly so that it cut into his flesh and he could not move his head. Mansur asked him his real name, and Kadem sPat at him. Mansur looked at Batula and Kumrah.



"The work we must do now is just. In God's Name, let us begin," said Mansur.



"Bismallahr said Batula.



While Mansur guarded the prisoner, Batula and Kumrah went into the forest. They knew where to search, and within the hour they had found a nest of the fierce soldier ants. These insects were bright red in colour, and not much bigger than a rice grain. The glistening head was armed with a pair of poisonous pincers. Careful not to injure them and even more careful to avoid their stings, Batula picked the ants out of the nest with a pair of bamboo tweezers.



When they returned Kumrah cut a hollow reed from the stream verge, and carefully worked one end of the tube as far as it would go into the opening of Kadem's ear.



"Regard this tiny insect." In the jaws of the tweezers Batula held up an ant. "The venom of his sting will make a lion roll on the ground roaring with agony. Tell me, you who call yourself Kadem, who are you and who sent you to commit this deed?"



Kadem looked at the wriggling insect. A clear drop of venom oozed out between the serrated jaws of its mandibles. It had a sharp, chemical odour that would drive any other ant that smelt it into an aggressive frenzy.



"I am a true follower of the Prophet," Kadem replied, 'and I was sent by God to carry out His divine purpose."



Mansur nodded to Batula. "Let the ant whisper the question more clearly in the ear of this true follower of the Prophet."



Kadem's eyes swivelled towards Mansur and he tried to spit again, but his mouth had dried. Batula placed the ant in the opening of the reed tube in his ear and closed the end with a plug of whittled soft wood.



"You will hear the ant as it comes down the tube," Batula told Kadem. "Its footsteps will sound like the hoofs of a horse. Then you will feel it walking in your eardrum. It will stroke the membrane of your inner ear with the sharp tips of its feelers. Then it will sting you."



They watched Kadem's face. His lips twitched, then his eyes rolled back in their sockets until the whites showed and his whole face worked furiously.



"Allah!" he whispered. "Arm me against the blasphemers!"



The sweat burst out from the pores of his skin like the first drops of monsoon rain, and he tried to shake his head as the footfalls of the ant in his eardrum were magnified a thousand times. But the thong held his head in a vice-like grip.



"Answer, Kadem," Batula urged him. "I can still wash out the ant



before it stings. But you must answer swiftly." Kadem closed his eyes to shut out Batula's face.



"Who are you? Who sent you?" Batula came closer and whispered in his open ear. "Swiftly, Kadem, or the pain will be beyond even your crazed imagining."



Then, deep in the recesses of the eardrum the ant humped its back and a fresh globule of venom oozed out between its curved mandibles. It sank the barbed points into the soft tissue at the spot where the auditory nerve was closest to the surface.



Kadem al-Juri was consumed by waves of agony, and they were fiercer than Batula had warned him. He screamed once, a sound that was not human but something from a nightmare. Then the pain froze the muscles and vocal cords in his throat, his jaws clamped together in such a rock-hard spasm that one of the rotten teeth at the back of his mouth burst, filling his mouth with splinters and bitter pus. His eyes rolled back in his skull like those of a blind man. His back arched until Mansur feared that his spine would crack, and his body juddered so that his bonds cut deeply into his flesh.



"He will die," Mansur asked anxiously.



"A shaitan is hard to kill," Batula answered. The three squatted in a half-circle in front of Kadem and studied his suffering. Although it was dreadful to behold, none of them felt the slightest twinge of compassion.



"Regard, lord!" said Kumrah. "The first spasm passes." He was right. Kadem's spine slowly relaxed, and although a series of convulsions still shook him, each was less violent than the one before.



"It is finished," Mansur said.



"No, lord. If God is just, soon the ant will sting again," Batula said softly. "It will not finish so swiftly." As he said it, so it happened: the tiny insect struck again.



This time Kadem's tongue was caught between his teeth as they snapped closed. He bit through it, and the blood streamed down his chin. He shuddered and leaped against the chain. His bowels loosened with a spluttering rush, and even Mansur's lust for vengeance faltered, the dark veils of hatred and grief parted and his instinct for humanity shone through. "Enough, Batula. End it now. Wash out the ant."



Batula withdrew the wood plug from the end of the reed and filled his mouth with water. Through the hollow reed he spurted a jet into Kadem's eardrum, and in the overflow the drowned red body of the insect was washed down Kadem's straining neck.



Slowly Kadem's tortured body relaxed, and he hung inert in his bonds. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and every few minutes he let out a harsh, ragged exhalation, half sigh and half groan.



Once again, his captors squatted in a semi-circle in front of him and watched him carefully. Late in the afternoon, as the sun touched the tops of the forest trees Kadem groaned again. His eyes opened and focused slowly on Mansur.



"Batula, give him water," Mansur ordered. Kadem's mouth was black and crusted with the blood. His torn tongue protruded between his lips like a lump of rotten liver. Batula held the waters king to his mouth, and Kadem choked and gasped as he drank. Once he vomited up a gush of the jellied black blood he had swallowed, but then he drank again.



Mansur let him rest until sunset, then ordered Batula to let him drink again. Kadem was stronger now, and followed their movements with his eyes. Mansur ordered Batula and Kumrah to relax his bonds to allow the blood to flow back, and to chafe his hands and feet before gangrene killed off the living flesh. The pain of the returning blood must have been agonizing but Kadem bore it stoically. After a while they tightened the leather thongs again.



Mansur came to stand over him. "You know well that I am the son of the Princess Yasmini whom you murdered," he said. "In the eyes of God and of men, vengeance is mine. Your life belongs to me."



Kadem stared back at him.



"If you do not reply to me, I will order Batula to place another insect in your good ear."



Kadem blinked, but his face remained impassive.



"Answer my question," Mansur demanded. "Who are you and who sent you to our home?"



Kadem's swollen tongue filled his mouth, so his reply was slurred and barely intelligible. "I am a true follower of the Prophet," he said, 'and I was sent by God to carry out His divine purpose."



"That is the same answer, but it is not the one I wait for," Mansur said. "Batula, select another insect. Kumrah, place another reed in Kadem's ear." When they had done as he ordered, Mansur asked Kadem, This time the pain may kill you. Are you ready for death?"



"Blessed is the martyr," Kadem replied. "I long with all my heart to be welcomed by Allah into Paradise."



Mansur took Batula aside. "He will not yield," he said.



Batula looked dubious. His tone was uncertain as he replied, "Lord, there is no other way."



"I think there is." Mansur turned to Kumrah. "We do not need the reed." Then, to both of them, "Stay with him. I shall return."



He rowed back down the stream. It was almost dark by the time he reached the encampment, but the full moon was already lighting the eastern sky with a marvelous golden glow as it pushed over the tops of



the trees. "Even the moon hastens to assist our enterprise," Mansur murmured, as he went ashore on the beach below the camp. He saw the lamplight shine in chinks through the thatched wall of his father's hut and he hurried there.



His uncle Tom and aunt Sarah sat by the mattress on which Dorian lay. Mansur knelt beside his father and kissed his forehead. He stirred but did not open his eyes.



Mansur leaned close to Tom and whispered low, "Uncle, the assassin will not yield. Now I need your help."



Tom rose to his feet and jerked his head for Mansur to follow him outside. Swiftly Mansur told him what he wanted, and at the end said simply, "This is something that I would do myself, but Islam forbids it."



"I understand." Tom nodded and looked up at the moon. "Tis favourable. I saw a place in the forest close by here where they feed each night on the tubers of the arum lily plant. Tell your aunt Sarah what I am about, and that she is not to fret. I shall not be too long gone."



Tom went to the armoury and selected his big double-barrelled German four to the pound musket. He drew the charge and reloaded the weapon with a handful of Big Looper, the formidable lion shot. Then he checked the flint and the priming, made sure that his knife was on his belt and loosened the blade in its sheath.



He selected ten of his men and told them to wait for his call, but he left the camp alone: silence and stealth were vital to success. When he waded across the stream he stooped to take up a handful of black clay and smear it over his face, for pale skin shines in the moonlight and his quarry was stealthy and cunning. Although it was a huge creature he was hunting it was nocturnal in its habits, and for that reason few men ever laid eyes on it.



Tom followed the far bank of the stream for almost a mile. As he came closer to the swamp in which the arum lilies grew his steps slowed and he paused every fifty paces to listen intently. At the edge of the swamp he squatted and held the big gun across his lap. He waited patiently, never moving even to flick away the mosquitoes that whined around his head. The moon rose higher and its light grew stronger so that the shadows thrown by each tree and shrub had sharp edges.



Abruptly there came a grunt and a squeal from close at hand, and his pulse tripped. He waited, as still as one of the dead tree stumps, as the silence fell again. Then he heard the squelch of hoofs in the mud, more grunts, the sound of hog-like rooting and the champing of tusked jaws.



1 from eased forward towards the sounds. Without warning they ceased as abruptly as they had begun, and he froze. He knew that this was the



customary behaviour of the bush pigs. The entire sounder would freeze together and listen for predators. Although Tom was on one leg, he froze in that attitude, still as an ungainly statue as the silence drew out. Then the grunting and feeding started again.



With relief he lowered his foot, his thigh muscles burning, and crept forward again. Then he saw the sounder just ahead of him: there were several dozen, dark hump-backed sows, with their piglets underfoot, rooting and wallowing. None was large enough to be a mature boar.



Tom moved with infinite care to a mound of harder earth at the edge of the swamp and crouched there, waiting for the big boars to come out of the forest. A cloud blew across the moon, and suddenly, in the utter darkness, he sensed a presence close by. He turned all his attention upon it and vaguely made out massive movement so close that he felt he could touch it with the muzzle of his musket. He inched the butt stock to his shoulder, but dared not cock the hammers. The beast was too close. It would hear the click as the sear engaged. He stared into the darkness, not sure if it was real or his imagination. Then the clouds overhead blew open and the moonlight burst through.



In front of him loomed a gigantic hog. Along its mountainous back rose a mane of coarse bristles, shaggy and black in the moonlight. Its jaws were armed with curved tusks, sharp enough to rip the belly out of a man or to slice through the femoral artery in his groin and bleed him white within minutes.



Tom and the boar saw each other in the same moment. Tom swept back the hammers of the musket to full cock, and the boar squealed and charged straight at him. Tom fired the first barrel into its chest, and the heavy leaden loopers thudded into flesh and bone. The boar staggered and dropped on to its front knees but in an instant it bounded to its feet and came straight in. Tom fired the second barrel, then smashed the empty musket into the pig's face and dived to one side. One tusk hooked into his coat and split it like a razor, but the point missed his flesh. The beast's heavy shoulder struck him a glancing blow, which was powerful enough nevertheless to send him rolling into the mud.



Tom struggled to his feet with his knife clutched in his right hand, ready to meet the next attack. All around him there was the rush of dark bodies and squeals of alarm as the pigs scattered back into the forest.



Silence fell almost immediately after they were gone. Then Tom heard a much softer sound: laboured gasping and snuffling and the convulsive thrashing of back legs in the reeds of the swamp. Cautiously he went towards the sounds, and found the boar down, kicking his last in the mud.



Tom hurried back to the camp and found his ten chosen men where he had left them, waiting his summons. None of them was a Muslim, so they had no religious qualms about touching a pig. Tom led them back to the swamp and they lashed the huge evil-smelling carcass to a carrying pole. It took all ten to stagger with this burden along the bank of the river to where Kadem was still tied to the tree and Mansur was waiting beside him with Batula and Kumrah.



By this time the dawn was breaking, and Kadem stared at the pig carcass as they dropped it in front of him. He said nothing but his expression clearly showed his horror and repugnance.



The bearers of the carcass had brought spades with them. Mansur put them to work at once digging a grave beside the carcass. None of them spoke to Kadem, and they barely glanced in his direction while they worked. However, Kadem's agitation increased as he watched them. He was again sweating and shivering, but this was not only the effects of the shock and agony of the ant stings. He had begun to understand the fate that Mansur was preparing for him.



When the grave was deep enough, the men laid aside their spades at Tom's order, and gathered around the carcass of the boar. Two stropped the blades of their skinning knives while the others rolled the boar on to its back and held all four legs widely separated to make the job of the skinners easier. They were expert, and the thick bristly hide was soon flayed away from pink and purple muscle and the white fat of the belly. At last it was free and the skinners stretched it open on the ground.



Mansur and the two sea captains kept well clear, careful not to let a drop of the vile creature's blood splatter them. Their revulsion was as evident as that of their captive. The stench of the old boar's fatty flesh was rank in the early-morning air, and Mansur spat the taste of it out of his mouth before he spoke to Kadem for the first time since they had brought in the carcass.



"O nameless one who calls himself a true follower of the Prophet, sent by God to carry out His divine purpose, we have no further need of you and your treachery. Your life on this earth has come to an end." Kadem began to exhibit more distress than the agony that the insect's sting had inflicted upon him. He gibbered like an idiot, and his eyes rolled from side to side. Mansur ignored his protests and went on mercilessly, "At my command, you will be stitched into this wet and reeking skin of the pig, and buried alive in the grave we have prepared for you. We will place the flayed carcass of this beast on top of you so that as you suffocate its blood and fat will drip into your face. As you and the pig rot your stinking bodily juices will mingle and you will



become one. You will be fouled, ha from for ever. The faces of God and all his prophets will be turned away from you for all eternity."



Mansur gestured to the men who were waiting ready, and they came forward. Mansur unlocked Kadem's chains, but left him pinioned at wrists to ankles. The men carried him to the open pigskin and laid him upon it. The ship's sail maker threaded his needle and donned his leather palm to sew Kadem into the winding sheet formed by the skin.



As Kadem felt the wet and greasy folds embrace him, he screeched like a condemned soul cast into eternal darkness. "My name is Kadem ibn Abubaker, eldest son of Pasha Suleiman Abubaker. I came here to seek vengeance for the murder of my father and to carry out the will of my master Caliph Zayn al-Din ibn al-Malik."



"What was the will of your master?" Mansur insisted.



"The execution of the Princess Yasmini and of her incestuous lover, al-Salil."



Mansur turned to Tom who was squatting close by. "That is all we need to know. May I kill him now, Uncle?"



Tom rose to his feet and shook his head. "His life belongs not to me but to your father. Besides, we may have further need of this assassin yet, if we are to avenge your mother."



With his damaged eardrum Kadem was unable to keep his balance and he staggered and toppled over when they lifted him out of the folds of pigskin, cut loose his bonds and placed him on his feet. Tom ordered him to be strapped to the carrying pole on which they had brought in the pig's carcass. The bearers carried him like dead game back to the beach of the lagoon.



"It will be more difficult for him to escape from the ship. Take him out to the Gift,1 Tom told Batula. "Chain him in the orlop, and see to it that he is guarded day and night by your most reliable men."



They stayed on in the encampment beside the lagoon during the forty days of mourning for Yasmini. For the first ten Dorian hung suspended over the black void of death, drifting from delirium into coma, then rallying again. Tom, Sarah and Mansur took turns to wait by his bedside.



On the tenth morning Dorian opened his eyes and looked at Mansur. He spoke weakly but clearly: "Is your mother buried? Have you said the prayers ?"



"She is buried and I have prayed over her grave, for you and for myself."



"That is good, my son." Dorian sank away, but within an hour he woke again and asked for food and drink.



"You will live," Sarah told him as she brought a bowl of broth. "You ran it very fine, Dorian Courtney, but now you will live."



Relieved of the terrible anxiety over Dorian's condition, Tom let Sarah and the women servants take over his share of the vigil at the bedside, and he and Mansur devoted themselves to other business.



Every day Tom ordered Kadem to be brought up from the orlop deck, and exercised in the sunlight and open air. He made sure he was well fed, and that the gash in his scalp healed cleanly. He felt no compassion for the prisoner, but he wanted to ensure his survival in good condition: he was an important part of Tom's plans for the future.



Tom had ordered the bush-pigskin to be salted and hung in the Gift's rigging. He questioned Kadem almost every day in fluent Arabic, forcing him to squat in the shadow of the pigskin that flapped over his head, a constant reminder of the fate that awaited him if he refused to answer.



"How did you learn that this ship belonged to me and my brother?" he demanded, and Kadem named the merchant in Zanzibar who had given him this information, before the life was choked out of him by the garotte. Tom passed the information to Dorian, when he was strong enough to sit up unaided. "So our identity is now known by the spies of Zayn al Din at every anchorage along the coast from Good Hope to Hormuz and the Red Sea."



"The Dutch know us also," Dorian agreed. "Keyser promised that every VOC port in the Orient would be closed to us. We must change the cut of our jibs."



Tom set about altering the appearance of the two ships. One after the other they warped them to the beach. Tom used the rise and fall of the tide to careen them over. First they scraped away the heavy infestation of weed and treated the shipworm that had already taken nrm hold in the hulls. Some of these loathsome creatures were as thick as a man's thumb and as long as his arm. They could riddle the timbers with holes until the ship was rotten as cheese and might easily break up in rough weather. They tarred the ship's bottom and renewed the copper sheathing where strips had been torn off, allowing the worm to enter. It was the only effective cure. Then Tom changed the masts and rigging. He stepped a mizzen on the Gift. This was something he and Dorian had discussed before: the additional mast altered the appearance and Performance of the ship completely. When he took her out to sea for her trials, she sailed a full point closer to the wind and logged an



additional two knots of speed through the water. Tom and Batula were delighted and reported the success gleefully to Dorian, who insisted on being allowed to hobble to the head of the beach to look at her.



"In God's name, she is as fresh as a virgin again."



"She must have a new name, brother," Tom agreed. "What shall it be?"



Dorian barely hesitated. "The Revenge."



Tom saw by his expression what he was thinking, and gave him no argument. "That is an illustrious name." He nodded. "Our great-great grandfather sailed with Sir Richard Grenville on the old Revenge."



They repainted the hull in sky blue, for that was the hue of the paint they had brought with them in abundance, and chequered the gun ports in darker blue. It gave the Revenge a saucy air.



Then they began work on the Maid of York. She had always shown a flighty inclination to broach-to when driven hard before the wind. Tom took this opportunity to add an additional ten feet to the mainmast and give it five degrees more rake. He also lengthened the bowsprit and moved the jib stay and the staysail stay a touch forward. He repositioned the cradles of the water casks in the holds nearer to the stern to alter her trim. This not only changed her profile but made her more responsive to the helm and corrected her tendency to being down by the head.



Tom gave her the contrary colour scheme to the Revenge: a dark blue hull and sky blue gun ports.



"She was named after you, the Maid of York," Tom reminded Sarah. "Fair is fair, you must rename her now."



"Water Sprite," she said immediately, and Tom blinked.



"How did you hit on that? Tis a quirky name."



"And I am a quirky lady." She laughed.



"That you are." He laughed with her. "But just plain Sprite might be better."



"Are you naming her, or am I?" Sarah asked sweetly.



"Let's say rather, we are." Sarah threw up both her hands in capitulation.



When the forty days of mourning for Yasmini had passed, Dorian was sufficiently recovered to walk unaided to the far end of the beach and swim back across the channel. Although he had recovered much of his strength, the loneliness and deep sadness had marked him. Whenever Mansur could find time from his duties he and Dorian spent it sitting together and talking quietly.



Each evening the entire family gathered around the campfire and discussed their plans. Soon it became obvious that none of them wished to make the lagoon their new home. As they were without horses Tom



and Mansur's scouting expeditions on foot did not penetrate far inland, and they encountered none of the tribes that had once inhabited this country. The old villages were burned and deserted.



There's no trade, unless you have someone to trade with," Tom pointed out.



"It is a sickly place. Already we have lost one of our people to the fever." Sarah supported him. "I had hoped so much to meet our Jim Boy here, but in all this time there has been neither sign nor sight of him. He must have moved on further to the north." There were a hundred other possible reasons why Jim had disappeared, but she put them out of her mind. "We will find him there," she said firmly.



"I, for another, cannot remain here," Mansur said. In these last weeks he had taken his place quite naturally at the family councils. "My father and I have a sacred obligation to find the man who ordered the death of my mother. I know who he is. My destiny lies to the north, in the kingdom of Oman." He looked at his father enquiringly.



Slowly Dorian nodded agreement. "Yasmini's murder has changed everything. I now share your sacred obligation of vengeance. We will go northwards together."



"So, it's settled, then." Tom spoke for all of them. "When we reach Nativity Bay, we can decide again."



"When can we sail?" Sarah asked eagerly. "Name a day!"



The ships are almost ready, and so are we. Ten days from now. The day after Good Friday," Tom suggested. "A propitious day."



Sarah composed a letter to Jim. It ran to twelve pages of heavy parchment in her elegant close-written script. She stitched it into a canvas cover and painted the packet with sky blue ship's paint and sealed the seams with hot tar. She printed his name on it in white paint and block capitals: James Archibald Courtney Esq. Then she carried it up the hill and, with her own hand, hid it in the recess below the post stone. She built a tall cairn on top to signal to Jim when he came that a letter was waiting for him.



Mansur hunted far up the valley and killed five more Cape buffalo. The women salted, pickled and dried the meat, then made spiced sausage for the voyage ahead. Mansur supervised the crews as they refilled all the water casks on both ships. When this was done, Tom and the Arab captains were rowed around the ships to check their trim. Though heavily laden, both vessels rode well. They looked wonderfully elegant in their new paint.



Chained and heavily guarded, Kadem al-Juri was allowed on deck for a few hours each day. Tom and Dorian took turns to interrogate him. With the dried pigskin casting its shadow across the deck Kadem responded to their questions, if not willingly at least with some show of respect. However, that disconcerting stare never faded from his eyes. Though Tom and Dorian phrased the same questions in different guises, Kadem's replies were consistent and he avoided the traps they set for him. He must have known what his eventual fate would be. The law allowed Dorian and Mansur little discretion of mercy: when they stared at him Kadem saw death in their eyes, and all he could hope for was that when the time came they would grant him a swift, dignified execution, without the horror of dismemberment or the sacrilege of the pigskin.



Over the weeks, Kadem's incarceration in the orlop developed its own routine and rhythm. Three Arab seamen shared the duty of acting as his warders during the night, each taking a shift of four hours. They had been carefully chosen by Batula, and at first they were mindful of his orders. While themselves remaining mute, they reported Kadem's most casual remarks to Batula. However, the nights were long and the guard duty as dull as the need to remain awake was onerous. Kadem had been trained by the most famous mullahs of the Royal House of Oman in dialectic and religious debate. The things he whispered in the darkness to his warders while the rest of the crew were ashore or sleeping on the upper deck were compelling to those devout young men. The truths he spoke were too poignant and moving to report to Batula. They could not close their ears to him, and they listened at first with awe when he spoke of the truth and beauty of God's way. Then they began, against their own will, to respond to his whispers with their own. From the fire in his eyes they knew Kadem to be a holy man. By the fervour of his own devotion and the unassailable logic of his words they were convinced. Slowly they were held in thrall by Kadem ibn Abubaker.



Meanwhile, the excitement of impending departure built up in the rest of the company. The last sticks of furniture and goods were taken from the huts at the forest edge and ferried on board. On Good Friday Tom and Mansur applied torches to the empty huts. The thatch had dried out and they burned like bonfires. The day after Good Friday they sailed early in the morning watch, so that Tom had light enough to make out the channel. The wind stood fair offshore, and he led the little flotilla out through the heads into the open sea.



It was midday and the land was low and blue on the western horizon before one of the crew came up from below decks in a state of terrible agitation. Tom and Dorian were on the quarter-deck together, Dorian seated in the sling chair Tom had rigged for him. At first neither could understand the man's wild shouts.



"Kadem!" Tom caught the gist of it. He went bounding down the companionway to the orlop deck. Locked securely in the wooden cage that the carpenters had built for him, Kadem was curled in sleep upon the straw mattress. His chains were still secured to the ring bolts in the deck. Tom seized a corner of the single blanket that covered the prisoner from the top of his head to his feet, jerked it aside and then kicked the dummy that lay beneath it. It was cunningly made of two sacks filled with oakum and tied with short pieces of old rope to give it the outline of a human body beneath the blanket.



They searched the ship swiftly from stem to stern, Tom and Dorian with swords in hand raging through the holds and probing every corner and cranny.



"Three other men are missing," Batula reported with a shamed face.



"Who are they?" Dorian demanded.



Batula hesitated before he could bring himself to answer. "Rashood, Pinna and Habban," he croaked, 'the same three men I set to guard him."



Tom altered course and steered alongside the Revenge. Through the speaking tube, he hailed Mansur who had command of her. Both vessels went about and headed back towards the entrance of the lagoon, but the winds that had allowed them to clear the lagoon so handily now blocked them offshore. For days more they beat back and forth across the entrance. Twice they were almost piled up to the reef as Tom in frustration tried to force the passage.



It was six days after they had sailed that at last they dropped anchor off the beach of the lagoon once again. Since their departure it had rained heavily, and when they went ashore they found that any sign left by the fugitives had been washed away. "Yet there is only one direction they would have taken." Tom pointed up the valley. "But they have almost nine days' start on us. If we are to catch up with them we must march at once."



He ordered Batula and Kumrah to check the weapons lockers and the magazines. They came ashore with sorry expressions to report that four muskets were missing, with the same number of cutlasses, bullet bags and powder flasks. Tom stopped himself reviling the two captains further, for they had already suffered enough.



Dorian argued vehemently when Tom told him he must stay behind



to take care of the ships and Sarah while they chased the fugitives. In the end, Sarah joined in to convince him that he was not yet strong enough for such an expedition, which would call for hard marches and perhaps even harder fighting. Tom selected ten of his best men to go with him, those who were proficient with sword, musket and pistol.



An hour after they had first stepped ashore all was ready. Tom kissed Sarah, and they left the beach heading inland. Tom and Mansur strode out at the head of the line of armed men.



"I would that little Bakkat were with us," Tom muttered. "He would follow them though they grew wings and flew ten feet above the ground."



"You are a famous elephant hunter, Uncle Tom. I have heard you tell it since I was a child."



"That was more than a year or two ago," Tom smiled ruefully, 'and you must not remember all I tell you. Boasts and brags are like debts and childhood sweethearts they often come back to plague the man who made them."



At noon on the third day they stood on the crest of the range of mountains that ran in an unbroken rampart north and south. The slopes below them were covered with banks of purple heather. This was the dividing line between the littoral and the inland plateau of the continental shield. Behind, the forests lay like a green carpet down to the edge of the ocean. Ahead, the hills were harsh and rocky and the plains were endless, stretching for ever to the horizon, blue with distance. The tiny dust clouds kicked up by the moving herds of game drifted in the warm breezes.



"Any one of those might mark the path of the men we are hunting, but the hoofs of the herds will have wiped out their tracks," Tom told Mansur. "Still and all, I doubt they would have headed into that great emptiness. Kadem would have the sense at least to try to find human habitation."



"The Cape colony?" Mansur looked southwards.



"More likely the Arab forts along the Fever Coast or the Portuguese territory of Mozambique."



"The land is so big." Mansur scowled. "They could have gone anywhere."



"We will wait for the scouts to come in before we decide what next to do."



Tom had sent his best men to cast north and south, ordering them to try to cut Kadem's trail. He would not say so to Mansur, not yet at least, but he knew that their chances were remote. Kadem had too long a start on them and, as Mansur had remarked, the land was big.



The rendezvous Tom had set at which to meet the scouts was a



distinctive peak shaped like a cocked hat that could be seen from twenty leagues in any direction. They camped on the southern slope at the edge of the treeline, and the scouts came dribbling back during the night. None had been able to cut human sign.



"They have got clean away, lad," Tom told his nephew. "I think we can do naught else but let them go, and turn back for the ships. But I would like your agreement. "Tis your duty to your mother that dictates what we do next."



"Kadem was only the messenger," Mansur said. "My blood feud is with his master in Lamu, Zayn al-Din. I agree, Uncle Tom. This is fruitless. Our energies may best be expended elsewhere."



"Think on this also, lad. Kadem will fly straight back to his master, the pigeon to its loft. When we find Zayn, Kadem will be at his side, if the lions have not eaten him first."



Mansur's face brightened and his shoulders straightened. "In God's Name, Uncle, I had not considered that. Of course you are right. As for Kadem perishing in the wilderness, it seems to me that he has the animal tenacity and fanatical faith to survive. I feel sure we will meet him again. He will not escape my vengeance. Let's hurry back to the ships."



Before first light Sarah left her bunk in the little cabin of the Sprite. Then, as she had done every morning since Tom left, she went ashore and climbed to the hilltop above the lagoon. From there she watched for Tom's return. From afar she recognized his tall, straight figure and his swinging walk at the head of his men. The image blurred as her eyes filled with tears of joy and relief.



Thank you, God, that you paid heed to my prayers," she cried aloud, and ran down the hillside straight into his arms. "I was so worried that you would get yourself into trouble again, without me to look after you, Tom Courtney."



"I had no chance for trouble, Sarah Courtney," he hugged her hard, 'more's the pity." He looked to Mansur. "You are faster than me, lad. Run ahead to warn your father that we are returning, and to have the ships ready to sail again as soon as I set foot aboard." Mansur set off at once.



As soon as he was out of earshot Sarah said, "You're the crafty one, aren t you, Thomas? You did not want to be the one who gave the bitter news to Dorry that Yassie's murder is unrevenged."



Tis Mansur's duty more than mine," Tom replied breezily. "Dorry would have it no other way. The only profit in this bloody business is that it might bring father and son closer than they have ever been before and that was mighty close."



They sailed with the ebb of the tide. The wind stood fair and they had made good their offing before darkness fell. The ships were within two cables' length of each other, with the wind fresh on the quarter, their best point of sailing. The Revenge showed her new turn of speed and began to pull ahead of the Sprite. Thus it was with reluctance that Tom gave the order to shorten sail for the night. It seemed a pity not to take full advantage of the wind that was bearing them so swiftly towards Nativity Bay.



"But I am a trader and not a man-o'-war," Tom consoled himself. As he gave the order to shorten sail he saw Mansur in the Revenge furl his staysail and reef his mizzen and main. Both ships hoisted lanterns to their maintops, to enable them the better to keep night stations on each other.



Tom was ready to give over the quarter-deck to Kumrah and go down to the small saloon for the supper that he could smell Sarah was cooking: he recognized the rich aroma of one of her famous spiced bobooties and saliva flooded into his mouth. He spent a few more minutes checking the set of the sails and the pointing of the helmsman. Satisfied at last, he turned towards the head of the companionway, then stopped abruptly.



He stared at the dark eastern horizon and muttered, mystified, "There is a great fire out there. Is it a ship ablaze? No, it's something greater than that. The fires of a volcano?"



The crew on deck had seen it too and crowded to the rail, gawking and gabbling. Then, to Tom's utter astonishment, there burst over the dark horizon a monstrous ball of celestial fire. It lit the dark surface of the sea. Across the water the sails of the Revenge glowed palely in this ghostly emanation.



"A comet, by God!" Tom shouted in wonder, and stamped on the deck above the saloon. "Sarah Courtney, come up here at once. You have never seen aught such as this, nor will you ever again."



Sarah came flying up the ladder with Dorian close behind her. They stopped and stared in wonder, struck speechless by the splendour of the sight. Then Sarah came to Tom and placed herself within the protective circle of his arms. "It is a sign," she whispered. "It's a benediction from on high for the old life we have left behind at Good Hope, and a promise of the new life that lies ahead of us."



Dorian left them, moved slowly down the deck until he reached the bows and sank to his knees. He turned his face up to the sky. "All the days of mourning have passed," he said. "Your time here on earth with me is over. Go, Yasmini, my little darling, I commit you to the arms or God, but you must know that my heart and all my love go with you."



Across the dark water Mansur Courtney saw the comet, and he ran to the main shrouds and leaped into them. He clambered swiftly upwards until he reached the maintop. He threw an arm around the topgallant mast, balancing lithely against the roll and pitch of the hull, which were magnified by the sixty feet that separated him from the surface of the sea. He lifted his face to the sky and his long, thick hair streamed back in the wind. "The death of kings!" he cried. "The destruction of tyrants! All these portentous events heralded by God's finger writing in the heavens." Then he filled his lungs and shouted into the wind, "Hear me, Zayn al-Din! I am Nemesis, and I am coming for you."



Night after night as the two little ships sailed northwards the comet climbed overhead, seeming to light their way, until at last they picked out a tall bluff of land that rose out of the dark waters ahead of their bows like the back of a monstrous whale. At the northern end of the promontory, the whale's mouth opened. They sailed through this entrance into a huge landlocked bay, far greater in extent than the Lagoon of the Elephants. On one side the land was steep-to, on the other it stretched in dense mangrove swamps, but between them lay the lovely embouchure of a river of sweet, clear water flanked by gently sloping beaches that offered a natural landing place.



"This is not our first visit to this place. Dorian and I have been here many times before. The natives hereabouts call this river Umbilo," Tom told Sarah, as he steered for the beach and dropped his anchor in three fathoms. Looking over the side they could watch the steel flukes burying themselves in the pale, sandy bottom and the brilliant shoals of fish swirling as they feasted on the small crabs and shrimps disturbed from their burrows by the anchor.



When all the canvas was furled, the yards sent down and both ships at rest, Tom and Sarah stood by the rail and watched Mansur row ashore from the Revenge, eager to explore these new surroundings.



The restlessness of youth," Tom said.



"If restlessness is the sign of tender age, then you are an infant in arms, Master Tom," she replied.



"That is most unfair to me," he chuckled, 'but I shall let it pass."



She shaded her eyes and studied the shoreline. "Where is the mail stone?"



There, at the foot of the bluff, but do not set your hopes too high." "Of course not!" she snapped at him, but she thought, he need not try to protect me from disappointment. I know, with a mother's sure instinct, that Jim is close. Even if he has not yet reached this sPot, he soon will. I need only be patient, and my son will come back to me.



Tom offered an olive branch by changing the subject in a placatory tone: "What do you think of this spot upon the globe, Sarah Courtney?"



"I like it well enough. Perhaps I will grow to like it even more if you allow me to rest here more than a day and a night." She accepted his peace-offering with a smile.



"Then Dorian and I will begin to mark out the site for our new fort and trading post immediately." Tom lifted his glass to his eye. He and Dorian had done most of this work on their last visit to Nativity Bay. He ran the glass over the site they had chosen then. It was on a promontory in a meander of the river. Because the Umbilo waters enclosed three sides, it was easy to defend. A constant supply of fresh water was also assured, and there was a good field of fire in all directions. In addition, it was under the guns of the anchored ships and would benefit from their support in the event of an attack by savage tribesmen or other enemies.



"Yes!" He nodded with satisfaction. "It will suit our purpose well enough. We will start work tomorrow at the latest, and you shall design our private quarters for me just as you did at Fort Providence twenty years ago."



"That was our honeymoon," she said, with awakening enthusiasm.



"Aye, lass." Tom smiled down at her. "And this shall be our second of that ilk."



The small band of horsemen moved slowly across the veld, dwarfed by the infinite landscape that surrounded them. They led the pack-horses and let the small herd of remounts follow at their own pace. Animals and men were lean and hardened by the journey. Their clothing was ragged and patched, their boots long ago worn out and discarded, to be replaced by new ones crudely sewn from the skins of the kudu antelope. The tack of the horses was abraded by their passage through the thorn thickets, the seats of the saddles polished by the riders' sweaty backsides.



The faces and arms of the three Dutchmen were burned as dark as those of the Hottentot troopers. They rode in silence, strung out behind the tiny trotting figure of Xhia, the Bushman. Onwards, ever onwards, following the tracks of the wagon wheels that ran ahead like an endless serpent across the plains and the hills.



The troopers had long ago given up any thought of desertion. It was not only the implacable determination of their leader that prevented them but also the thousands of leagues of wilderness that had already



unfurled behind them. They knew that a lone horseman would have little chance of ever reaching the colony. They were herd animals, forced to stay together to survive. They were not only the prisoners of Captain Herminius Koots's obsession, but also of the great empty distances.



Koots's worn leather jacket and breeches were patched and stained with sweat, rain and red dust. His lank hair hung down to his shoulders. It was bleached white by the sun, and the ends were raggedly trimmed with a hunting knife. With his gaunt sun-darkened features and his pale, staring eyes he seemed indeed a man possessed.



For Koots the lure of the reward had long ago faded: he was driven onwards by the need to quench his hatred in the blood of his quarry. He would allow nothing, neither man nor beast nor the burning distances, to cheat him of that ultimate fulfilment.



His chin was sunk on his chest, but now he lifted it and stared ahead, eyes narrowed behind the colourless lashes. There was a dark cloud across the horizon. He watched it climb higher into the sky and roll towards them across the plain. He reined in and called to Xhia: "What is this that fills the sky? It is not dust or smoke."



Xhia cackled with laughter and broke into a gleeful dance, shuffling and stamping. The distances and hardships of the journey had not wearied him: he had been born to this life. Enclosing walls and the company of hordes of his fellow men would have jaded him and chafed his spirit. The wilderness was his hearth, the open sky his roof.



He broke into another of his paeans of self-praise and vilification of his mad, cruel master that he alone of all the company could understand. "Slimy white worm, you creature with skin the colour of pus and curdled milk, do you know nothing at all of this land? Must Xhia, the mighty hunter and slayer of elephants, nurse you like a blind, mewling infant?" Xhia jumped high and deliberately broke flatus, with such force that the wind stirred the back flap of his loincloth. He knew that this would drive Koots into a rage. "Must Xhia, who stands so tall that his long shadow terrifies his enemies, Xhia beneath whose mighty prong women squeal with joy, must Xhia always lead you by the hand? You understand nothing that is written plain upon the earth, you understand nothing that is blazoned in the very heavens."



Stop that monkey chatter at once," Koots shouted. He could not understand the words but he recognized the mockery in the tone, and knew that Xhia had farted only to provoke him. "Shut your filthy mouth, and answer me straight."



must shut my mouth but answer your questions, great master?" Xhia switched into the patois of the colony, a mixture of all the languages.



"Am I then a magician?" Over the months of their enforced companionship they had learned to understand each other much better than they had at the beginning, both in words and in intent.



Koots touched the hilt of the long hippopotamus-hide sjambok that hung by its thong from the pommel of his saddle. This was another gesture well understood by them both. Xhia changed his tone and expression again, and danced just beyond the reach of the whip. "Lord, this a gift from the Kulu Kulu. Tonight we will sleep with full bellies."



"Birds?" Koots asked, and watched the shadow of this cloud sweep across the plain towards them. He had been amazed by the flocks of the tiny que lea bird, but this was far greater in height and extent.



"Not birds," Xhia told him. "These are locusts."



Koots forgot his anger, and leaned back in the saddle to take in the size of the approaching swarm. It filled half of the bowl of the sky from horizon to horizon. The sound of wings was like that of a gentle breeze in the high branches of the forest, but it mounted swiftly, becoming next a murmur, a rising roar and then a thunder. The great swarm of insects formed a moving curtain whose trailing skirts swept the earth. Koots's fascination turned to alarm as the first insects, buzzing low to earth, slammed into his chest and face. He ducked and cried out, for the locust's hind legs are barbed with sharp red spikes. One left a bloody welt across his cheek. His horse reared and plunged under him, and Koots threw himself from the saddle and seized the reins. He turned the horse's rump towards the approaching swarm, and shouted to his men to do the same. "Hold the pack-horses and knee-halter the spares, lest they are driven away before this pestilence."



They forced the animals to their knees, then shouted and jerked the reins until reluctantly they rolled flat on their sides and stretched out in the grass. Koots cowered behind the body of his own horse. He pulled his hat well down over his ears, and turned up the collar of his leather coat. Despite the partial protection afforded by the horse, the flying creatures slapped against any exposed parts of his body in a continuous hailstorm, each with the strength to sting painfully through the folds of his coat.



The rest of the band followed his example and lay behind their mounts, taking cover as though from enemy musket balls. Only Xhia seemed oblivious to the rain of hard bodies. He sat out in the open, snatching up the locusts that hit him and were stunned by the impact. He broke off their legs and goggle-eyed heads and stuffed the bodies into his mouth. The carapaces crunched as he chewed and the tobacco coloured juices ran down his chin. "Eat!" he called to them as he chewed. "After the locust comes famine."



From noon to sundown the locust swarm roared over them like the waters of a great river in flood. The sky was darkened by them so that the dusk came on them prematurely. Xhia's appetite seemed insatiable. He gobbled down the living bodies until his belly bulged, and Koots thought he must succumb to his own greed. However, Xhia was possessed of the same digestive tract as a wild animal. When his belly was stretched tight and shiny as a ball he staggered to his feet and tottered away a few paces. Then, still in full sight of Koots and with the breeze blowing directly to where Koots lay, Xhia lifted the tail flap of his loincloth and squatted again.



It seemed this abundance of food served only to lubricate the action of his bowels. He defecated copiously and thunderously, and at the same time picked up more of the fluttering insects and stuffed them into his mouth.



"You disgusting animal," Koots shouted at him, and drew his pistol, but Xhia knew that even if Koots thrashed him regularly, he could not kill him, not thousands of leagues from the colony and civilization.



"Good!" He grinned at Koots, and made the gesture of inviting him to join the feast.



Koots bolstered his weapon and buried his nose in the crook of his arm. "When he has served his purpose I will strangle the little ape with my own hands," Koots promised himself, and gagged on the odours that wafted over him.



As darkness fell, the mighty locust swarm sank down out of the air and settled to roost wherever it came to earth. The deafening buzzing of their wings faded, and Koots rose to his feet at last and stared about.



For as far as he could see in every direction the earth was covered waist deep with a living carpet of bodies, reddish brown in the light of the sunset. The trees of the forest had changed shape as the swarms settled upon them. They were transformed into amorphous haystacks of living locusts, seething and growing larger as more insects settled upon those already at roost. With a crackle like volleys of musketry the main branches of the nearest trees gave way under the weight and came crashing down to earth, but still the locusts piled on to them and devoured the leaves.



From their burrows and lairs the carnivores emerged to feast upon this bounty. Koots watched in wonder as hyena, jackal and leopard became bold with greed and rushed upon the mounds of insects, gobbling them down.



bven a pride of eleven lions joined the banquet. They passed close to where Koots stood, but took not the slightest notice of the men or the horses, for they were preoccupied with the feast. Like grazing cattle they



spread out across the plain, their noses to the earth, devouring the seething heaps of locusts, champing them between their great jaws. The lion cubs, their bellies stuffed full, stood up on their back legs and playfully batted the flying creatures out of the air as they were disturbed into flight again.



Koots's troopers swept a clear patch of earth, and built a fire on it. They used the blades of their spades as frying pans, and on these they roasted the locusts crisp and brown. Then they crunched them up with a relish almost as keen as Xhia's. Even Koots joined in and made a meal of these tit bits When night fell the men tried to compose themselves to rest, but the insects swarmed over them. They crawled into their faces, and their spiked feet rasped and scratched any exposed part of their skin and kept them from sleep.



The next morning when the sun rose it revealed a strange antediluvian landscape of dull featureless red-brown. Swiftly the sun warmed the motionless masses of locusts that had been chilled into a stupor during the night. They began to stir, to undulate and hum like a disturbed hive. Suddenly, as if at a signal, the entire horde rose into the air and roared away towards the east, borne on the morning breeze. For many hours the dark torrents streamed overhead, but as the sun reached its zenith the last had passed on. Once more the sky was brilliant blue and unsullied.



Yet the landscape they left behind was altered out of all recognition. It was bare earth and rock. The trees were denuded of their foliage, the bare branches snapped off to lie tangled below the stark boles and twisted trunks. It was as though a conflagration had consumed every leaf and green sprig. The golden grasses that had undulated in the breeze like the scend of the ocean were gone. In their place was this stony desolation.



The horses snuffled the bare earth and pebbles, then stood disconsolately, their empty bellies already rumbling with gases. Koots climbed to the top of the nearest bare hillock and played his telescope over the stony desert. The herds of antelope and quagga that had infested the land the previous day were gone. In the distance Koots made out a pale mist of drifting dust that might have been raised by the exodus of the last herds from this starvation veld. They were moving southwards to search for other grasslands that had not been devastated by the locusts.



He went back down the hill and his men, who had been arguing animatedly, fell silent as he walked into the camp. Koots studied their faces as he filled his mug with coffee from the black kettle. The last grain of sugar had been used up weeks before. He sipped from the mug,



then snapped, "Ja, Oudeman? What is it that is worrying you? You have the same pained expression as an old woman with bleeding piles."



There is no grazing for the horses," Oudeman blurted.



Koots made a show of amazement at this revelation. "Sergeant Oudeman, I am grateful to you for pointing this out to me. Without your sharp sense of perception I might have overlooked it."



Oudeman scowled at the laboured sarcasm. He was not sufficiently glib or well enough educated to match Koots in wordplay. "Xhia says that the herds of wild game will know which way to go to find grazing. If we follow them they will lead us to it."



"Please go on, Sergeant. I never tire of gleaning these jewels of your wisdom."



"Xhia says that since last night the game herds have started moving southwards."



"Yes." Koots nodded, and blew noisily into the mug of hot coffee. "Xhia is right. I saw that from the hilltop up there." He pointed with the mug.



"We must go southwards to find grazing for the horses," Oudeman went on stubbornly.



"One question, Sergeant. Which way are the tracks of Jim Courtney's wagon heading?" Using the mug again, he pointed out the deep ruts, which were even more obvious now that the grass no longer screened them.



Oudeman lifted his hat and scratched his bald pate. "North-east," he grunted.



"So, if we go southwards will we catch up with Courtney?" Koots asked, in a kindly tone.



"No, but..." Oudeman's voice trailed off.



"But what?"



"Captain, sir, without the horses we will never get back to the colony."



Koots stood up and flicked the coffee grounds out of his mug. "The reason we are here, Oudeman, is to catch Jim Courtney, not to return to the colony. Mount!" He looked at Xhia. "Good, so! You, yellow baboon, take the spoor again and eat the wind."



There was water in the streams and the rivers they crossed, but no grass on the veld. They rode for fifty and then a hundred leagues without nnding grazing. In the larger rivers they found aquatic weeds and lily stems beneath the surface of the water. They waded out to harvest them with their bayonets, and fed them to the horses. In one steep, narrow valley the sweet-thorn trees had not been entirely stripped of their oliage. They climbed into the trees and cut down the branches that the



locusts had not torn down with their weight. The horses ate the green leaves hungrily, but this was not their normal diet and they derived only small benefit from it.



By now the animals were showing all the signs of slow starvation, but Koots never wavered in his determination. He led them on across the desolation. The horses were so weakened that the riders were forced to dismount and lead them up any sharp incline to husband their strength.



The men were hungry too. The game had disappeared along with the grass. The once teeming veld was deserted. They ate the last few handfuls in the leather grain sacks, and then were reduced to any windfall that the ruined veld might provide.



With his slingshot Xhia knocked down the prehistoric blue-headed lizards that lived among the rocks, and they dug up the burrows of moles and spring-rats that were surviving on subterranean roots. They roasted them without skinning or cleaning the carcasses. This would have wasted precious nourishment. They simply threw them whole upon the coals, let the fur frizzle off, the skin blacken and burst open. Then they picked the half-cooked flesh off the tiny bones with their fingers. Xhia chewed the discarded bones like a hyena.



He discovered a treasure in an abandoned ostrich nest. There were seven ivory-coloured eggs in the rude scrape in the ground. Each egg was almost the size of his own head. He capered around the nest, screeching with excitement. "This is another gift that clever Xhia brings to you. The ostrich, which is my totem, has left this for me." He changed his totem with as little compunction as he would take a new woman. "Without Xhia you would have perished long ago."



He selected one of the ostrich eggs, set it on end in the sand, then looped his bowstring around the shaft of an arrow. He placed the point of the arrow on the top of the shell. By sawing the bow rapidly back and forth he spun the arrow. The point drilled neatly through the thick shell. As it broke through there was a sharp hiss of escaping gas and a yellow fountain erupted high in the air, like champagne from a bottle that had been shaken violently. Xhia clapped his open mouth over the hole and sucked out the contents of the egg.



The men around him leaped backwards, exclaiming with alarm and disgust as a sulphurous stench engulfed them.



"Mother of a mad dog!" Koots swore. "The thing is rotten."



Xhia rolled his eyes with relish, but did not remove his mouth from the hole, lest the rest of the yellow liquid spray out on to the dry earth and be lost. He gulped it down greedily.



"Those eggs have lain there since the last breeding season six



months in the hot sun. They are so badly addled that they would poison a dog hyena." Oudeman choked and turned away.



Xhia sat beside the nest and drank two of the eggs without pause, except to belch or chuckle with pleasure. Then he packed those that remained into his leather bag. He slung it over his shoulder and set off again along the wheel ruts of Jim Courtney's wagon train.



The men and horses grew daily weaker and more emaciated. Only Xhia was plump and his skin shone with health and vigour. The addled ostrich eggs, the castings of owls, the dung of lions and jackals, bitter roots and herbs, the maggots of blow-flies, the larvae of wasps and hornets food that only he could stomach sustained him.



Wearily the band climbed another denuded hillside and came upon yet another of Jim Courtney's camps. This one was different from the hundreds they had found before. The wagon train had paused here long enough to build grass huts and set up long smoking racks of raw timber over beds of what was by now cold black ash, most of it scattered on the wind.



"Here Somoya killed his first elephant," Xhia announced, after only a cursory examination of the abandoned campsite.



"How do you know that?" Koots demanded, as he dismounted stiffly. He stood with clenched fists pressed into his aching back, and gazed around him.



"I know it because I am clever and you are stupid," Xhia said, in the language of his people.



"None of that monkey talk," Koots snarled at him. But he was too tired to cuff him. "Answer me straight!"



"They have smoked a mountain of meat on these racks, and these are the knucklebones of the elephant from which they have made a stew." He picked a bone out of the grass. A few shreds of sinew adhered to it and Xhia gnawed at them before he went on: "I will find the rest of the carcass nearby."



He disappeared like a tiny puff of yellow smoke, a way he had that never failed to take Koots by surprise. One moment he was standing in plain sight, the next he was gone. Koots sank down in the meagre shade or a bare tree. He did not have long to wait. Xhia appeared again, as suddenly as he had vanished, with the huge white thigh bone of a bull elephant.



A great elephant!" he confirmed. "Somoya has become a mighty hunter, as his father was before him. He has cut the tusks from the skull. % the holes in the jawbone I can tell that each tusk was as long as two men, one standing on the shoulders of the other. They were as thick around as my chest." He puffed it out to illustrate.



Koots had little interest in the subject, and jerked his head to indicate the abandoned huts. "How long did Somoya camp here?"



Xhia glanced at the depth of the ash in the pits, at the midden heaps and the worn footpaths between the huts, and showed the fingers of both hands twice. "Twenty days."



"Then we have gained that much upon them," Koots said, with grim satisfaction. "Find something for us to eat before we go on."



Under Xhia's direction the troopers dug up a spring-hare and a dozen blind golden moles. A pair of white-collared crows was attracted by this activity, and Oudeman brought them down with a single musket shot. The moles tasted like chicken but the flesh of the crows was disgusting, tainted with the carrion of their diet. Only Xhia ate it with relish.



They were sick with weariness, and saddle sore, and after they had eaten the scraps of flesh they rolled into their blankets just as the sun was setting. Xhia woke them with squeals of excitement, and Koots staggered to his feet with his pistol in one hand, drawn sword in the other. "To arms! On me!" he shouted, before he was fully awake. "Fix your bayonets!"



Then he stopped short and gazed into the eastern sky. It was alight with a weird glow. The Hottentots whimpered with superstitious awe and cowered in their kaross blankets. "It is a warning," they told each other, but softly so that Koots could not hear them. "It is a warning that we should turn back to the colony, and abandon this mad chase."



"It is the burning eye of the Kulu Kulu," Xhia sang, and danced for the great shining deity in the sky above him. "He is watching over us. He promises rain and the return of the herds. There will be sweet green grass, and rich red meat. Soon, very soon."



Instinctively the three Dutchmen moved closer together.



"This is the star that guided the three wise men to Bethlehem." Koots was an atheist, but he knew the other two were devout, so he turned the phenomenon deftly to his advantage. "It is beckoning us on."



Oudeman grunted, but he did not want to provoke his captain with argument. Richter crossed himself furtively, for he was a clandestine Catholic in the company of Lutherans and heathens.



Some in fear, others in joyous anticipation, they all watched the comet's stately progress across the heavens. The stars paled and then disappeared, obliterated by its splendour.



Before dawn the trail of the comet stretched in an arc from one horizon to the other. Then, abruptly, it was in turn obscured by dense banks of cloud that rolled in from the east, off the warm Ocean of the Indies. As a murky day broke, thunder rolled against the hills and a blade of vivid lightning ripped open the belly of the clouds. The rain



came down. The horses turned their tails into the wind and the men huddled under their tarpaulins as icy squalls swept over them. Only Xhia threw off his loincloth and pranced naked in the rain, throwing back his head and letting the waters fill his open mouth.



It rained for a day and a night without ceasing. The earth dissolved under them, and each gully and don ga became a raging river, every depression and hollow in the earth became a lake. Incessantly the rain raked them and the thunder bemused them, like a cannonade of heavy guns. Huddled in their blankets, they shivered with the wet and the cold, their guts cramped and churned with the sour fluids of starvation. At intervals the rain froze before it hit the ground, and hailstones as big as knucklebones rattled against their tarpaulins and drove the horses frantic. Some snapped their ropes and galloped away in front of the sweeping grey squall.



Then on the second day, the clouds broke up and streamed away in dirty grey tatters and the sun burst through, hot and bright. They roused themselves, mounted and sallied out to retrieve the missing horses, which were scattered away for leagues across the veld. One had been killed by a pair of young lions. The two big cats were still on the body, so Koots and Oudeman rode them down and shot both of them in furious retribution. It was another three days wasted before Koots could resume the chase. Though the rain had eroded and, in places, obliterated the wagon trail, Xhia never faltered and led them on without check.



The veld responded joyously to the rain and the hot sun that followed it. Within the first day a soft green fuzz covered the gaunt outlines of the hills, and the trees lifted their drooping bare branches. Before they had gone another hundred leagues the horses' bellies were distended with sweet new grass, and they encountered the first influx of returning wild game.



From afar Xhia spotted a herd of over fifty hartebeest, each animal the size of a pony, their red coats shining in the sunlight, their thick horns sweeping up then twisting back, tall as a bishop's mitre. The three Dutchmen spurred out to meet the herd. The strength of the horses was restored by the fresh grazing, and they ran them down swiftly. Musket fire boomed out across the plains.



They butchered the hartebeest where they fell, and built fires beside the carcasses. They threw bleeding hunks of flesh on to the coals and then, half crazed with hunger, they gorged on the roasted meat. Although he was sleek, well fed and only half the size of the troopers, *hia ate more than any two of them, and for once not even Koots grudged it to him.



Kadem knelt behind a fallen log beside a rain-swollen rill of sweet water. He had laid the musket over the top of the log, with his turban folded into a cushion beneath it. Without this padding the weapon might bounce off the hardwood log at the discharge and the shot fly wide. The musket was one of those they had taken from the powder magazine in the Revenge. Rashood had only managed to steal four small powder bags. The mighty rainstorm that had drenched them for a day and a night had also soaked and caked most of the powder that remained. Kadem had crumbled and sorted the damaged remnants with his fingers, but in the end he had only been able to retrieve a single bag of the precious stuff. To conserve what remained, he had used only half a measure to charge the musket.



Through the riverine bush he watched a small herd of impala antelope feeding. They were the first game he had seen since the locust swarms had passed. They were nibbling the sprigs of new green growth that the rains had brought forth. Kadem picked out one of the rams from the herd, a velvety brown creature with lyre-shaped horns. He was an expert musketeer, but his weapon was half charged and he had loaded only a few lead pellets of goose-shot on top of the powder. For these to be effective he had to let the animal come in close. His moment came and Kadem fired. Through the whirling cloud of gunsmoke he saw the ram stagger, and then, bleating pitifully, it tottered in a circle with its front leg dangling from the shattered shoulder. Kadem dropped the musket and darted forward with the cutlass in his hand. He stunned the ram with a blow of the heavy brass pommel, then rolled it over swiftly and slit its throat while it still lived.



"In God's Name!" He blessed it and the flesh was hal al no longer profane, fit to be eaten by believers. He whistled softly and his three followers came up the bank of the rill, from where they had hidden. Swiftly they butchered the carcass, then roasted strips of meat from either side of the spine over the small fire Kadem allowed them to build. As soon as the meat was cooked he ordered them to extinguish it. Even in this vast, uninhabited wilderness he was always careful to remain hidden. This was a part of his desert training, where almost every tribe was in a blood feud with all its neighbours.



They ate quickly and sparingly, then rolled the remaining cold cooked meat in their turbans, draped them over their shoulders and knotted them round their waists.



"In God's Name, we go on." Kadem stood up and led his three



followers along the bank of the stream. It cut through a steep, rugged barrier of hills. By now their robes were stained and the hems so tattered that they seemed to have been nibbled away by rats, barely covering their knees. They had made sandals for themselves from the hides of game they had killed before the locusts came. The ground was harsh and stony underfoot. There were areas carpeted with the three-pointed devil thorns, which always presented one of their spikes uppermost. The auger points could pierce even the most leathery sole to the bone.



By now the rains had repaired most of the damage wreaked by the locust swarms. However, they had no horses and they had travelled hard on foot, from before dawn until sunset each day. Kadem had decided that they must head northwards, and try to reach one of the coastal Omani trading centres beyond the Pongola river before their powder ran out. They were still a thousand leagues or more short of their goal.



They halted again at midday, for even these indefatigable travellers must stop to pray at the appointed times. They had no prayer mats with them, but Kadem estimated the direction of Mecca from the position of the noon sun and they prostrated themselves on the rugged earth. Kadem led the prayers. They affirmed that God was one and Muhammad his last true Prophet. They asked no boon or favour in return for their faith. When their worship was completed in the pure, strict form, they squatted in the shade and ate a little more of the cold roasted venison. Kadem led the quiet conversation, then instructed them in religious and philosophical matters. At last he glanced up at the sun again. "In God's Name, let us continue the journey."



They rose and girded themselves, then froze together as they heard, faint but unmistakable, the sound of musket fire.



ThenI Civilized men, with muskets and powder!" Kadem whispered. "To have ventured this far inland they must have horses. All the things we need to save ourselves from perishing in this dreadful place."



The gunfire came again. He cocked his head and slitted his wild eyes as he tried to pinpoint the source of the sound. He turned in that direction. "Follow me. Move like the wind, swift and unseen," he said. They must not know we are here."



in the middle of that afternoon, Kadem found the spoor of many horses moving towards the north-east. The hoofs were shod with steel and had left clear prints in the rain-damp earth. They followed them at a trot across the plains, which danced and wavered with mirage. In the late afternoon they saw the dark smear of smoke from a campfire ahead. they went forward more cautiously. In the gathering dusk they could make out the twinkle of red flames below the smoke. Closer still, Kadem saw the shapes of men moving in front of the fire. Then the wind of the



day faded away, and the night breeze puffed from another direction. Kadem sniffed the air and caught the unmistakable ammoniac tang. "Horses!" he whispered, with excitement.



Koots leaned back against the hole of the camel-thorn tree and carefully pressed shreds of crumbling dry shag into his clay pipe. His tobacco bag was made from the scrotum of a bull buffalo with a drawn string of sinew to close the mouth. It was less than half full, and he was rationing himself to this half-pipe a day. He lit it with a coal from the fire and coughed softly with pleasure as the first powerful inhalation filled his lungs.



His troopers were spread out under the surrounding trees; each man had picked his own spot to lay out his fur kaross. Their bellies were stuffed with the meat of the hartebeest, the first time in over a month that they had eaten their fill. So that they could better savour this feast, Koots had allowed an early halt to the day's march. There was almost an hour left of daylight. In the normal run of events they would have camped only when the dusk obscured the wagon ruts they were following.



From the corner of his eye Koots picked up a flicker of movement and he glanced around quickly, then relaxed again. It was only Xhia. Even as Koots watched him he vanished into the darkening veld. A Bushman, with every hand turned against him all his life, would never lie down to sleep until he had swept his back trail. Koots knew he would make a wide circle out across the ground that they had already travelled. If an enemy was following them, Xhia would have cut his tracks.



Koots smoked his pipe down to the last crumb, savouring every breath. Then, regretfully, he knocked out the ash. With a sigh he settled down under his kaross and closed his eyes. He did not know how long he had slept, but he woke with a light touch on his cheek. As he started up Xhia made a soft, clucking sound to calm him.



"What is it?" Instinctively Koots kept his voice low.



"Strangers," Xhia replied. "They follow us."



Then?" Koots's wits were still fuddled with sleep. Xhia did not deign to answer such an inanity. "Who? How many?" Koots insisted, as he sat up.



Quickly Xhia twisted a spill of dried grass. Before he lit it he held up a corner of Koots's kaross as a screen from watching eyes. Then he held the spill to the dying ash of the fire. He blew on the coals, and when the spill burst into flame he screened it with the kaross and his own



body. He held something in his free hand. Koots peered at it. It was a scrap of soiled white cloth.



"Ripped from a man's clothing by thorns," Xhia told him. Then he showed his next trophy, a single strand of black hair. Even Koots realized at once that it was a human hair, but it was too black and coarse to have come from the head of a northern European and it was too straight, free of kinks, to have come from the head of a Bushman or an African tribesman.



This rag comes from a long robe such as Mussulmen wear. This hair from his head."



"Mussulman?" Koots asked in surprise, and Xhia clicked in assent. Koots had learned better than to argue.



"How many?"



"Four."



"Where are they now?"



"Lying close. They are watching us." Xhia let the burning spill drop and rubbed out the last sparks in the dust with the palm of his childlike hand.



"Where have they left their horses?" Koots asked. "If they had smelt ours they would have whinnied."



"No horses. They come on foot."



"Arabs on foot! Then, whoever they are, that is what they are after." Koots pulled on his boots. "They want our horses." Careful to keep a low profile, he crawled to where Oudeman was snoring softly and shook him. Once Oudeman was fully awake he grasped quickly what was happening, and understood Koots's orders.



"No gunfire!" Koots repeated. "In the dark there is too much risk of hitting the horses. Take them with cold steel."



Koots and Oudeman crept to each of the troopers, and whispered the orders. The men rolled out of their blankets, and slipped singly down to the horse pickets. With drawn sabres they lay up among shrub and low brush.



Koots placed himself on the southern perimeter furthest from the faint glow of the dying campfire. He lay flat against the earth, so that any man approaching the pickets would be silhouetted against the stars and the fading traces of the great comet, by now only an ethereal ghost in the western sky. Orion was no longer obliterated by its light: at this season of the year he was standing on his head below the dazzle of the Milky Way. Koots covered his eyes to enhance his night vision. He listened with all his attention, and opened his eyes only briefly, so that they would not be tricked by the light.



Time passed slowly. He measured it by the turning of the heavenly



bodies. For any other man it might have been hard to keep his level of concentration screwed up to the main, but Koots was a warrior. He had to close his ears to the mundane sounds made by the horses as they shifted their weight or cropped a mouthful of grass.



The last glimmer of the great comet was low on the western horizon before Koots heard the click of two pebbles striking together. Every nerve in his body snapped taut. A minute later, and much closer, there came the slither of a leather sandal on the soft earth. He kept his head low, and saw a dark shape move against the stars.



He is closing in, he thought. Let him start to work on the ropes.



The intruder paused when he reached the head of the horse lines Koots saw his head turn slowly as he listened. He wore a turban and his beard bushed and curled. After a long minute he stooped over the running line to which the head halters of the horses were secured by steel rings. Two of the animals jerked their heads free as the line slipped through the rings.



As soon as Koots guessed that the intruder was absorbed in unravelling the next knot he rose to his feet and moved towards him. But he lost sight of him as he crouched below the skyline. He was no longer where Koots expected him to be, and abruptly Koots stumbled up against him in the darkness. Koots shouted to warn his men, then the two of them were struggling chest to chest, too close for Koots to use his blade.



Koots realized at once that the man he was wrestling was a formidable adversary. He twisted like an eel in his grip, and he felt all hard muscle and sinew. Koots tried to knee his groin, but his kneecap was almost torn loose as it struck the hard, rubbery muscle of the man's thigh instead of the soft bunch of his genitals. In an instantaneous riposte the man slammed the heel of his right hand up under Koots's jaw. His head snapped back and it felt as though his neck was broken as he went over backwards and sprawled on the ground. He saw the intruder rearing over him and the glint of his blade as it went up high for the forehand cut to his head. Koots threw up his own sabre in an instinctive parry, and steel thrilled on steel as the blades met.



The intruder broke off the attack and disappeared into the darkness. Koots crawled to his knees, still half stunned. There were shouts and the sound of blows from all around, and he heard both Oudeman and Richter bellowing orders and encouragement to the others. Then there was the bang and flash of a pistol shot. That galvanized Koots.



"Don't shoot, you fools! The horses! Have a care for the horses!" He pulled himself to his feet, and at that moment heard the clatter of shod hoofs behind him. He glanced around and saw the dark outline of a



horseman bearing down upon him at full gallop. A sword glinted dully in the starlight and Koots ducked. The blade hissed past his cheek, and he glimpsed the turbaned head and beard of the rider as he raced by.



Wildly he looked about him. Nearby, the grey mare was a pale blob against the darker background. She was the fastest and strongest of the entire string. He sheathed his sword, and checked the pistol in the holster at his hip as he ran to her. As soon as he was astride her back he listened for the sound of hoofs, turned her with his knees and kicked her into a full gallop.



Every few minutes during the next hours he was forced to stop and listen for the fugitive's hoofbeats. Although the Arab often twisted and turned to throw off Koots's pursuit he always headed back towards the north. An hour before dawn Koots lost the sound of him altogether. Either he had turned again or he had slowed his mount to a walk.



North! He is set on north, he decided.



He placed the great Southern Cross squarely over his shoulder and rode into the north, keeping to a steady canter that would not burn up the mare. The dawn came up with startling rapidity. His horizon expanded as the darkness drew back, and his heart bounced as he made out the dark shape moving not a pistol shot ahead of him. He knew at once that it was not one of the larger species of antelope, for the shape of the rider upon its back was plain to see against the lightening veld. Koots pushed the mare harder and came up on him swiftly. The rider was not yet aware of him and was holding his horse to a walk. Koots recognized the bay gelding, a good strong mount, almost a match for his mare.



"Son of the great whore!" Koots laughed with triumph. "The bay has gone lame. No wonder he had to slow down." Even in this poor light it was plain to see that the gelding was favouring his off fore. He must have picked up a sharp stone or a thorn in the frog, and he was making heavy weather of it. Koots raced down upon them, and the fugitive swivelled round. Koots saw that he was a hawk-faced Arab, with a curling bush of beard. He took one quick look at Koots, then flogged the gelding into a laboured gallop.



Koots was close enough to risk a pistol shot and try to end it swiftly. He threw up his weapon and fired for the centre of the Arab's broad back. It must have been close for the Arab ducked and shouted, "Swords, infidel! Man to man!"



As an ensign Koots had spent years with the VOC army in the Orient. His Arabic was fluent and colloquial. Those are sweet words!" he shouted back. "Stand and let me thrust them down your throat."



Within two hundred yards the gelding was pulled up. The Arab



slipped off his back, and turned to face Koots, flourishing the naval cutlass in his right hand. Koots realized he had no firearm: if he had carried a musket when he entered the camp, he had lost it somewhere along the way. He was dismounted, and had only the cutlass and, of course, a dagger. An Arab always had a dagger. Koots had a great advantage, and no quixotic notions ever entered his calculations. He would exploit it to the full. He charged straight down on the Arab, leaning out to sabre him from horseback.



The Arab was quicker than he anticipated. As soon as he read Koots's intention, he feinted away from the charge and then, at the last moment, darted back under his sword arm, brushing down the flank of the running mare with the grace of a toreador leaning inside the horns of the charging bull. At the same time he reached up, grabbed a handful of the skirt of Koots's leather coat and threw all his weight on it. It was so sudden and unexpected that Koots was taken by surprise. He was leaning far out from his mount's bare back, without stirrups or reins to steady himself, and he was hauled bodily off the mare.



But Koots was a fighting man too, and, like a cat, he landed on his feet with his grip on the hilt of his sabre. The Arab went for the forehand cut to the head again. Then immediately he reversed and cut low for the Achilles tendon. Koots met the first stroke, deflecting it with a twist of the wrist, but the second was so fast that he had to jump over the swing of the cutlass. He was in balance when he landed and thrust straight at the Arab's dark glittering eyes. The Arab rolled his head and let the stroke fly over his shoulder, but so close that it razored a tuft of his beard from below his ear. They sprang apart and circled each other. Neither was even breathing hard: two warriors in peak condition.



"What is your name, son of the false prophet?" Koots asked easily. "I like to know who I am killing."



"My name is Kadem ibn Abubaker al-Juri, infidel," he said softly, but his eyes glittered at the insult. "And, apart from Eater-of-Dung, what do men call you?"



"I am Captain Herminius Koots of the army of the VOC."



"Ah!" said Kadem. "Your fame goes ahead of you. You are married to the pretty little whore named Nella who has been fucked by every man who ever visited Good Hope. Even I had a few guilders' worth of her behind the hedge of the Company gardens when I was in the colony only a short while ago. I commend you. She knows her trade and enjoys her work."



The insult was so barbed and unexpected that Koots gaped at him the Arab even knew her name. His sword arm faltered with the shock. On the instant Kadem was at him again, and he had to scramble



backwards to avoid the attack. They circled and came together, and this time Koots managed a touch high on his left shoulder. But it barely scratched the skin and no more than a few scarlet drops showed through the thin soiled cotton sleeve of Kadem's robe.



They essayed a dozen more passes without a hit, and then Kadem scored, slicing open Koots's hip, but only skin deep. The blood made it look worse than it was. Nevertheless Koots gave ground for the first time, and his sword arm ached. He regretted that wasted pistol shot. Kadem was smiling, a thin reptilian curl of the lips, and suddenly, as Koots had expected, a thin curved dagger appeared in his left hand.



Then Kadem came on again, very fast, leading with his right foot, his blade turning into a darting sunbeam, and Koots went back before it. His heel caught on a patch of thorns and he nearly fell, but recovered with a sideways twist that jarred his spine. Kadem broke off again and circled out left. He had read Koots accurately. Left was his weak side. Kadem was not to know that, years ago, during the fighting before Jaffna, he had taken a ball through that knee. It was aching now and he was panting for breath. Kadem came on again, steely and relentless.



By now Koots was flailing his blade a little, not thrusting straight and hard. His breath whistled in his own ears. He knew that it would not be much longer. The sweat burned his eyes, and Kadem's face blurred.



Then, abruptly, Kadem pulled back and lowered his cutlass. He was staring over Koots's shoulder. It might have been a ruse, and Koots refused to respond. He watched the dagger in Kadem's left hand, trying to steady and compose himself for the next pass.



Then he heard the sound of hoofs behind him. He turned slowly, and there were Oudeman and Richter mounted and fully armed, Xhia leading them. Kadem let both the dagger and the cutlass drop from his hand, but still he stood with his chin lifted and his shoulders squared.



"Shall I kill the swine-pig, Captain?" Oudeman asked, as he rode up. His carbine was resting across the saddle in front of him. Koots almost gave the order. He was shaken and angry. He knew how close he had come, and Kadem had called Nella a whore. It was the truth, but death to any man who uttered it in Koots's hearing. Then he checked himself. I he man had spoken of Good Hope. There was something to learn from that, and later Koots would kill him with his own hands. That would give him more pleasure than letting Oudeman do it for him.



i want to hear more from him. Tie him behind your horse."



It was almost two leagues back to camp. They bound Kadem's wrists ogether and tied the other end of the rope to the snap-ring on the wing f Oudeman's saddle. He dragged Kadem at a trot. When he fell



'-'udeman jerked him to his feet again, but each time Kadem lost a piece



of skin from where his elbows or his knees struck the hard ground. He was coated with a paste of dust, sweat and blood when Oudeman dragged him into the camp.



Koots swung down from the back of the grey mare, and went to inspect the other three Arab prisoners that Oudeman had captured.



"Names?" he demanded of the two who seemed uninjured.



"Rashood, effendi."



"Habban, effendi." They touched their foreheads and breasts in respect and submission. He went to the third prisoner, who was wounded. He lay groaning, curled like a foetus in the womb.



"Name?" Koots said, and kicked him in the belly. The wounded man groaned louder, and fresh blood trickled from between his fingers where he was clutching his stomach. Koots glanced at Oudeman.



"Stupid Goffel," Oudeman explained. "He was carried away with excitement. Forgot your orders and shot him. It's in the belly. He won't live until tomorrow."



"So! Better this than one of the horses," Koots said, and drew the pistol from the holster on his sword belt. He cocked it and held the muzzle to the back of the wounded man's head. At the shot the prisoner stiffened, his eyes rolled back in their sockets. His legs kicked spasmodically, then lay still.



"Waste of good powder," said Oudeman. "Should have let me use the knife."



"I haven't had my breakfast yet, and you know how squeamish I can be." Koots smiled at his own sense of humour and returned the smoking pistol to its holster. He waved his hand towards the other prisoners, "Give them each ten with the sjambok across the soles of both feet to put them in a friendlier mood, and as soon as I have finished my breakfast I will speak to them again."



Koots ate a bowl of stew made from the shanks of the hartebeest, and watched Oudeman and Richter lay on the sjambok to the bare feet of the Arab captives.



"Hard men." Koots gave grudging approval when the only sound they made was a small grunt to the fall of each stroke. He knew what agony they were enduring. Koots wiped out the bowl with a finger and sucked it as he went back to squat in front of Kadem. Despite his torn and dusty robe, the cuts and abrasions that covered his limbs, Kadem was so obviously the leader that Koots wasted no time on the others. He glanced up at Oudeman and indicated Rashood and Habban. "Take these pig-swine away."



Oudeman knew that he wanted them out of earshot while he



Questioned Kadem so that they would not hear his replies. Later he would question them separately and compare their responses. Koots waited until the Hottentot troopers had dragged them, limping on their swollen feet, to a tree and tied them to its trunk. Then he turned back to Kadem. "So you visited the Cape of Good Hope, Beloved of Allah?"



Kadem stared back at him with fanatical, glittering eyes in his dusty face. However, the mention of the place stirred something in Oudeman's sluggish mind. He fetched one of the muskets they had captured from the Arabs and handed it to his captain. Koots's first glance at the weapon was perfunctory.



"The butt-stock." Oudeman directed his attention. "See the emblem in the wood?"



Koots's eyes narrowed and his lips formed a thin, hard line as he traced the design that had been burned into the wood with a branding iron. It depicted a cannon, a long-barrelled nine-pounder on a two wheeled carriage, and in the ribbon below it the initials CBTC.



"Good, so!" Koots looked up and stared at Kadem. "You are one of Tom and Dorian Courtney's men."



Koots saw something flare in the depths of those dark eyes, but it was so swiftly hidden again that he could not be certain of it, but the emotion the names had engendered was passionate. It might have been loyalty, dedication or something different. Koots sat and stared at him. "You know my wife," Koots reminded him, 'and I might have to castrate you for the way you spoke of her. But do you know the Courtney brothers, Tom and Dorian? If you do, it might just save your balls."



Kadem stared back at him, and Koots spoke to Oudeman: "Sergeant, lift his skirts that we can judge how big is the knife we must use for the job."



Oudeman grinned and knelt beside Kadem, but before he could touch him Kadem spoke.



"I know Dorian Courtney, but his Arabic name is al-Salil."



The Red-headed One," Koots agreed. "Yes, I have heard him called that. What of his brother, Tom? The one whom men also call Klebe, the hawk."



"I know them both," Kadem affirmed.



"You are their hireling, their creature, their lackey, their lickspittle?" Koots chose his words with care to provoke him.



I am their implacable enemy." Kadem rushed into the trap, his pride bristling. "If Allah is kind, then one day I will be their executioner."



He said it with such fierce sincerity that Koots believed him. He said nothing, for often silence is the best form of interrogation.



Kadem was by now so agitated that he burst out: "I am the bearer of the sacred fat was entrusted to me by my master the ruler of Oman, Caliph Zayn al-Din ibn al-Malik."



"Why would such a noble and mighty monarch entrust such a mission to a miserable slice of rancid pork fat such as you?" Koots gave a mocking laugh. Although Oudeman had not understood a word of the Arabic exchanges he laughed like an echo.



"I am a prince of the royal blood," Kadem avowed angrily. "My father was the Caliph's brother. I am his nephew. The Caliph trusts me because I command his legions and I have proven myself to him a hundred times over in war and in peace."



"Yet you have failed to accomplish this sacred fat wa of yours," Koots taunted him. "Your enemies still flourish, and you are in rags, tied to a tree and covered with filth. Is that the Omani ideal of a mighty warrior?"



"I have slain the incestuous sister of the Caliph, which was part of the task I was given, and I have stabbed al-Salil so deeply and grievously that he might still perish of the wound. If he does not, I will not rest until my duty is accomplished."



"All this is the raving of a madman." Koots smirked at him. "If you are driven by this sacred duty, why do I find you wandering like a beggar in the wilderness, dressed in filthy rags, carrying a musket with al-Salil's emblem branded on it, trying to steal a horse on which to escape?"



Skilfully Koots milked the information out of his captive. Kadem boasted of how he had inveigled himself on board the Gift of Allah. How he had waited his opportunity, and how he had struck. He described his assassination of the Princess Yasmini, and how he had come so close to killing al-Salil also. Then he described how, with the help of his three followers, he had escaped from the Courtney ship while it lay in the lagoon, how they had avoided the pursuit and at last had stumbled on Koots's troop.



There was much in this account that was entirely new to Koots, especially the flight of the Courtneys from the colony of Good Hope. This must have taken place long after he had left in pursuit of Jim Courtney. However, all of it was logical and he could detect no weak spots in the story, nor any attempt to deceive him in Kadem's rendition of it. Everything seemed to fit neatly into what he knew of Keyser and his intentions. It was also the kind of resourceful enterprise that Tom and Dorian Courtney between them might devise.



He believed it, with reservations. There were always reservations. Yes! he gloated inwardly, without letting it show in his expression. This is an extraordinary stroke of fortune, he thought. I have been sent an



ally I can bind to me by chains of steel, a religious fat wa and a burning hatred beside which even my own determination pales.



Koots stared hard at Kadem while he made his decision. He had lived among the Mussulmen, fought for and against them long enough to understand the teachings of Islam and the immutable codes of honour that bound them.



"I also am the sworn enemy of the Courtneys," he said at last. He saw the naked passion in Kadem's eyes veiled immediately.



Have I made a fatal mistake? he wondered. Have I rushed too swiftly to my purpose, and startled my quarry? He watched Kadem's suspicion growing stronger. However, I have taken the plunge now, and I cannot go back. Koots turned to Oudeman. "Loosen his bonds," he ordered, 'and bring water for him to wash and drink. Give him food to eat and let him pray. But watch him carefully. I don't think he will try to escape, but do not give him the chance."



Oudeman looked mystified by these orders. "What about his men?" he asked uncertainly.



"Keep them tied up and under close guard," Koots told him. "Don't let Kadem speak to them. Don't let him go near them."



Koots waited until after Kadem had bathed, eaten and carried out the solemn ritual of the midday prayers. Only then did he send for him to continue their conversation.



Koots observed the polite form of greeting and, in so doing, changed Kadem's status from that of captive to guest, with all the responsibilities that that relationship placed on both of them. Then he went on. "The reason why you find me here, in the wilderness so far from the civilized abodes of men, is that I am following the same quest as you. Behold these wagon tracks." He pointed them out, and Kadem glanced at them. Of course he had noticed them while he had stalked the horses and closed in on the camp.



"Do you see them?" Koots insisted.



Kadem's face set in a stony expression. He was already regretting his previous indiscretions. He should never have let his emotions run away with his tongue and revealed so much to the infidel. By now he had recognized that Koots was a clever, dangerous man.



These tracks were made by four wagons that are being driven by the only son of Tom Courtney, whom you know as Klebe." Kadem blinked but showed no other expression. Koots let him think about that for a while. Then he explained why Jim Courtney had been forced to leave the colony.



Although Kadem listened in silence and his eyes showed no more



emotion than those of a cobra, he was thinking furiously. While he had been masquerading as a lowly seaman aboard the Gift of Allah he had heard all this discussed by his companions. He knew about Jim Courtney's flight from Good Hope.



"If we follow these wagon tracks, we can be certain that they will lead us to the place somewhere on the coast where father and son have agreed to meet," Koots finished, and again they were silent.



Kadem thought about what Koots had told him. He turned it over and back and forth in his mind, the way a jeweller examines a precious stone for impurities. He could detect no false notes in Koots's version of events. "What do you want of me?" he asked, at last.



"We share the same purpose," Koots answered. "I propose a pact, an alliance. Let us take the oath together in the sight of God and his Prophet. Let us dedicate ourselves to the total destruction of our mutual enemies."



"I agree to that," said Kadem, and the mad glitter he had so carefully masked returned to his eyes. Koots found it unsettling, more menacing than the cutlass and dagger in the Arab's hands when they had fought that morning.



They took the oath beneath the towering branches of a camel-thorn tree, in which new growth had already burgeoned to replace that which had been devoured by the locust swarms. They swore on the blade and the haft of Kadem's Damascus-steel dagger. Each placed a pinch of coarse salt on the other's tongue. They shared a slice of venison, swallowing a morsel each. With the razor-sharp Damascus blade they opened a vein in their right wrists, then massaged the arm until the blood was flowing bright and warm down into their cupped palms. Then they clasped hands so that their blood mingled, and maintained the grip while Kadem recited the wondrous names of God. At last they embraced.



"You are my brother in blood," said Kadem, and his voice trembled in awe at the binding power of the oath.



"You are my brother in blood," Koots said. Though his voice was firm and clear and his gaze into Kadem's eyes was steady, the oath sat lightly upon his conscience. Koots recognized no God, especially not the foreign deity of a dark-skinned, inferior race. The profit in the bargain was all his for he could turn away from it when the time came, even kill his new blood-brother with impunity if it were called for. He knew that Kadem was bound by his hope of salvation and the wrath of his God.



Deep in his heart Kadem recognized the fragility of the bond between them. That evening as they shared the campfire and ate meat together, he showed how astute he was. He gave Koots an undertaking more



poignant than any religious oath. "I have told you that I am the favourite of my uncle, the Caliph. You know also the power and riches of the Omani empire. Its realm encompasses a great ocean and the Red and Persian Seas. My uncle has promised me great reward if I carry his fat wa to a successful conclusion. You and I have sworn, as brothers in blood, to dedicate ourselves to that end. Once it is done we will return together to the Caliph's palace on Lamu island, and to his gratitude. You will embrace Islam. I will request my uncle to place you in command of all his armies on the African mainland. I will ask him to make you governor of the provinces of Monamatapa, the land from which come the gold and slaves of Opet. You will become a man of power and wealth uncountable."



The spring tides of Herminius Koots's life were beginning to flow strongly.



Now they moved along the wagon trail with renewed determination. Even Xhia was infected with this enhanced sense of purpose. Twice they cut the trail of herds of elephant coming down out of the north lands. Perhaps in some mysterious way the elephant were aware of the bounty the rains had brought upon the land. From afar Koots surveyed the massed herds of these grey giants through the lens of his telescope, but he showed only a passing interest in them. He would not let a hunt for a few ivory tusks deter him from his main quest.



He ordered Xhia to detour round the herds and they went onwards, leaving them unmolested. Both Koots and Kadem grudged every hour of delay and they drove horses and men hard along the tracks of their quarry.



They passed out of the wide swath that the locusts had cut through the land and left the great plains behind them. They entered a lovely land of rivers and lush forests, and the air tasted as sweet as the perfume of wild flowers. Scenes of great beauty and grandeur surrounded them, and the promise of riches and glory led them onwards.



"We are not far behind the wagons now," Xhia promised them, 'and each day we draw closer."



Then they came to a confluence of two rivers, a wide, deep flow and a smaller tributary. Xhia was amazed by what he found there. He led K-oots and Kadem through the field of rotting, sun-dried human remains, which had been chewed and scattered by the hyena and other scavengers. He did not have to point out to them the discarded spears and



assegais and the rawhide shields, most of them shot through by musket fire. "There was great battle here," Xhia told them. These shields and weapons are those of the fierce Nguni tribes."



Koots nodded. No man who had lived and travelled in Africa as he had could have been ignorant of the legend of the warrior tribes of the Nguni. "Good, so!" he said. "Tell us what else you see here."



"The Nguni attacked the wagons Somoya had drawn up here, across the neck between the two rivers. That was a good place for him, his back and both his sides protected by the water. The Nguni had to come at him from the front. He killed them like chickens." Xhia giggled and shook his head with admiration.



Koots walked across to the crater in the middle of the area of devastated ground in front of which the wagons had stood. "What is this?" he asked. "What happened here?"



Xhia picked a short length of charred slow-match out of the dirt, and brandished it. Even though he had seen fuse and explosives used before, he did not have the vocabulary to describe it. Instead he mimed the act of lighting the slow-match and made a sizzling sound as he ran along the path the flame must have taken. When he reached the crater he shouted, "Ba-poof!" and leaped high into the air to illustrate the explosion. Then he fell on his back and kicked both legs, shrieking with laughter. It was so expressive that even Koots had to laugh.



"By the pox-ridden vagina of the great whore," he guffawed, 'the Courtney puppy let off a mine under the imp is as they stormed the wagons. We will have to take care when we catch up with him. He has grown as crafty as his father."



It took Xhia the rest of the day to unravel all the secrets of the battlefield, spread out as it was over such a vast stretch of the veld. He showed Koots the path the routed imp is had taken, and how Jim Courtney and his men had chased them on horseback and shot them down as they ran.



They came at last to the abandoned Nguni encampment, and Xhia became almost incoherent as he realized the extent of the cattle herds Jim had captured. "Like the grass! Like the locusts!" he squeaked, as he pointed out the spoor the herds had trodden as they were driven away eastwards.



"A thousand?" Koots wondered. "Five thousand, or maybe more?"



He tried to form a rough estimate of the value of these cattle if he could get them to Good Hope.



There are not enough guilders in the Bank of Batavia, he concluded. One thing is certain. When I catch up with them, Oudeman and these stinking Hottentots will not see a single centime. I will kill them first,



before I hand over a guilder. By the time I am finished here I will make Governor van de Witten look like a pauper in comparison.



That was not the end of it. When they entered the camp Xhia led him to the far side of the encampment where a stockade stood, made of stout timber poles lashed together with strips of bark.



Koots had never seen such a sturdy construction, even in the permanent villages of the tribes. Is it a grain store? he wondered, as he dismounted and entered. He was further puzzled when he found that it contained what seemed to be drying or smoking racks. However, there was no sign of ash or scorched areas beneath them. As with the construction of the walls, the timber used seemed too massive for such a simple purpose. It was clear that the racks had been designed to support a much greater weight than strips of meat.



Xhia was trying to tell him something. He jumped up on the racks and repeated the word 'chicken'. Koots frowned irritably. This was no hen coop, nor even an ostrich coop. Koots shook his head. Xhia began another mime, holding one arm in front of his face like a long nose, and flapping his other hand from the side of his head like an ear. Koots puzzled over the meaning, then remembered that the San words for 'chicken' and 'elephant' were almost identical.



"Elephant?" he asked, and touched the elephant-hide belt at his waist.



"Yes! Yes! You stupid man." Xhia nodded vigorously.



"Are you mad?" Koots asked in Dutch. "An elephant would never fit through that doorway."



Xhia leaped down from the rack and ferreted around under it. Then he crawled out again. He showed Koots what he had found. It was an immature tusk, taken from an elephant calf. It was only as long as Xhia's forearm and so slim that he could encircle it at the thickest point with thumb and finger. It must have been overlooked when the storeroom was emptied. Xhia waved it in Koots's face.



"Ivory?" Koots began to understand. Five years previously, when he was acting as aide-de-camp to the governor of Batavia, the governor had made an official visit to the Sultan of Zanzibar. The Sultan was proud of his collection of ivory tusks. He had invited the governor and his staff to tour his treasury and view the contents. The ivory had been laid out on racks much like these, to keep it off the damp floor.



"Ivory!" Koots breathed hard. These are ivory racks!" He imagined the tusks stacked high, and tried to estimate the value of such a treasure. "In the name of the black angel, this is another great fortune to match the Plundered herds of cattle."



He turned and strode out of the shed. "Sergeant!" he bellowed. Sergeant Oudeman, get the men mounted up. Kick the brown backsides



of our Arab friends. We ride at once. We must catch Jim Courtney before he reaches the coast and comes under the protection of the guns on his father's ships."



They rode eastwards along the spoor of the cattle herds, a beaten roadway almost a mile wide, along which the cattle had grazed and trodden down the grass.



"A blind man could follow this on a moonless night," Koots told Kadem, who rode beside him.



"What a fine bait this piglet of the great hog will make for our trap," Kadem agreed, with grim determination. They expected to come up with the wagons and the herds of plundered cattle at any moment. However, day succeeded day, and although they rode hard and Koots took every opportunity to spy out the land ahead through his telescope they caught no glimpse of either cattle or wagons.



Each day Xhia assured them that they were gaining rapidly. From the sign he was able to tell Koots that Jim Courtney was hunting for elephant while his caravan was on the march.



"This is slowing him down?" Koots asked.



"No, no, he hunts far ahead of the wagons."



"Then we can surprise the caravan while he is not with them to defend them."



"We have to catch up with them first," said Kadem, and Xhia cautioned Koots that if they approached Jim Courtney's caravan too closely before they were ready to attack it, Bakkat would immediately discover their presence. "In just the same way as I discovered that these brown baboons," he indicated Kadem and his Arabs disdainfully, 'were creeping up on us. Although Bakkat is no match for Xhia, the mighty hunter, in stealth and wizard-craft, neither is he a fool. I have seen his footprints and his sign where he swept his back trail every evening before the wagons went into camp."



"How do you know it is Bakkat's sign?" Koots demanded.



"Bakkat is my enemy, and I can pick out his footprints from those or any other man that walks this land." Then Xhia pointed out other circumstances that Koots had not taken into consideration before. The signs showed clearly that Jim Courtney had made other additions to his retinue apart from the herds of captured cattle: men, many men Xhia thought there were at least fifty and that there might be as many as a hundred additional men to face them when they attacked the wagons. Xhia had employed all his genius and wizardry to determine the character and condition of these new men.



"They are big, proud men. That I can tell by the manner in which they carry themselves, by the size of their feet and the length of their



stride," he told Koots. "They bear arms and are freemen, not captives or slaves. They follow Somoya willingly and they guard and care for his herds. It comes to me that these are Nguni who will fight like warriors." Koots was learning from experience that it was best to accept the little Bushman's opinion. So far he had never been wrong in such matters.



With such quantity and quality of reinforcements added to the hard core of mounted musketeers, Jim Courtney had now mustered a formidable force which Koots dared not underestimate.



"We are outnumbered many times over. It will be a hard fight." Koots weighed these new odds.



"Surprise," said Kadem. "We have the element of surprise. We can choose our time and place to attack."



"Yes," Koots agreed. By this time his opinion of the Arab as a warrior had been much enhanced. "We must not waste that advantage."



Eleven days later they came to the brink of a deep escarpment. There were tall snow-capped mountain peaks to the south, but ahead the land dropped away steeply in a confusion of hills, valleys and forest. Koots dismounted and steadied his spyglass on Xhia's shoulder. Then, suddenly, he shouted aloud as he picked out in the blue distance the even bluer tint of the ocean. "Yes!" he cried. "I was right all along. Jim Courtney is headed for Nativity Bay to join up with his father's ships. That is the coast less than a hundred leagues ahead." Before he could fully articulate his satisfaction at having pursued the quest so far, something even more compelling caught Koots's eye.



In the wide expanse of land and forest below him he descried drifts of pale dust dispersed over a wide area, and when he turned the glass on these clouds he saw beneath them the movement of the massed herds of cattle, slow and dark as spilled oil spreading on the carpet of the veld.



"Mother of Satan!" he cried. "There they are! I have them at last." With a mighty effort he checked his warlike instinct to ride down on them immediately. Instead he cautioned himself to consider all the circumstances and eventualities that he and Kadem had discussed so earnestly over the past days.



They are moving slowly, at the speed of the grazing herds. We can afford the time to rest our own men and horses and prepare ourselves for the attack. In the meantime I will send Xhia ahead to scout Jim Courtney's dispositions, to learn his line of march, the character of his new men, and the order of battle of his horsemen." ( Kadem nodded agreement as he surveyed the ground below them. We might circle out ahead and lie in ambush. Perhaps in a narrow pass through the hills or at a river crossing. Order Xhia to have an eye for a Place such as that."



"Whatever happens, we must not let them join up with the ships that might already be waiting for them in Nativity Bay," said Koots. "We must attack before that happens, or we will be facing cannon and grapeshot as well as muskets and spears."



Koots lowered the telescope, and grabbed Xhia by the scruff of his neck to impress upon him the seriousness of his orders. Xhia listened earnestly, and understood at least every second word that Koots growled at him.



"I will find you here when I return," Xhia agreed, when Koots ended his harangue. Then he trotted away down the escarpment wall without looking back. He did not have to make any further preparations for the task ahead of him, for Xhia carried upon his sturdy back every possession he owned.



It was a little before noon when he set out, and late afternoon before he was close enough to the cattle herds to hear their distant lowing. He was careful to cover his own sign, and not to approach any closer. Despite his braggadocio he held Bakkat's powers in high respect. He circled round the herds to find the exact position of Somoya's wagons. The cattle had trodden the tracks and confused the sign, so it was difficult even for him to read as much from them as he wanted.



He came up level with the wagons but a league out to the north of their line of march when suddenly he stopped. His heart began to pound like the hoofbeats of a galloping herd of zebra. He stared down at the dainty little footprint in the dust.



"Bakkat," he whispered. "My enemy. I would know your sign anywhere, for it is imprinted on my heart."



All Koots's orders and exhortations were wiped from his mind and he concentrated all his powers on the spoor. "He goes quickly and with purpose. In a straight line, not pausing or hesitating. He shows no caution. If ever I can surprise him, this is the day."



Without another thought he turned aside from his original purpose and followed the tracks of Bakkat, whom he hated above all else in his world.



In the early morning Bakkat heard the honey-guide. It was fluttering in the treetops, chittering and uttering that particular whirring sound that could mean only one thing. His mouth watered.



"I greet you, my sweet friend," he called, and ran to stand beneath the tree in which the drab little bird was performing its seductive gyrations. Its movements became more frenzied when it saw that it had attracted Bakkat's attention. It left the branch on which it was displaying and flitted to the next tree.



Bakkat hesitated, and glanced round at the square of wagons laagered at the edge of the forest on the far side of the glade, a mile away. If he were to take the time to run back merely to tell Somoya where he was going, the bird might become discouraged and fly away before he returned. Somoya might forbid him to follow it. Bakkat smacked his lips: he could almost taste the sweet, viscous honey on his tongue. He lusted for it. "I will not be away long," he consoled himself. "Somoya will not even know that I am gone. He and Welanga are probably playing with their little wooden dolls." This was Bakkat's opinion of the carved chessmen that so often occupied the couple to the exclusion of everything around them. Bakkat ran after the bird.



The honey-guide saw him coming and sang to him as it flitted on to the next tree, then the next. Bakkat sang as he followed: "You lead me to sweetness, and I love you for it. You are more beautiful than the sunbird, wiser than the owl, greater than the eagle. You are the lord of all birds." Which was not true, but the honey-guide would be flattered to hear it.



Bakkat ran through the forest for the rest of that morning, and in the noonday when the forest sweltered in the heat, and all the animals and birds were silent and somnolent, the bird stopped at last in the top branches of a tam bootie tree, and changed its melody.



Bakkat understood what it was telling him: "We have arrived. This is the place of the hive, and it overflows with golden honey. Now you and I will eat our fill."



Bakkat stood beneath the tam bootie and threw back his head as he peered upwards. He saw the bees, highlighted by the low sunlight like golden dust motes, as they darted into the cleft in the tree trunk. Bakkat took from his shoulder his bow and quiver, his axe and leather carrying bag. He laid them carefully at the base of the tree. The honey-guide would understand that this was his guarantee that he would return. However, to make certain there was no misunderstanding, Bakkat explained

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