Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

His oath lasted him less than a year. When he turned eighteen he left the little mission in the center of the royal compound. He told no one that he was leaving, not even his mother, and for that he felt guilty. She alone would have to bear the weight of Lucas Smythe’s righteous tirades.

Peter had always felt he was a survivor. He and Assa had camped dozens of times on the veldt, but by the time he reached a trading station fifty miles from the mission, he was nearly dead from exhaustion and thirst. There he spent a couple of the precious coins he’d hoarded from birthday presents from his mother. His father never gave him anything, believing that the only birth the family should celebrate was that of Jesus Christ.

There was barely enough to pay the wagon master to take him to Kimberley on the buckboard of a twenty-oxen span returning south with a load of ivory and salted meat. The wagon master was an older man wearing a huge white hat, and had the thickest sideburns Peter had ever seen. Tagging along with H. A. Ryder were a pair of brothers who’d been promised grazing land by the Cape colonial office only to find it already occupied by Matabele. With no desire to fight an army, they had prudently chosen to return south. Also with the party was a lean, hawk-faced man named Jon Varley.

In the weeks they trudged south, Peter never did get a sense of what Varley did or what had brought him so far from the Cape Colony; all he knew was that he didn’t trust the man as far as he could spit.

At camp one night following the dangerous crossing of a river where Peter saved the life of one of Ryder’s oxen by actually jumping on the animal’s back and riding it across like a horse, Varley revealed a cache of liquor. It was fiery cape brandy, as raw as pure spirits, but the five of them sat around a campfire digesting a meal of guinea fowl that Tim Watermen had taken with his shotgun and drank the two bottles empty.

It was Peter’s first taste of alcohol and, unlike the others, the brandy went to his head after only the first tentative sips.

It was inevitable that talk would turn to prospecting since it was second nature for anyone in the bush to keep a sharp eye for minerals. It seemed every day a new diamond field or gold reef or coal mine was staked and someone became an instant millionaire.

Peter knew he shouldn’t have opened his mouth. He’d made a pledge to Assa. But he wanted to fit in with these rough-and-ready men who spoke so knowledgeably about things he himself was unaware. They were worldly, especially Varley and H. A., and Peter wanted them to respect him more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. So with lips made slack by brandy he told them of the dozen clay pots filled with uncut diamonds in the royal kraal of King Maharero.

“How do you know this, boy?” Varley had hissed like an adder.

“Because the lad’s father is the preacher in Hereroland,” H. A. had answered and looked at Peter. “I recognize you now. I met your old man a couple of seasons back when I went to see the king about hunting concessions on his land.” His steady eyes swept the group. “He’s been living with the Herero, what, five years now?”

“Almost six,” Peter answered proudly. “They know me and trust me.”

Before another fifteen minutes had passed they were discussing openly the possibility of stealing the beer pots. Peter went along with the scheme only after the others promised that the five of them would only take one container each and leave seven for the Herero people; otherwise he wouldn’t tell them where the stones were located.

At a trading post a further hundred miles south, H. A. Ryder sold his wagon and its precious load for half of what he could have fetched for the ivory in Kimberley and outfitted the men with proper horses and gear. He’d already decided the course they would take out of the Herero empire, the one that afforded their only chance of escape once the theft was discovered. The trading post was at the end of a newly laid telegraph line. The men waited three days while Ryder made arrangements with a trader he knew in Cape Town. H. A. shrugged off the staggering cost of what he ordered, figuring he’d either be a millionaire able to pay the debt or a corpse lying in the searing Kalahari sun.

It was impossible to sneak into the royal kraal. Runners reported their presence to the king as soon as they crossed into his domain. But H. A. was known to the king, and Peter’s father was surely eager to have his son returned to him, though Peter suspected he’d be given a treatment worthy of Job rather than that of the prodigal son.

It took a week to reach the kraal from the border and Samuel Maharero himself greeted the riders when they finally reached his camp. He and H. A. spoke for an hour in the king’s native tongue, the guide giving him news of the outside world since the king was in exile by order of the German colonial office. The king in turn told Peter, to his great relief, that his parents had just left for the bush, where his father was baptizing a group of women and children, and wouldn’t return till the following day.

The king granted them permission to spend the night but denied H. A.’s request to hunt on Herero land, as he had four years previously.

“Can’t blame a man for trying, Your Highness.”

“Persistence is a white man’s vice.”

That night they’d stolen into the rondoval. The hut was packed to the roof poles with hay and they had to burrow into the pile like mice to reach the spot where the diamonds were hidden. It was when John Varley plucked a second pot from the ground and dumped its contents into a saddlebag that Peter Smythe realized he’d been duped from the beginning. The Watermen brothers, too, emptied several pots into their bags. Only H. A. kept his word and took the contents of only one of the beer pots.

“If you don’t take them, I will,” Varley whispered in the dark.

“Your choice,” Ryder drawled. “But I’m a man of my word.”

As it was they didn’t have enough bags for all the stones, and after stuffing pants pockets and anything else they could, four of the big pots remained unmolested. H. A. carefully reburied the cache and did everything he could to hide the theft. They left camp at dawn, thanking the king for his hospitality. Maharero asked Peter if he had any message for his mother. Peter could only mumble to tell her he was sorry.

LYING on the crest of the dune above the water hole, H. A. allowed himself just a moment to watch the king’s men.

When they’d started out after the thieves there had been an entire impi, an army of a thousand warriors, tracking them from the tribal lands. But that had been five hundred miles ago, and the hardship had whittled their numbers. H. A. estimated there were still more than a hundred of them, the very strongest, and they ran at a ground-eating pace despite their own hunger and thirst. The sun was just high enough to glint off the honed blades of their assegais, the stabbing spears their people used to vanquish any who stood in their way.

H. A. tapped Tim Watermen on the leg and together they slid to the bottom of the dry wash where the others clustered nervously. The horses had picked up on the sudden shift in mood. They shuffled their hooves in the dust and their ears twitched as if they could hear the approaching danger.

“Mount up, lads,” Ryder said, accepting the reins from Peter Smythe.

“We’re going to ride?” he asked. “Through the day?”

“Aye, boy. It’s that or one of Maharero’s warriors going to garland his hut with your insides. Let’s go. We have only a mile on them and I don’t know how long the horses are going to take the heat.”

Ryder was aware that had they not found water last night, the Herero would have been on them like a pack of wild dogs by now. As it was, only one of his canteens was full when he threw a rangy leg over his horse’s broad back. They climbed out of the wadi abreast, and all five men turned when they left the shadow of the depression and felt the raw sun burning at the backs of their necks.

For the first miles, H. A. kept them at a steady trot that gained them a mile for every three on the advancing Herero impi. The sun baked the earth and dried their sweat the instant it burst from their pores. Under the protection of his big slouch hat, H. A. had to ride with his eyes closed to slits to protect them from the blinding reflection off the dunes.