Zama for their opinion. It was a long debate.
They are riding fast,' Bakkat pointed out. 'They have a start of almost half a night and a day. It will take many days to catch them, if you ever do. Let them go, Somoya.'
'I think they are beaten,' Zama said. 'Koots will not come back. But if you catch him, he will fight like a leopard in a trap. You will lose men.'
Louisa thought about that. Jim might be one of those wounded or killed. She thought of intervening, but she knew that might harden Jim's resolve. She had found a wide streak of contrariness in his nature.
She bit back her pleas to make him stay, and instead said quietly, 'If you go after him, I shall go with you.'
Jim looked at her. The warlike gleam in his eye faded, and he smiled in defeat, but it was still a conditional surrender. 'I have a feeling that Bakkat is right, as usual. Koots has abandoned his hostile intentions towards us, for the present at least. Most of his men have been wiped out. But he still has a formidable force with him. There are five still unaccounted for: Koots, Oudeman and the three Arabs. They could make a bitter fight of it if we cornered them. Zama is also right. We can't hope to get away scot-free a second time. If we do catch up with them some of our people will be killed or hurt. On the other hand, what seems to be flight might be a trick to draw us away from the wagons. We know Koots is a crafty animal. If we follow, Koots might circle round and attack the wagons before we can get back to intervene.' He drew breath and conceded, 'We will keep on for the coast and see what we find at Nativity Bay.' They crossed the river and headed back down the narrow gut of the gorge along the path of the cattle stampede.
Now that she knew Jim would not ride off after Koots, Louisa was happy and chatted easily as they rode side by side. Zama was anxious to return to the wagons, and he drew steadily ahead, until he was almost obscured by the trees.
'In a hurry to get back to the lovely lily.' Louisa laughed.
'Who?' Jim was puzzled.
'Intepe.'
Tegwane's granddaughter? Is Zama--'
'Yes, he is,' Louisa confirmed. 'Sometimes men are blind. How could you not have noticed?'
'You are the only thing in my eye, Hedgehog. I see nothing but you.'
'My love, that was neatly said.' Louisa leaned out of the saddle and offered her mouth. 'You shall have a kiss as a reward.'
But before he could claim it, there was a wild shout and the crash of a musket shot ahead. They saw Frost rear and shy under Zama as he reeled in the saddle.
'Zatna's in trouble!' Jim shouted, and spurred forward. As he caught up he saw that Zama was wounded. He was hanging half out of the saddle, and blood was shining at the back of his coat. Before Jim could reach him he keeled over and fell to earth in a limp heap.
'Zama!' Jim shouted, and rode for him, but at that moment he saw a Hash of movement to one side. There was danger there and Jim turned Drumfire to meet it. One of the Arabs, in a ragged robe stained with dirt and dried blood, was crouched behind the trunk of a fever tree. He was frantically reloading his long-barrelled musket, ramrodding a ball
down the muzzle. He looked up as horse and rider charged down on him. Jim recognized him. 'Rashood!' he shouted. He was one of the crewmen from the family schooner, Gift of Allah, Jim had sailed with him more than once, and knew him well, yet here he was riding with a company of the enemy, treacherously attacking the Courtney wagons and he had shot Zama.
At the same moment Rashood recognized Jim. He dropped the musket, sprang to his feet and ran. Jim unsheathed his cutlass, and steered Drumfire after him. When he realized he could not escape Rashood dropped to his knees and spread his arms in a gesture of surrender.
Jim rose over him in the stirrups.
'You treacherous, murderous bastard!' He was angry enough to use the edge and split the man's skull, but at the last moment he controlled himself and swung the flat of the blade across Rashood's temple. The steel cracked against the bone with such force that Jim feared he might have killed him anyway. Rashood collapsed face forward on to the earth. 'Don't you dare die,' Jim threatened him, as he swung down from the saddle, 'not until you have answered my questions. Then I will give you a royal sen doff.'
Louisa rode up, and Jim shouted, 'See to Zama. I think he is hard hit. I will come to you as soon as I have this swine secured.'
Liisa sent Bakkat to call for help from the men at the laager, and they carried Zama back on a litter. He had received a dangerous wound at an oblique angle through the chest and Louisa feared for his life, but she hid her anxiety. As soon as they reached the laager Intepe came running to help her nurse him.
'He is hurt, but he will live,' she told the weeping girl, as they laid Zama on the car dell bed in the spare wagon. With the help of the books and the medicine chest Sarah Courtney had given her, and by dint of much practice and experience, Louisa had become a proficient physician over the months since they had left the Gariep river. She made a more thorough examination of the wound, and exclaimed, with relief, 'The ball has gone clean through and out the other side. That's most propitious. We won't have to cut for it, and the danger of mortification and gangrene is much reduced.'
Jim left Zama to the women and took out his concern and anger on Rashood. With arms and legs spreadeagled like a starfish, they lashed
him to the spokes of one of the big rear wagon wheels and jacked the rim clear of the ground. Jim waited for him to recover consciousness.
In the meantime Smallboy brought in the body of another Arab they had found lying close to where he had captured Rashood. This one had died from loss of blood: a horn wound in his groin had severed the big artery there. When they turned him face up, Jim recognized him as another of the sailors from the Gift. This one is Habban,' he said.
'It is indeed Habban,' agreed Smallboy.
'There is something going on here that stinks like rotten fish,' Jim said. 'I know not what it is, but this one can give us the answers.' He glared at Rashood, still hanging unconscious on the rear wheel of the wagon. 'Throw a bucket of water over him.' It needed not one but three buckets flung into his face to revive him.
'Salaam, Rashood,' Jim greeted him, as he opened his eyes. 'The beauty of your countenance lightens my heart. You are a servant of my family. Why did you attack our wagons and try to kill Zama, a man you know well as my friend?'
Rashood shook the water from his beard and long, lank hair. He stared back at Jim: he did not speak but the expression in his eyes was eloquent.
'We must loosen your tongue, Beloved of the Prophet.' Jim stepped back, and nodded to Smallboy. 'Give him a hundred turns of the wheel.'
Smallboy and Muntu spat on their hands and seized the rim. They began to spin it between them. Smallboy counted the turns. The speed built up swiftly until the image of Rashood's revolving body blurred before their eyes. Smallboy lost the count after fifty and had to start again. When at last he called the hundred and they braked the wheel, Rashood was writhing weakly against his bonds, his dirty robe drenched with sweat. His eyes were unfocused and he was heaving and gasping with vertigo.
'Rashood, why were you riding with Koots? When did you join his band? Who was the strange Arab with you, the man with the green turban?'
Despite his distress Rashood turned his eyes towards Jim and tried to focus on him. 'Infidel!' he blurted. 'Kaffirl I act by virtue of the sacred fat wa of the Caliph Zayn al-Din of Muscat and at the command of his pasha, General Kadem ibn Abubaker. The Pasha is a great and holy man, a mighty warrior and beloved of God and the Prophet.'
So the one in the green turban is a pasha? What are the terms of this fatuial' Jim demanded.
They are too sacred to be spoken into the ear of the profane.'
'Rashood has discovered religion.' Jim shook his head sadly. 'I have never heard him prate such bigoted and venomous nonsense before.' He nodded to Smallboy. 'Give him another hundred turns on the wheel to cool his ardour.'
The wheel blurred again, but before they reached the count of a hundred, Rashood vomited in a long, sustained jet. Smallboy grunted at Muntu: 'Don't stop!' Then Rashood's bowels loosed and his bodily excretions erupted simultaneously from both ends of his body, like a deck hose.
At the hundred count they braked the wheel, but Rashood's befuddled senses could not tell the difference. The sensation of violent movement seemed to become stronger and he moaned and vomited until his stomach was empty. Then he heaved and dry-retched painfully.
'What were the terms of the fatwaT Jim insisted.
'Death to the adulterers.' Rashood's voice was barely audible and yellow bile ran down his chin into his beard. 'Death to al-Salil and Princess Yasmini.'
Jim recoiled at the mention of those two beloved names. 'My uncle and aunt? Are they dead? Tell me they are still alive or I shall spin your black soul loose from your foul body.'
Rashood recovered his scattered senses and once more tried to oppose Jim's questions, but gradually the wheel broke down his resistance, and he answered freely. 'The Princess Yasmini was executed by the Pasha. She died with a thrust
