'I will have you thrashed!' van de Velde gurgled apoplectically. 'You slave bitch!'
'No, you won't,' said Althuda, and placed the point of the jewelled scimitar against the Governor's pendulous belly. 'Rather, you will apologize for that insult to my sister.'
'Apologize to a slave? Never!' van de Velde began in a bellow, but this time Althuda pricked him with more intent and the bellow turned into a squeal, like air escaping from a pig's bladder.
'Apologize not to a slave, but to a free-born Balinese princess,' Althuda corrected him. 'And swiftly.'
'I beg your pardon, madam,' van de Velde gritted through clenched teeth.
'You are gallant, sir.' Sukeena smiled at him. Van de Velde sank back in his seat and said no more, but he fixed his wife with a venomous stare.
Once they had left the settlement behind them, the surface of the road deteriorated. There were deep wheel ruts left by the Company wagons going out to fetch firewood, and the carriage rocked and lurched dangerously through them. Along the edge of the lagoon the water had seeped in to turn the tracks to mud and slush and, in many places, the seamen were forced to put their shoulders to the tall rear wheels to help the horses drag the vehicle through. It was late morning before they saw ahead the framework of the wooden bridge over the first river.
'Soldiers!' Aboli called. From his high seat he had picked out the glint of a bayonet and the shape of the tall helmets.
'Only four,' said Hal. His eyes were still the sharpest of all. 'They'll not be expecting trouble from this direction.' He was right. The corporal of the bridge guard came forward to meet them, puzzled but unalarmed, his sword sheathed and the match on his pistols unlit. Hal and his crew disarmed him and his men, stripped them to their breeches and sent them running back towards the colony with a discharge of muskets over their heads.
While Aboli walked the carriage over the bridge and took it on along the rudimentary track, Hal and Ned Tyler climbed beneath the wooden structure and roped a barrel of gunpowder under the heavy timber king post When it was secure Hal used the butt of his pistol to drive in the bung of the barrel, thrust a short length of slow-match into it and lit it. He and Ned scrambled back onto the roadway and ran after the carriage.
Hal's leg was painful now. It was swelling and stiffening, but he was looking back over his shoulder as he hobbled along through the ankle-deep sand. The centre of the bridge suddenly erupted in a spout of mud, water, shattered planks and piers. The wreckage fell back into the river.
'That will not hold the good colonel long, but at least he will get his breeches wet,' Hal muttered, as they caught up with the carriage. Althuda jumped down and called to him, 'Take my place. You must favour that leg.'
'There is little wrong with my leg,' Hal protested.
'Other than that it can barely carry your weight,' said Sukeena sternly, leaning over the door. 'Come up here at once, Gundwane, or else you will do lasting damage to it.'
Meekly Hal climbed up into the coach and took the seat opposite Sukeena Without looking at the pair, Aboli grinned to himself Already she gives the orders and he obeys. It seems they have the tide and a fair wind behind them.
'Let me look at that leg,' Sukeena ordered, and Hal placed it on the seat between her and Katinka.
'Take care, clod!' Katinka snapped, and pulled away her skirts. 'You will bloody my dress.'
'If you do not have a care to your tongue, it will not be the only thing I will bloody,' Hal assured her, and scowled. She withdrew into the farthest corner of the seat.
Sukeena worked over the leg with swift, competent hands. 'I should lay a hot poultice on these bites, for they are deep and will certainly fester. But I need boiling water.' She looked up at Hal.
'You will have to wait for that until we reach the mountains,' he told her. Then, for a while, their conversation broke down and they gazed into each other's eyes bemusedly. This was as close as they had ever been and each found something in the other to amaze and delight them.
Then Sukeena roused herself. 'I have my medicines in the saddle-bags, she said briskly, and climbed over the seat to reach the panniers on the back of the carriage. She hung there as she rummaged in the leather bags. The carriage jotted on over the rough track, and Hal looked with awe on her small rounded bottom, pointed skywards. Despite the ruffles and petticoats that shrouded it, he thought it almost as enchanting as her face.
She climbed back with cloths and a black bottle in her hand. 'I will swab out the wounds with this tincture and then bind them up,' she explained, without looking again into the distraction of his green eyes.
'Avast!' Hal gasped at the first touch of the tincture. 'That burns like the devil's breath.'
Sukeena scolded, 'You have endured whip and shot and sword and savaging by an animal. But the first touch of medicine and you cry like a baby. Now be still.'
Aboli's face creased into a bouquet of tattoos and merry laughter lines but, though his shoulders shook, he held his peace.
Hal sensed his amusement, and rounded on him. 'How far ahead is the bitter-almond hedge?'
'Another league.'
'Will Sabah meet us there?'
'That is what I believe, if the green-jackets don't catch up with us first.'
'Methinks we will have some respite. Schreuder made an error by rushing alone in pursuit of us. He should have mustered his troops and come after us in an orderly fashion. My guess is that most of the green-jackets will be chasing the other prisoners we turned free, They will concentrate on us only once Schreuder takes command.'
'And he has no horse,' Sukeena added. 'I think we will get clear away, and once we reach the mountains-' She broke off and lifted her eyes from Hal's leg. Both she and Hal looked ahead to the high blue rampart that filled the sky ahead.
Van de Velde had been avidly following this conversation, and now he broke in. 'The slave wench is right. You have succeeded in this underhand scheme Of yours, more's the pity. However, I am a reasonable man, Henry Courtney. Set my wife and me free now. Give the carriage over to us and let us return to the colony. In exchange I will give you my solemn undertaking to call off the chase. I will order Colonel Schreuder to send his men back to their barracks.' He turned on Hal what he hoped was an open and guileless countenance. 'I offer you my word as a gentleman on it.'
Hal saw the cunning and malice in the Governor's eyes.
'Your excellency, I am uncertain of the validity of your claim to the title of gentleman, besides which I should hate to be deprived so soon of your charming company.'
At that moment one of the front wheels of the carriage crashed into a hole in the tracks. 'The aardvarks dig these burrows,' Althuda explained, as Hal clambered down from the lopsided vehicle.
'Pray, what manner of man or beast is that?'
'The earth pig, a beast with a long snout and a thick tail that digs up the burrows of ants with its powerful claws and devours them with its long sticky tongue,' Althuda told him.
Hal threw back his head and laughed. 'Of course, I believe that. I also believe that your earth pig flies, dances the hornpipe and tells fortunes by cards.'
'You have a few things yet to learn about the land that lies out there, my friend,'Althuda promised him.
Still chuckling, Hal turned from him. 'Come on, lads!' he called to his seamen. 'Let's get this ship off the reef and running before the wind again.'
He made van de Velde and Katinka get out and the rest of them strained with the horses to pull the carriage free. From here onwards, though, the track became barely passable, and the bush on either hand grew taller and more dense as they went on. Within the next mile they were stuck in holes twice more.
'It is almost time to get rid of the carriage. We can get on faster on our own shanks, Hal told Aboli quietly. 'How much further to the hedge?' -'I thought we should have reached it by now,' Aboli replied, 'but it cannot be far.' They came to the boundary around the next kink in the narrow track. The famous bitter-almond hedge was a straggly and blighted excrescence, hardly shoulder high, but the road ended dramatically against it. There was also a rough hut, which served as a guard post to the border picket, and a notice in Dutch.
'WARNING!' the notice began, in vivid scarlet letters, and went on to forbid movement by any person beyond that point, with the penalty for infringement being imprisonment or the payment of a fine of a thousand guilders or both. The board had been erected in the name of the Governor of the Dutch East India Company.
Hal kicked open the door of the single room of the guard hut and found it deserted. The fire on the open hearth was cold and dead. A few articles of Company uniform hung on the wooden pegs in the wall, and a black kettle stood over the dead coals, with odd bowls, bottles and utensils lying on the rough wooden table or on shelves along the walls.
Big Daniel was about to put the slow-match to the thatch, but Hal stopped him. 'No point in giving Schreuder a smoke beacon to follow,' he said, 'and there's naught of value here. Leave it be,' and limped back to where the seamen were unloading the carriage.
Aboli was turning the horses out of the traces and Ned Tyler was
