sent us a message through Bakkat. He didn't forget us.'
'It's not the same,' said Tom heavily. 'You know he might never come back. He has closed this door behind him. Keyser will catch him and hang him if he ever sets foot in the colony again. No, damn my eyes, I must see him again. Just once more. He is so headstrong and wild. I have to give him my counsel.'
'You have been giving him your counsel for the last nineteen years,' Dorian said wryly. 'Look where it has got us now.'
'Where was his rendezvous with Zama?' Sarah asked. 'That is where they will be.'
Tom thought about it for a moment, then grinned. 'Only one place it could be,' he said firmly.
Dorian nodded. 'I know what you're thinking,' he told Tom. 'Majuba is the obvious place for them to hide out. But we dare not follow them there. Keyser will be watching us like a leopard at the water-hole. If one of us leaves High Weald he will put that little yellow bloodhound of his on to us, and we will lead him straight to Majuba, and Jim.'
'If we're going to find him it must be soon, otherwise Jim will be gone from Majuba. They are well mounted. They have Drumfire and Keyser's mare. Jim will be half-way to Timbuktu before we can catch up with him.'
At that moment the tramp of boots and loud masculine voices echoed through the main storeroom of the go down
'Keyset's men have searched the house.' Sarah glanced out of the door. 'Now they're starting on the warehouse and the outbuildings.'
'We'd better go out to keep an eye on those rogues,' Dorian stood up, 'before they start helping themselves.'
'We'll decide what to do about Jim once we've seen Keyser off,' Tom said, as they went through on to the main floor of the go down
Four of the troopers were poking about aimlessly among the clutter. They were obviously tiring of their fruitless hunt. The long storeroom was piled to the high yellow-wood rafters. If they were to search it thoroughly they would need to clear the tons of goods with which the warehouse was congested. There were bales of silk from China, and cottons from the Indies; sacks of coffee beans and gum arabic from Zanzibar and other ports beyond the Horn of Hormuz; balks of sawn teak, sandalwood and ebony; mounds of pure gleaming copper cast into huge wheels so that armies of slaves could trundle them down the mountain tracks from the far interior of Ethiopia to the coast. There were bundles of the dried skins of exotic animals, tigers and zebras, and the furs of monkeys and seals, and the long curved horns of the rhinoceros, famous through China and the Orient for its aphrodisiac powers.
The Cape of Good Hope sat across the trade routes between Europe and the Orient. In former times the ships from the north had made the long voyage down the Atlantic. Even when they anchored in Table Bay they still faced another seemingly endless passage to the Indies and China, then even further north again to far Japan. A ship might be at sea for three or four years before it could return to Amsterdam, or the Pool of London.
Tom and Dorian had gradually evolved another network of trade. They had convinced a syndicate of ship-owners in Europe to send their ships only as far as the Cape. From the Courtney Brothers' warehouse they could fill their holds with choice goods, turn round in Table Bay and, with favourable winds, be back in their home ports in under a year. The profit the Courtneys exacted more than compensated for the additional years that the ships would be forced to spend at sea if they went further afield. In the same way ships coming from the east could discharge in Table Bay into the go down of the Courtney Brothers and be back in Batavia, Rangoon or Bombay in less than half the time it would have taken to make the journey across two great oceans.
This innovation was the foundation on which they had built their fortune. Added to this, they had their own trading schooners, which plied the African coast and were captained by Dorian's trusted Arab followers. As Muslims they could travel into waters forbidden to Christian captains, and venture as far as Muscat and Medina, the Luminous City of the Prophet of God. Although these vessels lacked the large holds in which to carry bulky cargoes, they dealt in the goods of higher value: copper and gum arabic, pearls and mother-of-pearl shells from the Red Sea, ivory from the markets of Zanzibar, sapphires from the mines
of Kandy, yellow diamonds from the alluvial field along the great rivers of the empire of the Moguls, and cakes of black opium from the mountains of the Pathans.
There was only one commodity in which the Courtney brothers refused to trade: human slaves. They had intimate knowledge of the barbaric practice. Dorian had spent most of his boyhood in slavery, until his owner, Sultan Abd Muhammad al-Malik, the ruler of Muscat, had adopted him as a son. In his younger days Tom had waged a bitter war against the Arab slave-traders of the East African coast, and had been a witness at first hand of the heartless cruelty of the trade. Many of the Courtney servants and sailors were former slaves who had come into their possession and whom they had manumitted at once. The means by which some of these unfortunates had been brought under the wing of the family varied- sometimes by force of arms, for Tom dearly loved a good fight, or by shipwreck, or in payment of debts, or even by outright purchase. Sarah could seldom bring herself to walk past a weeping orphan on the auction block without importuning her husband to buy the child and give it into her care. She had reared half of her house servants from infancy.
Sarah went out to the kitchens and came back almost immediately with her sister-in-law Yasmini, and a chattering, giggling train of housemaids all bearing jugs of freshly squeezed lime juice, trays of Cornish pasties, pork pies and samos as filled with spicy lamb curry. The bored, hungry troopers sheathed their blades and fell upon the fare with a will. Between bites they ogled and flirted with the maids. The soldiers who were supposed to be searching the coach-house and the stables saw the women carrying the provender out of the kitchens and found an excuse to follow them.
Colonel Keyser interrupted the feast and ordered his men back to work, but Tom and Dorian placated him and inveigled him into the counting house.
'I hope that now you will accept my word of honour, Colonel, that my son Jim is not anywhere on High Weald.' Tom poured him a glass of jonge jenever from a stone bottle; Sarah cut him a thick wedge of steaming Cornish pasty.
'Ja, very well, I accept that he is not here now, Tom. He has had enough time to get clean away- for the moment, that is. But I think you know where he is hiding.' He glared at Tom as he accepted the long-stemmed glass.
Tom assumed the expression of a choirboy about to receive the sacrament. 'You can trust me, Stephanus.'
'That I doubt.' Keyser washed down a mouthful of the pasty with a
swallow of gin. 'But I warn you, I am not going to let that bumptious puppy of yours get away with what he has done. Do not try to soften my resolve.'
'Of course not! You have your duty to perform,' Tom agreed. 'I offer you only common hospitality and I am not attempting to influence you. The minute that Jim returns to High Weald I myself will frog march him up to the castle to account to you and His Excellency. You have my word on it as a gentleman.'
Only slightly mollified, Keyser allowed them to usher him out to where a groom was holding his horse. Tom slipped two more bottles of the young Hollands gin into his saddlebags and waved to him as he led his squadron out through the gates.
As they watched them go, Tom said quietly to his brother, 'I have to get a message to Jim. He must stay at Majuba until I can reach him. Keyser will be watching for me to ride into the mountains and show him the way, but I'll send Bakkat. He leaves no tracks.'
Dorian threw the tail of his turban over his shoulder. 'Listen to me well, Tom. Don't take Keyser too lightly. He is not the clown he pretends to be. If he gets his hands on Jim it will be a tragic day for this family. Never forget that our own grandfather died on the gallows of the castle parade.'
The rutted road from High Weald back to the town led through a forest of tall yellow-wood trees with trunks as thick as cathedral columns. Keyser halted his troop as soon as they were hidden from the homestead. He looked down at the little Bushman at his stirrup, who gazed back at him with the eager expression of a hunting dog.
'Xhia!' He pronounced the name with the explosive sound of a sneeze. 'Soon they will send someone with a message to wherever the young rogue is hiding. Watch for the messenger. Follow him. Do not let yourself be seen. When you have found the hiding-place, return to me swiftly. Do you understand?'
'I understand, Gwenyama.' He used the term of utmost respect, which meant He Who Devours His Enemies. He knew that Keyser enjoyed the title. 'I know who they will send. Bakkat is an old rival and enemy of mine. It will give me pleasure to bring him down.'
'Go, then. Keep watch.'
Xhia slipped away into the yellow-wood forest, silent as a shadow, and Keyser led the troop of horsemen back towards the castle.
The lodge at Majuba was a single long room. The low roof was thatched with reeds from the banks of the stream that flowed close by the door. The windows were slits in the stonework, curtained by the dried skins of eland and blue buck There was an open fireplace in the centre of the earthen floor, with a hole in the roof above to let the smoke escape. The far corner of the hut was screened off by a hanging curtain of rawhide.
'We put my father behind that curtain
