Five minutes, ten minutes, and then he heard Higgens’s sloppy footfalls on the crumbling wall overhead, coming closer, closer. Madshaka shook his arms, limbered them up, tested the spring in his legs.
The crunch of shoes was just over him now, a bit of dirt knocked loose, falling on his neck, and then Madshaka sprung like a snake striking out. He saw Higgens’s startled face, his recoiling body, heard the beginning of a shout as he grabbed the guard by the ankles and jerked him off the wall. Higgens fell in a great, awkward heap, arms flailing out, his musket coming to rest on the wall where he had dropped it in surprise.
Madshaka pounced, rolling Higgens over, knees on his chest, pinning him, one hand over the man’s mouth, his dirk flashing in the other. He could have killed him that instant but he did not, because in the last seconds of his life he wanted Higgens to know who it was who had killed him. So he held the man down and grinned at him, a horrible leer, and thought of how Higgens had once grinned at him the same way as he jerked the chain attached to the iron collar around his neck.
He saw Higgens’s eyes, already wide with terror, register recognition, and then go wider still.
Higgens began to thrash, to try and dislodge Madshaka, but it was futile, like trying to push over a stone wall. Madshaka leaned close, whispered, “That’s right, Higgens. It’s Madshaka. I’m back. And now, time for you to die.”
A muffled shriek under his hand and then he cut Higgens’s throat, sinking the blade of the dirk down through soft flesh until he felt it grate on bone. He held the white man down as he writhed in his death agony, felt the hot blood pulsing over his arm and hand, and then Higgens was still.
Madshaka leaned back, looked around. No one else in sight, no indication of any alarm from within. He sat and listened to the silence for a moment more, until he was certain that Higgens’s murder had gone unnoticed. He wiped the blade of his dirk on Higgens’s breeches and sheathed it, then trotted back to the tree line and followed it back to his waiting men.
“I kill the sentry,” he whispered. “Now we go, silent, silent, like the leopard.” This he said in all their languages, slowly, so they would understand the import of his words, then said, “Follow me, stay close, yell when I do.”
He turned, headed back toward the factory, felt the powerful and dangerous presence of the men at his back. He moved along the wide trail, paused where it opened onto the clearing, but still he could see no sign of alarm. He glanced back at his men, their faces set and determined. Their blood was up, he could see. They were ready for mayhem and slaughter.
He headed off along the tree line again, the same route he had taken to get close to Higgens. Behind him, the padding of sixty pairs of feet made no more noise than the wind in the trees. Less, in fact. He arrived at that point where the tree line was closest to the wall and stopped again and let his men assemble for the final assault. He bounced on the
balls of his feet, his whole body tensed, ready for this moment.
No one betrayed Madshaka and lived long to brag on it.
He drew his cutlass, and all along the line his men drew their edged weapons as well. He held the steel aloft, looked left and right, checked his men’s readiness, then stepped out, leading the charge at the wall, and behind him the others followed. He picked up his pace as he moved over the open ground, the wall less than one hundred feet away, the madness building, building with his speed and momentum.
And then he was at the wall but it seemed as if it was no impediment at all. His foot found a chink in the crumbling surface and his legs carried him up and his hands were flat on the top and the next thing he knew he was standing on the wall, and the factory, that familiar factory, lay spread out below him.
It was time to announce his arrival. He could not hold it in a second more, for he surely would explode if he tried.
The war cry started in his gut and spread up and out, filled his lungs and his throat and finally burst from his mouth with a thunderous and frightening whoop, and on either side of him his men were gathered on the wall and they began shouting as well, the same terrifying sound of warriors ready for the fight, the fight with no quarter.
The door to the guardhouse burst open, fifty feet away, the doorway framed in weak light from within, and half-clothed men stumbled out, muskets in hand, right into the face of the horrible shouting, and Madshaka yelled, “That right, gentlemen. Madshaka’s back.”
Then Madshaka leapt from the wall down into the compound just as the first of the guards fired. He heard a scream from behind as one of his own men took the bullet, but the rest were behind him, leaping down, racing forward.
More muskets blazed away, flashes of light, the bang of the gun, and his men screaming, screaming, in fury, in fear, in agony. Madshaka felt a bullet whiz by but there was no chance that he might be struck down. There was a shield of pure energy around him that would not be penetrated.
And then he was up with the first of the guards, all of whom had discharged their weapons and now were helpless because they had no skill for fighting, they could only fire muskets.
The man in front of him, a fat man, white face sweating, terrified, saw death coming at him in the form of a huge, leering black man, the death he feared most. He swung his musket like a club at that face, but Madshaka caught the butt of the gun before it developed any force and with the other hand drove his cutlass through the man’s fat white face.
His army was there, falling on the guards so fast that they were not even able to retreat to their guardhouse, but were flanked and cut off and hacked to death where they stood.
The door to the factor’s house was open, just for an instant, and Madshaka saw John van der Haagen, the factor-lean, vicious, his eyes like a snake’s-staring out, saw his assistant and some of the others behind him, and then he slammed the door shut, as if that would protect him from the slaughter.
Madshaka looked around him. The Kru warriors, the real nucleus of his army, were clustered there, as he had instructed them. He gestured to them and they followed him at a run, racing for the factor’s house.
The closed door was no more an obstacle than was the outer wall. Madshaka hit it with his shoulder and it collapsed in front of him and he was in the factor’s house, which was no more than a hut, albeit a big one, with a grass roof and a few rooms.
It was the main room they were in now, with its long table spread with bottles and pipes and bowls and playing cards. Two lanterns hung from a beam overhead, making the room the most brightly lit space in the compound.
As he had guessed, the factor and his cronies had been carousing, drinking and gambling and working up the courage to go and drag one of the hapless slave girls from the trunk. But now they stood against the far wall, in breeches and sweat-soaked shirts, as if they were preparing for execution. Madshaka pushed into the room and his men flowed in behind him. Stevens, who was the assistant factor, raised a pistol in a trembling hand and fired.
The bullet missed Madshaka by inches-he could feel its passing- and struck the frame of the door.
Madshaka stopped, looked at the splintered wood, looked up at Stevens.
The assistant factor’s hand was shaking harder now, his mouth open, sweat standing out in beads on his forehead. Like Higgens, like the fat guard, he saw before him now the very thing that made him wake in terror in the night: a dangerous African, sold into slavery, come back for him.
The gun slipped pathetically from his fingers and made a thudding sound on the dirt floor.
It did not matter that Stevens had fired at him. He would have died regardless. They were all traitors and bastards, but Stevens was the worst and the most expendable.
“Madshaka…,” said Van der Haagen, a Dutchman in English employ.
Madshaka ignored him. A demonstration first, to make certain they all knew his position, and then talk. He sheathed his cutlass, took two long steps across the room, grabbed Stevens by the collar of his waistcoat and jerked him closer.
“Madshaka!” Van der Haagen shouted, but Madshaka whipped out his dirk and drove it into Stevens’s gut, held him there, pinned on the long blade, their faces inches apart, their breath mingling. He could smell the stale tang of dried sweat on Stevens’s clothes, the rum and smoke on his breath, the shit and piss that he could no longer hold in.
Stevens gasped, his eyes bulged, and gurgling sounds came from his throat. Then Madshaka twisted the blade and pushed Stevens away and the assistant factor fell to the ground and blood erupted from his mouth. But he was not dead, and Madshaka knew he would not be for an hour at least, and his writhing and choking on his own blood created just the background he wanted for their discussion.
