He flourished the scourge as he advanced on Xhia. 'Now, you little reptile, you have led me a fine fandango, but it's your turn to dance now.'
He swung the first cut across Xhia's shoulder- blades. The cane raised a welt upon it, studded with an irregular rash of thorn punctures, from each of which oozed a drop of blood. Xhia howled with pain and outrage.
'Sing, you bastard mating of baboons,' Koots told him, with grim satisfaction. 'You must learn that you cannot take Herminius Koots for a fool.' He swung again. The green branch began to disintegrate with the force of the blows, and the thorns broke off and embedded themselves in Xhia's flesh.
Xhia twisted and fought against his bonds until his wrists were rubbed bloody and raw by the leather loops. In a voice too loud for his little frame he screamed his fury and his vows of revenge in a language that the white man could not understand.
'You will die for this, you white hyena! You eater of dung! You copulater with corpses! I shall kill you with the slowest of my poisons, you drinker of snake's piss and monkey sperm.'
Koots discarded the broken branch and selected another. He wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his shirt and began again. He kept it up until both he and Xhia were exhausted. His shirt was sodden and his breathing hoarse. Xhia hung silently on the leather thongs and the blood ran in dark snakes down his back and buttocks to drip into the dust between his feet. Only then did Koots step back. 'Leave him hanging there tonight,' he ordered. 'He should be in a more willing mood by the morning. Nothing like a good thrashing to get these zwartes working properly.'
Slowly Xhia turned his head and looked into Koots's face. He spoke softly. 'I will give you the death of twenty days. You will plead with me to kill you at the end.'
Koots did not understand the words but when he saw the hatred in Xhia's beady black eyes he understood the sense, and stepped back involuntarily. 'Corporal Richter,' he said, 'we will have to keep him tied up until he gets over his sore back and his murderous temper.' He picked up Xhia's quiver of poisoned arrows and tossed it on to the fire. 'Don't let him have any weapon until he's learned his lesson. I don't want it between my shoulder-blades. They are treacherous bastards, these little apes.'
In the morning Goffel used the point of his bayonet to dig the thorns ut of the punctures that covered Xhia's back, but some had been driven in too deeply. Over the following days they festered and suppurated,
before they sloughed to the surface. With the fortitude of a wild thing Xhia recovered his strength and agility swiftly. His expression was inscrutable, and only when he looked at Koots did the hatred gleam out of those anthracite dark eyes.
'Drink the wind, Xhia,' Koots cuffed him casually as he would a recalcitrant dog, 'and don't look at me like that, or I'll waste another thorn tree on your stinking hide.' He pointed back along the trail that had led them to this place. 'Now go back and find where Jim Courtney split his spoor.'
They retraced their footsteps over the ground they had covered during the last ten days. They followed Xhia. Gradually his torn back clotted with festering scabs as his injuries started to heal. However, it seemed that the beating had indeed been beneficial for he worked hard. He seldom lifted his eyes from the ground, except to study the lie of the terrain ahead. They went swiftly for he had their own tracks to use as a marker. Sometimes he followed a spur for a short way until it proved false or illusory, then returned to the main trail.
At last they reached the stratum of black igneous rock beside the waterfall. On the way out they had passed this spot with only a brief pause. Even though this seemed an ideal location for Bakkat to stage a deception, Xhia's suspicions had been only mildly excited. Almost immediately he had picked up the strong clear spoor on the further side of the stratum, and followed it away.
Now he shook his head as he returned to the spot. 'I was a fool. Now I can smell Bakkat's treachery in the air.' He sniffed like a dog getting a whiff of the chase. He reached the place where Bakkat had cast the masking spell, and he picked up a fragment of black ash. He examined it carefully and saw it was the ash of the long tree, the wizard's tree.
'Here he burned the long and cast his spell to cheat me. I walked past this place with my eyes blinded.' He was angry at having been so easily deluded by a man he considered his inferior in cunning and wizard-craft. He went down on his hands and knees and snuffled the earth. 'This is where he would have pissed to cover his scent.' But the traces were months old and even his nose could distinguish no residual ammoniac odour of Bakkat's urine.
He stood up again and made a sign of separation to Koots, laying the palms of his hands together, then parting them with a swimming motion. This is the place,' he said in execrable Dutch, pointing left and right. 'Horses go that way. Man go that way.'
'By the blood of the crucifixion, this time you had better be right or I will have your balls. Do you understand?'
'No understand.' Xhia shook his head.
Koots reached down and seized a handful of Xhia's genitalia, and with his other hand drew his dagger. He lifted Xhia on tiptoe by his scrotum, then made the gesture of drawing the blade across the stretched sac, almost touching the skin, but shaving past it by a hair's breadth.
'Cut your balls,' he repeated. 'VerstaanT
Xhia nodded soundlessly and Koots pushed him away. 'Get on with it, then.'
They camped on the bank above the waterfall, and Xhia worked both banks of the river for three miles upstream and down. First he covered the water's edge, but in the last ten days or so the river had come down in spate, then subsided again. At the high-water mark dry grass and debris were stranded in the branches of the trees that grew along the banks. Not even the heaviest trodden spoor could have survived the inundation.
Next Xhia moved out from the river bank, climbing up the slopes to the highest point that the flood waters had reached. He worked the ground painstakingly, scrutinizing every inch. All his experience and magic yielded nothing. The trail was gone, washed away. He had no way of knowing whether Bakkat had gone upstream or down. He had come up against an impenetrable wall.
Koots's nerves were already raw, and when he realized that Xhia had failed again he flew into a fit of fury more vicious than the last. He had Xhia bound again, but this time they hung him by his heels over a smouldering fire which Koots stoked carefully with green leaves. Xhia's peppercorn hair frizzled in the heat and he coughed, choked and retched in the smoke as he writhed and swung on the rope's end.
The rest of the band broke off their dice game to watch. They were all thoroughly bored and dispirited by this time, and the lure of the reward was waning as the trail grew colder each day. Richter and Le Riche had already started muttering threats of mutiny, of abandoning the pursuit, escaping from these harsh and merciless mountains and heading back to the colony.
'Kill the little monkey,' said Le Riche in a tone of disinterest. 'Have done with him, and let's go home.'
Instead Koots stood up and drew his knife, slashed the rope that held Xhia suspended, and the little man dropped headlong into the coals. He let out another shriek and rolled out of the fire, only slightly more singed than he had been already. Koots grabbed the end of the rope that was still round his ankles and dragged Xhia to the nearest tree. He tied him there, and left him while he went back to eat the midday meal.
Xhia crouched against the trunk of the tree, muttering to himself and
examining his injuries. When Koots had finished eating he flicked the coffee grounds out of his mug, and shouted for Goffel. The Hottentot went with him to the tree and they both looked down at Xhia. 'I want you to tell this little bastard in his own language, that I am going to keep him tied up. He will receive no water or food and I will beat him every day until he does his job and finds the spoor again.'
Goffel translated this threat. Xhia hissed angrily and covered his face, to show how the sight of Koots offended him.
'Tell him I am in no hurry,' Koots instructed. Tell him I can wait until he shrivels up and dries in the sun like the baboon turd that he is.'
In the morning Xhia was still tied to the tree, but while Koots and his troopers were eating a breakfast of grilled corn cakes and smoked Dutch sausage Xhia called out to Goffel in the language of the San. The Hottentot went to squat in front of him and they spoke together quietly for a long time. Then Goffel came back to Koots. 'Xhia says that he can find Somoya for you.'
'Well, he hasn't done a good job of it so far.' Koots spat a piece of sausage skin into the fire.
'He says that the only way to find the spoor now is to work a solemn magic.'
Le Riche and Richter guffawed scornfully, and Le Riche said, 'If we have come to witchcraft then I'm spending no more time here. I am going back to the Cape, and Keyser can stick his reward up his arse hole
'Shut your fat face,' Koots told him, and turned back to Goffel. 'What kind of solemn magic is this?'
'There is a sacred place in the mountains where the spirits of the San have their abode. There, their power is strongest. Xhia says that if we go to this place and sacrifice to the spirits Somoya's tracks will be revealed.'
Le Riche stood up. 'I have heard enough of this mumbo-jumbo. I have listened to it for almost three months and we are still no nearer having the gold guilders in hand.' He picked up his saddle and began to walk towards
