A twitch of Shaka’s head told Ralph that he was dismissed. He stepped back, making his way down into the crowd behind the embankment. He could feel Dingane’s eyes on him. He may have made a powerful enemy – but for now, he was untouchable.

  Shaka spoke again, and this time his words were louder and more forceful. He jerked his head and jabbed his arms. The plumes in his headdress waved as if caught in a fierce wind. The watching Zulus began to pound the ground with the butts of their spears, underscoring his speech with an urgent rhythm.

  Ralph edged away. Shaka’s wounds had not weakened his hold over his people. He was whipping them up as expertly as any actor or conductor, playing with their emotions. Ralph could see the Zulus’ faces gripped with a terrible intensity.

  Shaka swayed and shook like a man possessed by demons. He bellowed out a tirade in staccato sentences, and each time he drew breath his audience roared its approval.

  Ralph followed the emotion in his speech – he could not understand a word, but he could tell where it was going. Blood would be spilled, copious amounts of blood.

  A side gate to the right of the enclosure burst open. A company of warriors emerged, dragging a group of men between them. They hauled them up on the dais in front of the crowd, holding them by their arms, spears pointed at each man’s throat.

  Six of the condemned men were Zulus, naked except for their penis sheaths. The other two were Marius and Jobe.

  Ralph remembered what Hamu had said when he had asked about his friends: Safe. He had assumed that Hamu had meant that they had gone back to the kraal, outside the city – their lodgings since they had arrived in KwaBulawayo. But there was more than one way a man might be made ‘safe’.

  Marius and Jobe were barely recognisable. Their bodies were bruised and streaked with blood; Marius had a purple ring around his right eye, and his nose was bent at a crooked angle. Jobe’s left arm hung limp.

  Dingane clambered up the embankment and confronted the captives. He too had been dressed for the occasion, Ralph saw. He wore a necklace of beads around his neck – blood-red baubles that glowed in the sunlight – and embroidered crossbelts that fell either side of his belly, so that it seemed even more enormous. He carried a spear, like any other Zulu iklwa, except that it had a bulbous pommel at the end, which he jabbed at the prisoners while he spoke.

  He seemed to have taken on the role of prosecutor. His voice had none of Shaka’s subtle modulations. He did not play to his audience, nor did Ralph think he was trying to persuade them with arguments. He hurled a barrage of accusations at the African prisoners, bludgeoning them with angry, short sentences.

  ‘What is Dingane saying?’ Ralph whispered to Thabisa.

  ‘These men Ndwandwe.’

  ‘What is Ndwandwe?’

  ‘Other tribe. Not Zulu. They try kill Shaka.’

  Ralph studied the captives. They made an unlikely group of would-be murderers. Stripped naked they were gaunt, their arms so stick-thin it was impossible to believe that they could even wield a blade. They looked at their feet as if they already knew their punishment.

  ‘How does he know they are guilty?’ Ralph had seen one man stab Shaka – and he had had his skull broken by Hamu.

  ‘Not Zulu spear. Ndwandwe.’ Thabisa cupped her hands together, mimicking the shape of the bulbous butt of the spear in Dingane’s hand.

  Ralph had seen the weapon that wounded Shaka. ‘That is not the same spear. The one the assassin used had no pommel on the end.’

  He glanced at Thabisa and saw the warning blazing in her eyes: Do not contradict Dingane.

  Ralph had no experience of Zulu justice, but the outcome of this trial was not in doubt. If he remained silent, Marius and Jobe would die at Dingane’s hand. Could Ralph help them? Or would he get himself killed, too?

  ‘What is he accusing my friends of?’ he whispered to Thabisa.

  ‘He say Jobe Ndwandwe spy.’

  ‘Jobe is not Ndwandwe,’ Ralph objected. ‘And Marius would never conspire with the Ndwandwes.’ Or any black man, he might have added.

  Dingane spoke again.

  Thabisa pointed to Marius and mimed aiming something into the air. ‘He firestick. Big noise.’

  Ralph remembered how Marius had fired the gun into the air that first morning in KwaBulawayo, letting off his frustrations at being confined in the hut. A few hours later, Shaka had been stabbed. To the Zulus it must look as if he had been summoning some kind of black magic. Or it was a prearranged signal.

  Ralph could have cursed the Dutchman for his stupidity.

  The fact that I saved Shaka’s life does not matter, he thought bitterly. Or, worse, it counts against us. This is Dingane’s way of punishing me.

  Up on the dais, Shaka leaned forward to listen to his half-brother. Ralph could not tell if the king agreed or disagreed with what Dingane had to say, but the longer he spoke, the more impatient Shaka seemed to become. Under the gleaming grease and splendid headdress, Ralph could see him beginning to tire from spending so long on his feet in the blazing sun.

  He will let them die.

  Marius was a brute. Jobe wanted to drive the white man out of Africa. If life had taken a different course, Ralph would have had nothing in common with either of them. But fate had drawn them together, and they had sworn an oath to one another.

  Dingane had finished his case. He stopped talking and turned towards Shaka, awaiting judgement. Marius and Jobe could see what was coming. Marius’s face had lost its colour, while Jobe scanned the crowd behind the dais, looking for Ralph with mounting desperation.

  Ralph was distraught. He had no evidence to prove their innocence. Maybe there was nothing he could say that would persuade Shaka to spare them.

  But if I do not speak now, it will be too late, thought Ralph, urging himself to speak.

  He had this choice before in his life – to act to save someone; or to save himself. Even with hindsight, he could not say which choice was better.

  Ralph stepped forward and began to make his way back up the embankment, Thabisa hurrying behind him. Shaka was lifting his stick to pass judgement as Ralph dropped to his haunches and bellowed at the top of his lungs: ‘Bayete!’

  Shaka looked down at him, surprised and angry. Ralph was not supposed to interrupt this moment.

  ‘Nkosi, my friends are innocent of any plot against you,’ he said as Thabisa translated. ‘They are as loyal to King Shaka as I am. Everything I have done to heal you, it is as if they did it with their own hands.’

  The king glared at him.

  ‘In my country, a man is given a chance to prove his innocence. umGeorge does not condemn a man just because his brother says so.’

  Dingane’s expression became more poisonous. But Shaka hesitated. The reference to his brother had caused him to think again.

  ‘How they show they good?’

  ‘They will take an oath of loyalty to the king.’

  Shaka considered this. Then he spoke a few words.

  ‘Salute like Zulu.’

  Ralph glanced at Thabisa. ‘He wants me to salute him?’

  She pointed to Marius. ‘Him.’

  A smile played across Shaka’s lips. He understood human pride – and delighted in humbling it. He pointed to the ground so there could be no doubting what he meant. He wanted Marius to prostrate himself.

  Jobe dropped to his knees. It stung his pride to kneel before any man, black or white, but not so much that he would part with his life. Marius, however, remained motionless. The guards began to approach, but Shaka ordered them back with a flick of his fingers.

  ‘If you do not do this, they will kill us all,’ Ralph said to Marius.

  ‘And bow before a Kaffir?’

  ‘Bow before the man who can spare your life.’

  The whole enclosure – tens of thousands of people – had gone still. Under the heat of the sun, Marius’s face flushed crimson.

  Ralph could see that Shaka was losing his patience. The stubborn, bull-headed Dutchman would not bow before a black man. Ralph had spoken in his defence, and that would give Dingane the pretext he needed to place Ralph’s neck in the same noose.

  The guards began to move forward, spears ready. Marius flexed his arms. He would not fall without a fight.

  Ralph could not watch. Squatting on his haunches, he bowed his head and stared at the dust.

  Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return. To anyone who had grown up in India, like Ralph, they were words that became ingrained from the endless round of funerals. To a child, standing at the graveside, hearing dry earth rattle on yet another coffin lid, the lesson was unmissable: this will be your end, too. Ralph had never imagined it would be the red dust of Zululand that took his bones.

  At that moment, as if the gods themselves heard Ralph’s prayers, a scorpion skittered across Ralph’s shadow. He saw the tiny claws, the tail curled up over its back with the pointed stinger on the end. Its body was a cloudy brown, like a drop of blood in water.

  Ralph did not know what species it was. Size, he knew, made no difference: the tiniest creature could contain the most lethal poison, and a large one might hurt no worse than a bee sting.

  Its sting might be a swifter death than what Dingane would do.

  Shaka had started addressing his people again, no doubt pronouncing Marius’s death sentence. The Zulus stamped their feet and shouted their approval, while the guards raised their spears and circled around Marius.

  Ralph reached down and, with a flick of his wrist, scooped up the scorpion from the dust and flicked it towards the big Dutchman, just as he had once scooped up cricket balls in their garden in Holkar. It sailed through the air and landed on the back of Marius’s leg.

  The disorientated scorpion gripped its enemy with its claws and plunged in its venomous stinger.

  Marius bellowed in agony. He grabbed for his leg, but before he could reach it all the strength drained from his limbs. His body went limp; he collapsed onto the dais and lay still.

  Shaka broke off in surprise. The Zulu guards leaped back, as if they feared the taint of witchcraft. The crowd went silent. For a moment, it felt as if the whole city held its breath. The buzzards circled overhead, and the unseen scorpion scuttled away, but there was no other movement.

  Shaka looked down at Ralph. His intuition told him Ralph must have had something to do with it, but he could not work out what. His piercing eyes dug into Ralph’s face, commanding answers.

  ‘He bowed before you,’ said Ralph.

  Shaka frowned as Thabisa translated. He glanced at Marius.

  Then he tipped back his head and roared with laughter.

  In an instant, the mood changed. The assembled Zulus followed their king’s lead and began to laugh. Ralph found himself laughing, too, almost on the edge of hysteria. Even the other prisoners, the Ndwandwes, risked a few tentative smiles, thinking perhaps that Shaka’s good humour meant they were reprieved.

  They hardly had time to realise their mistake. At a sign from Dingane, the guards seized the prisoners. Each put one arm around a captive’s neck, the other around his forehead, and gave a quick, well-practised twist. The neck snapped; the head lolled on to the chest. The guards threw the dead men on the ground as the Zulu crowd surged forward with a roar. Every man carried a bulb-ended knobkerrie, like Shaka’s. They gathered around the corpses, fighting and jostling to batter the bodies to pulp.

  Ralph stood and pushed his way through to where Marius lay. The Dutchman was still, but when Ralph put a finger to his neck he felt a pulse – he had simply fainted from the pain. Jobe joined him, and between the two of them they managed to carry Marius off the dais and into an open space between a pair of huts. Behind them, the Zulus dragged the corpses of the executed men out of the city.

  Marius blinked his eyes open and stared at the sky, his pupils dilated.

  ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ he grunted to Ralph. And then, wincing: ‘And what did you do to me?’

  ‘A scorpion stung you.’

  Marius stared at him, struggling to focus. ‘What?’

  ‘It was the only way to make you bow.’

  ‘A scorpion? God verdoem dit. How did you know it wouldn’t kill me?’

  ‘I didn’t. I still don’t. We will find out if you will live in a few hours.’

  ‘You rooinek bastard—’

  He lunged at Ralph, but he was too weak. Ralph stopped the punch and held Marius’s fist, bending low so that their faces were inches apart.

  ‘Shaka would have killed us because of your stupid pride. If you had died it would be no more than you deserved.’

  Jobe nodded. ‘Ralph is right.’

  Marius twisted towards him. ‘And a hell of a lot of use you were,’ he snarled, the pain of the scorpion sting evident on his face. ‘Why didn’t you try to speak to Shaka, one Kaffir to another?’

  ‘Because to them I am as worthless as you,’ said Jobe.

  ‘What matters is we are alive.’ Ralph released Marius’s fist and stood. ‘For now.’

  Would Shaka be content with the Ndwandwe men he had executed, or would his attention return to Ralph and his companions?

  Hamu was striding towards them, with Thabisa two paces behind. The induna’s face was grim. He looked down at Marius, clearly unimpressed that he was still alive, then pointed to him and to Jobe and spoke a few words.

  ‘They go,’ said Thabisa.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘eThekwini.’ She said it as if Ralph should know what it meant. He racked his brains, trying to remember all the strange words he had heard in the past fortnight, and then it came to him: the place of the lagoon.

  ‘We are to go back to Nativity Bay?’

  ‘They go. You here.’

  ‘You want me to stay?’

  ‘Shaka want you stay.’

  ‘What is she saying?’ demanded Marius. Still groggy from the poison, and unable to conceive of a black woman speaking anything other than her native language, he had not realised that Thabisa was talking in English.

  ‘Shaka has released you,’ said Ralph. ‘You and Jobe can go back to Nativity Bay.’

  ‘And you?’ Marius’s voice was instantly hot with suspicion.

  ‘Shaka wants me here.’

  ‘So you can get rich by yourself, hey?’ Marius propped himself up on his elbow. Jealousy had driven the dull haze from his eyes. ‘Make yourself King Shaka’s pet while we rot by the sea?’

  ‘We made a partnership,’ said Ralph. ‘Everything shared equally. And all the ivory in the world will not fetch me much profit if I cannot get it to market. The only way to do that is if you go back to Nativity Bay and build us a boat. Your shares will be safe enough. Safer than I will be,’ he added.

  Marius grunted, pulled himself to his feet and brushed the dust off himself. He leaned towards Ralph, swaying slightly on unsteady feet. ‘Just remember . . . I came here to get rich. And if you try to cheat me . . .’ He smacked his fist into his open palm. ‘A scorpion sting will seem like nothing against what I will do to you.’

  NATIVITY BAY

  M

  ahamba and his people – the tribe was called Chunu, Ann learned – settled into a small camp outside the walls of the stockade. Ann marvelled at how they built it. Instead of hewing logs and sharpening stakes, as the sailors had, the Chunus gathered thorn bushes and put them in a rough circle to keep out the wild animals, then bent saplings into arches and thatched them to make simple huts. Ann gave them as much food as she could from the stores, which they supplemented with roots and fruits they gathered from the forest.

  ‘Why don’t they fish?’ Harry asked innocently one day. He was fascinated by Mahamba’s people, and spent hours following them around – to the discomfort of the Africans, who tried to avoid the whites with an almost superstitious aversion.

  Ann hadn’t considered the question. ‘Maybe they don’t know how.’

  ‘But they live here.’

  ‘I think they came here from somewhere else.’

  It was more than a fortnight since they had met Mahamba, but she still knew almost nothing about him or his people. Where did they come from? What had happened to put them in such a distressed state?

  Ann looked to the north curve of the bay, where a herd of hippos were wallowing in the estuarine mud. With a start, she saw two people had emerged from the forest. Both were tall men, one broad, the other more slightly built.

  She recognised something familiar in those shapes. She squinted, shielding her eyes from the sun.

  ‘It is Marius and Jobe.’

  But why were there only the two of them? was Ann’s first thought. What had happened to Ralph?

  She ran barefoot across the sand, Harry following behind, and reached them before they were halfway across the beach. Their clothes were ragged, their bare feet bruised and swollen. Both men looked as if they had been in a fight – and come off second best.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Ann asked. And then: ‘Where is Ralph?’

  ‘Not coming back,’ said Marius.

  She gasped.

  ‘Ralph is alive,’ Jobe reassured her. ‘He stayed with Shaka.’

  The questions tumbled out of her. ‘Who is Shaka? What did you find?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’ Marius turned to the stockade. ‘It needs a drink to tell it.’

  The tale was indeed extraordinary. The sailors listened with wide eyes to Marius’s description of King Shaka and his capital, and what had happened to Shaka and Ralph. Marsden kept glancing out through the cracks in the palisade fence, as if he expected a thousand Zulus to appear on the beach at any moment.

  ‘After we left KwaBulawayo, the Zulus escorted us to the river. We followed the coast from there back here,’ Marius concluded.

  ‘And Ralph is still there?’ Ann asked.

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Will he be safe?’

  ‘Shaka is a brute,’ said Marius. ‘He kills men like swatting a fly.’

  He said it casually, as if he did not see or did not care about the impact his words had on Ann.

  ‘Ralph saved the king,’ said Jobe quickly. ‘He is safe for now.’

  ‘Maybe safer than we are.’ Marius suddenly leaped to his feet. ‘Who are they?’