The wave receded and Zouga was still there, his hair streaming with water, slicked down over his face and into his eyes, and now he shifted slightly, jamming his legs against one of the heavy timbers and he reared back once more against -the chain, and a low bellow. broke from his throat in the agony of effort.
The ring bolt that held the loop of chain to the deck ripped out cleanly, and Zouga dragged both women clear of the water, the chain slithering after them for ten feet or more before coming up hard against the next ring bolt.
Robyn had never suspected Zouga capable of such strength, she had never seen his naked upper body, not since he was a child, had not realized that he had the lean hard muscle of a prizefighter. But even so, he could not repeat the effort, and the girl was still chained. They had won only a temporary respite. Zouga was bellowing now, and the young naval Ensign scrambled down through the open hatch. To re-enter the doomed hull was an act of courage in itself, Robyn realized, as she saw that the Ensign carried the cutting shears, lugging the heavy tool with him as he floundered towards the struggling group in the bottom of the hold.
The hull rolled through another five degrees, the water swirling higher towards them hungrily, it sucked at their bodies. Had not Zouga given them the extra few feet of chain they would be far below the surface now.
Zouga stooped over her and helped her hold the black girl's head above the water, while the Ensign groped for the chain links and fed them into the jaws of the shears.
But the blades had been blunted and chipped by the heavy work they had already done, and the Ensign was still only a lad. Zouga pushed him aside.
Again muscle bunched in his shoulders and upper arms and the chain parted with a metallic clunk. Zouga cut twice at ankle and at wrist, then he dropped the shears, picked the frail naked body up against his chest and climbed frantically up towards the hatch.
Robyn tried to follow him, but something tore deep, in her belly, she felt it go, tearing like brittle parchment, and the pain was a lance that transfixed her. She doubled over it, clutching herself, unable to move, and the wave hit her, knocking her down, swirling her over the broken timbers into the dark waters, and the darkness began to fill her head. There was temptation to let go now, to let the water and darkness take her, it would be so easy, but she gathered her anger and her obstinacy to her and went on fighting. She was still fighting when Zouga reached her, and dragged her up towards the light.
As they crawled out through the hatch into the sunlight, so the dhow rolled all the way, flinging them as though from a catapult over the side into the shocking cold of the green waters.
As the dhow capsized so the last faint cries from within her were extinguished, and the hull began to break up under the remorseless hammer of the sea.
When Robyn and Zouga surfaced, still clinging together, the whaler was hovering over them, the Ensign risking all to come in over the reef for the pick-up.
Strong hands reached down, and the overladen boat heeled dangerously as they were pulled aboard. Then the Ensign swung the bows to meet the next boiling line of surf and they climbed its steep side and crashed over the top, the seamen pulling frantically to hold her bows on.
Robyn crawled to where the black girl lay on a heap of other bodies in the bottom of the boat, her relief at finding her aboard and still alive outweighing the pain of her sodden lungs and the deep ache in her belly.
Robyn rolled the girl on to her back, and lifted her lolling head to cushion it from the pounding of the whaler's hull over the steep swells that threatened to crack her skull against the floorboards.
She saw immediately that the girl was older than she had imagined, although the body was desiccated, dried out and wasted. Yet her pelvis had the breadth of maturity. She would be sixteen years old at least, Robyn thought, and pulled a corner of the tarpaulin over her body to screen her from the men's gaze.
The girl opened her eyes again, and stared at Robyn solemnly. Those eyes were still the colour of dark honey, but the ferocity had dimmed to some other emotion as she looked up into Robyn's face. Ngi ya bongo, the girl whispered, and with a shock Robyn realized that she understood the words. She was transported in an instant to another land and another woman, her mother, Helen Ballantyne, teaching her those same words, repeating them to her until Robyn had them perfected. Ngi ya bongo, I praise you! ' Robyn tried to find a reply, but her mind was as battered as her body, and it had been so long ago that she had learned the language, the circumstances so different that the words came only haltingly. Velapi wena, who are you and from where do you come?
The black girl's eyes flew wide with shock. You! ' she whispered.
'You speak the language of the people.'
They had taken on board twenty-eight living black girls.
By the time Black joke got under way again and turned from the land, towards the open sea, the dhow's hull had burst open and the planking and timbers swung and pitched end over end as they sawed across the exposed reef.
A squawking raucous flock of seabirds squabbled over the reef, hovering above the gruesome remnants that were mixed in the floating debris of the wreck, dropping to seize a tidbit and rise again on delicate fans of pearly wings.
in the deeper water along the seaward side of the reef, the shark packs were gathering, lashing themselves into a frenzy, the stubby rounded triangles of their dorsal fins crisscrossing the green sweep of the current, while every few seconds a long torpedo-shaped body would break clear of the surface in an ecstasy of greed, falling back heavily with a boom like distant cannon as it struck the surface.
Twenty-eight from three hundred and more was no great haul, Robyn thought, as she hobbled along the line of barely living bodies, her own bruised limbs protesting every step, and her despair deepened as she realized how far gone they were. It was easy to see which of them had already lost the will to resist. She had read her father's treatise on the sick African, and she knew how important this will to resist was in treating a primitive people.
A perfectly healthy man could will himself to die, and once he did so there was nothing that could save him.
That night, despite Robyn's constant attention, twenty-two of the girls died and were carried aft to be dropped over Black Joke's stern . By morning all the others were sinking into the coma and fever of renal failure, their kidneys, shrivelled and atrophied by lack of fluid, were no longer filtering the urinal wastes from the bodies' system's. There was only one treatment and that was to force the patient to drink.
