"What danger is this, Aboli?" The King glanced around him fearfully, as if seeking an assassin among his courtiers. "Our father warned me that you and I are joined in life as we were in birth. If one of us prospers, then so does the other."
The Monomatapa nodded. "What else did our father say?"
"He said that as we are joined in life, so we will be joined in death. He prophesied that we will die upon the very same day, but that that day is of our own choosing."
The King's face turned a strange greyish tone and glistened with sweat. The elders shrieked and those nearest to where he sat drew small iron knives and slashed their own chests and arms, sprinkling their blood on the earth to protect him from witchcraft.
"I am deeply troubled by these words that our father uttered," Aboli went on. "I wish that I were able to abide with you here in the Land of Heaven, to protect you from this fate. But, alas, my father's shade warned me further that should I stay here another day then I will die and the Monomatapa with me. I must leave at once and never return.
That is the only way in which we can both survive the curse."
"So let it be." The Monomatapa rose to his feet and pointed with a trembling finger. "This very day you must be gone."
"Alas, my beloved brother, I cannot leave here without that boon I came to seek from you."
"Speak, Aboli! What is it that you lack?"
"I must have one hundred and fifty of your finest warriors to protect me, for a dreadful enemy lies in wait for me. Without these soldiers, then I go to certain death, and my death must portend the death of the Monomatapa."
"Choose!" bellowed the Monomatapa. "Choose of my finest Amadoda, and take them with you. They are your slaves, do with them as you wish. But then get you gone this very day, before the setting of the sun. Leave my land for ever."
In the leading pinnace Hal shot the bar and rowed out through the Musela mouth of the delta into the open sea. Big Daniel followed closely, and there lay the Golden Bough at her anchor on the ten fathom shoal where they had left her. Ned Tyler stood the ship to quarters and ran out his guns when he saw them approaching. The pinnaces were so packed with men that they had only an inch or two of freeboard. Riding so low in the water, from afar they resembled war canoes. The glinting spears and waving head-dresses of the Amadoda strengthened this impression and Ned gave the order to fire a warning shot across their bows. As the cannon boomed out and a tall plume of spray erupted from the water half a cable's length ahead of the leading boat, Hal stood up in the bows and waved the croix pott6e.
"Lord love us!" Ned gasped. "Tis the Captain we're shooting at."
"I'll not be in a hurry to forget that greeting you gave me, Mister Tyler," Hal told him sternly, as he came in through the entry port "I rate a four-gun salute, not a single gun."
"Bless you, Captain, I had no idea. I thought you was a bunch of heathen savages, begging your pardon, sir."
"That we are, Mister Tyler. That we are!" And Hal grinned at Ned's confusion as a horde of magnificent warriors swarmed onto the Golden Bough's deck. "Think you'll be able to make seamen of them, Mister Tyler?" soon as he had made his offing, Hal turned the bows into the north once more and sailed up the inland channel between Madagascar and the mainland. He was heading for Zanzibar, the centre of all trade on this coast. There he hoped to have further news of the progress of the Holy War on the Horn and, if he were fortunate, to learn something of the movements of the Gull of Moray.
This was a settling-in time for the Amadoda. Everything aboard the Golden Bough was strange to them. None had ever seen the sea. They had believed the pinnaces to be the largest canoes ever conceived by man, and were overawed by the size of the ship, the height of her masts and the spread of her sails.
Most were immediately smitten by seasickness, and it took many days for them to find their sea-legs. Their bowels were in a turmoil induced by the diet of biscuit and pickled meat. They hungered for their pots of millet porridge and their gourds of blood and milk. They had never been confined in such a small space and they pined for the wide savannah.
They suffered from the cold, for even in this tropical sea the trade winds were cool and the warm Mozambique current many degrees below the temperature of the sun-scorched plains of the savannah. Hal ordered Althuda, who was in charge of the ship's stores, to issue bolts of sail canvas to them and Aboli showed them how to stitch petticoats and tarpaulin jackets for themselves.
They soon forgot these tribulations when Aboli ordered a platoon of men to follow Jiri and Matesi and Kimatti aloft to set and reef sail. A hundred dizzy feet above the deck and the rushing sea, swinging on the great pendulum of the mainmast, for the first time in their lives these warriors who had each killed their lion were overcome by terror.
Aboli climbed up to where they clung helplessly to the shrouds and mocked them. "Look at these pretty virgins. I thought at first there might be a man among them, but I see they should all squat when they piss." Then he stood upright on the swaying yard and laughed at them. He ran out to the end of it and there performed a stamping, leaping war dance. One of the Amadoda could abide his mockery no longer. he loosed his death grip on the rigging and shuffled out along the yard to where Aboli stood with hands on hips.
"One man among them!" Aboli laughed and embraced him. During the next week three of the Amadoda fell from the rigging while trying to emulate this feat. Two dropped into the sea but before Hal could wear the ship around and go back to pick them up the sharks had taken them. The third man struck the deck and his was the most merciful end. After that there were no more casualties, and the Amadoda, each one accustomed since boyhood to climbing the highest trees for honey and birds" eggs, swiftly became adept top-mast men
When Hal ordered bundles of pikes to be brought up from the hold and issued to the Amadoda they howled and danced with delight, for they were spearmen born. They delighted in the heavy-shafted pikes with their deadly iron heads. Aboli adapted their tactics and fighting formation to the Golden Bough's cramped deck spaces. He showed them how to form the classical Roman Testudo, their shields overlapping and locked like the scales of an armadillo. With this formation they could sweep the deck of an enemy ship irresistibly.
Hal ordered them to set up a heavy mat of oakum under the forecastle break to act as a butt. Once the Amadoda had learned the weight and balance of the heavy pikes they could hurl them the length of the ship to bury the iron heads full length in the mat of coarse fibres. They plunged into these exercises with such gusto that two of their number were speared to death before Aboli could impress upon them that these were mock battles and should not be fought to the death.
Then it was time to introduce them to the English longbow. Their own bows were short and puny in comparison and they looked askance at this six-foot weapon, dubiously tried the massive draw weight and shook their heads. Hal took the bow out of their hands and nocked an arrow. He looked up at the single black and white gull that floated high above the mainmast. "If I bring down one of those birds will you eat it raw?" he asked, and they roared with laughter at the joke.
"I will eat the feathers as wellP shouted a big cocky one named Ingwe, the Leopard. In a fluid motion Hal drew and loosed. The arrow arced up, its flight curving across the wind, and they shouted with amazement as it pierced the gull's snowy bosom and the wide pinions folded. The bird tumbled down in a tangle of wings and webbed feet, and struck the deck at Hal's feet. An Amadoda snatched it up, and the transfixed carcass was passed from hand to hand amid astonished jabbering.