With a gush of blood, the spear tip came free. Hamu tore one of the ox-tails from his kilt, balled it up and pressed it into the wound to staunch the bleeding. He threw the spear aside, onto the ground where Ralph could see it. Up close, Ralph noticed it had a barbed tip, like a harpoon.

  That was why I could not pull it out, he thought.

  He felt his consciousness slipping away. He had to stay alive, had to fight – but he could not resist the tide of exhaustion overtaking him. His face felt hot under the sun, yet his body shivered with cold.

  From nowhere, an image burst into his mind: Ann, standing alone on the beach by the lagoon, hundreds of miles away. She turned to look at him and held him with her eyes.

  Then pain, exhaustion and blood loss overwhelmed him, and the world went dark.

  NATIVITY BAY

  A

  grey heron surveyed the lagoon from its hunting perch – a wooden stump that had once been the Farewell’s bowsprit. Even at low tide, the spar protruded but a few inches from the water: the next storm would most likely bury it completely. For now, it made a perfect perch for the bird, which stood so still that if it had not occasionally twitched its head you might have thought it was carved from the same wood as the bowsprit.

  Ann watched the bird from the bluff. The heron captivated her: its poise, its stillness, the beauty of its slate-blue colouring. She found its presence comforting and came here almost every day to spend time in its company.

  Behind the heron, the Nanticoke sat in the middle of the lagoon. It was a handsome ship, but for some reason Ann felt a shiver every time she looked at it. Ever since the ship had arrived, her men had been busy below decks, making some kind of repair. The sounds of hammering and sawing had drifted out of the hold from dawn until dusk. The wind brought the smell of tar, sawdust and lye from her decks.

  Soon the ship would set sail again – and Ann and Harry would be aboard her. Ann still wondered if she had made the right decision. She did not trust Captain Sterling, with his sharp eyes and dangerously good manners; and she was not naive to the perils of putting herself aboard a ship in the company of two dozen strange men.

  Will Ralph return before I leave? To her annoyance, she often found herself thinking of him. It felt wrong to go without saying goodbye. He had slipped into her life four years ago on the beach at Algoa Bay, as unexpected as a ghost, and now she would leave him the same way.

  Would he care? She wanted to think so. But that was just foolishness.

  In a blink, the heron slipped off its perch into the water. Its long neck stabbed forward. When it pulled back, a tiny fish wriggled in its beak. With two gulps, the bird swallowed it whole. Even a moment of repose was only the prelude to the next kill.

  Ann got up. The calm she craved had slipped away; best to get back to camp.

  ‘Harry!’ she called.

  She knew he would not be far away. At first she had fretted that he roamed so freely in this wild place. She had worried about the hippos and crocodiles that lurked by the water, the lions in the bush. But he had proved to have surprisingly sharp instincts, almost a sixth sense for danger. He kept away from the riverbanks in the middle of the day, when the crocodiles were sunning themselves; and from the deep pools where the hippos lay submerged. He seemed to be able to sniff out the game paths where lions had passed, or know where the jackals hunted. Once, Ann had seen him playing in a meadow of long grass. Suddenly, he had stopped and looked up at a tree on the edge of the clearing. Following his gaze, Ann’s heart nearly stopped. A leopard lay on a low branch, almost hidden in the dappled shadows. Its paws hung limp over the branch, while its head was turned sideways as if on a pillow.

  Ann had to bite her fist to keep her composure. But Harry had shown no fear. He backed away, slowly and silently, until he reached the far side of the clearing and wondered why his mother was crying.

  Now, at Ann’s summons, he came trotting out of the thick bush on to the bluff.

  His face was streaked with mud, the tear in his shirt that she had darned that morning had reopened, and blood oozed from a gash on his knee.

  ‘I found a calemion on a tree,’ he said. He could not say ‘chameleon’.

  He held it out, a puffy lizard squeezed into his cupped hand. Its flesh was a cloudy, almost transparent colour, tinted pink where it touched his skin and with a green tinge along its spine. Ann thought it must be terrified.

  ‘Can I keep it?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Let it go,’ she said gently.

  ‘I won’t hurt it.’

  ‘I know. But it wants to be free.’

  Harry bent down to the ground and opened his hand, watching as the chameleon lurched slowly into the brush.

  If only I could escape so easily, Ann thought. Change my colours, and live unnoticed.

  They walked back to camp, off the bluff and round into the bend of the lagoon. The stockade they had made on their first day still stood, though the only house inside it was Marius’s. Everyone else had made their homes beyond its gate, preferring to keep a safe distance. Ann’s home was a lean-to hut, logs laid against a ridge pole and woven through with grass to keep the rain out.

  Whoever thought that one day our house in Paradise Valley would seem like a mansion? she marvelled.

  Ann made a fire and put some water on to boil. Marius had kept the cooking utensils they had salvaged from the wreck for himself, but the Chunus had made her a broad pot with a tapered mouth, sculpted from river clay. As the water began to simmer, she added fish and herbs to make a stew.

  Approaching footsteps started her, but it was just Jobe. The smell of food often brought him to her hut. He came so regularly that she always prepared an extra portion. He sat cross-legged by the fire and took the bowl that Ann offered him.

  ‘What will you do when I am gone?’ she asked.

  ‘Wait for Ralph. Try not to kill Marius.’

  She laughed, though she couldn’t tell if he was joking. She wished he had not mentioned Ralph. She was trying to avoid thinking about him.

  ‘Will Ralph return, do you suppose?’

  ‘He escaped the prison on Robben Island. If anyone can survive King Shaka, and come out a rich man, he will.’

  ‘Then you will be rich, too.’

  It felt absurd, imagining any of these ragged castaways ever making their fortunes. The best that could be imagined was that they would eke out a wretched existence, no better than she had in Paradise Valley. The worst . . .

  She thought of the graves by the ruined house. People had lived here, they had died, and now they were no more than bones.

  Marsden was coming up the path. ‘Boss wants you at the stockade,’ he said to Jobe.

  Jobe gave him a contemptuous stare. He had objected when the men started referring to Marius as ‘boss’, and he still refused to refer to him in this way, but the title had stuck.

  ‘What does he want me for?’

  ‘He’s got something to say. Needs you to translate.’

  The Chunus had trooped in from the village and the fields and gathered inside the stockade. Ann was surprised to see that men from the Nanticoke had come, too. They stood around the perimeter with guns and axes in their hands.

  ‘They look like the guards on Robben Island,’ Jobe muttered.

  Marius stood in the gateway. As the Africans arrived, he directed them to one side or other of the enclosure: men to the left, women and children to the right. Some of them looked frightened, but most of their daily work saw them divided by gender – it was not unusual for them to be split up in this way. If any man wanted to complain about being separated from his wife and children, Marius’s sjambok made him think again.

  Ann hung back. Five years previously, she and her husband Frank had attended a meeting at St Peter’s Field outside Manchester. They had gathered to protest against the corrupt parliamentary system that let landowners live in luxury while honest people starved. It had been a good-natured affair: women in their Sunday best, children playing.

  Then the hussars had arrived. They had ordered the crowd to disperse, and – when the crowd did not oblige – they had lowered their sabres and charged as if they were facing a corps of Bonaparte’s infantry. Twenty minutes later, eighteen civilians lay dead and hundreds more were wounded.

  Ann and Frank had escaped with some bruises. But she had not forgotten the horror of it, the disbelieving moment when she realised that the cavalry meant to attack, that innocence and good intention were no protection. Now, she felt something of that brutal purpose in Captain Sterling’s men. They looked at the Africans with the same pitiless contempt as the hussars: not as human beings, but as quarry.

  The last of the Chunus were almost inside the stockade. Ann’s feeling of dread grew stronger: she wanted to warn the Chunus that something terrible was going to happen, but she did not know how, and Marius would surely silence her if she tried. She glanced at Harry. She had to protect him at any cost.

  ‘Come with me, my boy.’ She took his hand hastily and pulled him into a rough lean-to that the men used for storage. There was no door, but a pile of salvaged barrels would at least conceal him from anyone passing. ‘Wait here,’ she said, hoping for once he would obey her.

  Harry seemed to sense the menace in the air. He ducked down obediently. ‘Mummy, aren’t you staying?’ he asked from behind the barrels.

  ‘No, my heart.’

  Ann longed to keep him safe and sit out the danger until it had passed, but she could not hide in ignorance while others might be suffering. She had to see it for herself.

  ‘Stay here and be good.’

  She went back to the stockade. Twenty yards behind it, a spreading tree grew on a low hill that allowed a view over the palisade wall. Ann hid behind the tree and looked out.

  The stockade was full. Every African in the settlement must be there, perhaps the first time they had all been gathered together. Ann had never realised how many there were – well over a hundred. They crowded into the open space in front of Marius’s house, while the armed sailors stood around the perimeter. Ann saw Ratray and Marsden, and Captain Sterling in his immaculate frock coat. Jobe was there, too, standing at the front next to Marius, who had climbed onto a crude platform made from a plank stretched between two barrels. It put him almost on eye level with Ann. She shrank back, but he had not seen her behind the tree. He was surveying the assembled Africans with an unpleasant smirk on his face.

  ‘Tell them they have done good work,’ he said to Jobe. ‘Tell them I am pleased with them.’

  Jobe translated what Marius had said. Some of the Chunus smiled tentatively, but most were more worried about the armed men around them.

  ‘In fact,’ Marius continued, ‘I am so pleased that I am going to send them to work for other men. They will go on that boat’ – he pointed to the Nanticoke – ‘across the sea to another country.’

  His words died away without translation. Jobe was staring at him with murder in his eyes. Everything that Ratray had said – the sly jokes and euphemisms, the references to ‘passengers’ and ‘perishable cargo’ – suddenly made horrifying sense.

  Perhaps Ann had always known it. Perhaps, deep in her subconscious, she had understood it; but against all judgement she had looked away, refusing to believe it. Maybe some betrayals were simply too enormous to imagine.

  The Nanticoke was not a merchant ship. She was a slaver. And now Marius would make the Chunus her cargo.

  The last to know, inevitably, were the Africans. They stood uncertain and afraid, waiting for Jobe to translate what Marius had said.

  ‘Tell them.’ Marius poked Jobe hard in the ribs with the toe of his boot. ‘Tell them, or I’ll put you on that ship, too, hey?’

  For Jobe, this was the bitterest betrayal of all. But he was unarmed, and surrounded by men who would happily put a bullet in him. He was alive and free for one reason – his use to the slavers as an interpreter.

  He raised his head and spoke a few short words.

  A shudder went through the crowd. Some cried out; others clasped their neighbours. One or two of the women started to weep, and in turn their children started crying agonisingly.

  But a few men decided on a different tack. Mahamba was one of them. The beating Marius had given him had broken his authority, but it had not taken away his pride. He stood in the front rank, staring at Marius with undisguised loathing. When Jobe spoke, he did not flinch. Instead, he launched himself at Marius.

  He moved so fast that the big Dutchman had no time to react. He was knocked backwards off the makeshift platform onto the ground. Before he could get up, Mahamba sprang onto him.

  Marius was the bigger man. He could wrestle Mahamba off him in seconds. But the Chunu chief raised his arm, revealing a stone clasped in his hand: big enough to smash Marius’s skull, with jagged edges as sharp as an axe.

  A shot rang out from the palisade. Mahamba slumped. Blood gushed from the hole that a bullet had punched clean into his heart. The stone fell from his hand and rolled at Jobe’s feet.

  Jobe looked down. Marius was pinned under Mahamba’s body. In three paces Jobe could be on top of him. But there were armed sailors on every side, all watching Jobe. He would be dead before he was within striking distance.

  Jobe left the stone where it lay. Better to live now, and take his revenge later. But others among the Chunus felt differently. Better to die now than submit. Following Mahamba’s example, they charged their captors.

  They would surely have overwhelmed the white men, but their advantage was also their weakness. With so many people crammed into the stockade, those who wanted to fight struggled to reach their opponents, while many of the crowd had no appetite for battle but only wanted to flee.

  More shots were fired, deafening at such close range. Smoke billowed into the compound. Cries became screams; fear turned to panic. The crowd surged back towards the gate.

  They could not get out. The gates were closed, and Ann saw with horror that they had been barred from the outside, buttressed with heavy logs so that they would not shift even under the press of a hundred Africans. Mothers lifted their children above their heads, holding them up to save them from being trampled. A sailor reached out and took one of them, as if to help it over the palings and to safety, then tossed it back into the compound as casually as throwing a ball. The child vanished in the melee.

  What could Ann do against so many men? If she revealed herself, she would put both her and Harry in danger. But she could not stand by and watch as women and children were condemned to death, or worse.

  She ran from the tree, across the open ground. Two sailors had been stationed outside the gate, but their attention was on the people inside, so they did not see her coming. Ann was able to get right up to the gate. The timbers propped against it were blocks salvaged from the Farewell’s stern post, each one so big she would struggle to put her hands around it. She grabbed one as best she could and heaved with all her strength.

  It did not budge. It was too heavy and the people pushing on the gate had driven it into the ground. If they had stepped back, they would have released the pressure on it, maybe given Ann a chance, but they did not know that, and Ann had no way of telling them.

  Ann beat her fists on the wood in fury. She wrapped herself around the beam, rocking her weight to try and shift it.

  One of the sailors had seen her.

  ‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘Hands off that.’

  The sailor came lunging towards her. He hit her with all his weight, crushing her against the prop and squeezing the breath out of her.

  The timber moved. Ann’s frantic heaving had pushed it loose; now, the sailor’s weight piling in on top of her dislodged it. It fell with a thud that made the earth tremble – so thunderously that the second prop was also shaken loose.

  It toppled over, just missing Ann. The sailor was not so lucky. The heavy beam fell on his legs and crushed them, mangling the limbs into grotesque shapes. Ann scrambled free, ignoring his screams. The other sailor stood a few yards away, staring at her and his crippled shipmate.

  But without the props, there was nothing to hold the gates shut. They burst open like a breached dam, letting the Africans pour out. The sailor, still pinned under the piece of timber, was trampled under their feet. His companion fared no better: he was knocked down and trampled, too, as the Chunus fled in every direction.

  Ann joined the rout. Again, she was taken back to St Peter’s Field, running with the crowd like game before the beaters, heart bursting, knowing that if she did not keep up, she would be killed. Gunshots sounded behind them as Marius’s men fired indiscriminately into the crowd. A woman cartwheeled past Ann and collapsed. Ann wanted to help, but there was nothing to be done. She was caught in a river in spate; her one thought was to run.

  She reached the lean-to. Harry had come out from his hiding place and was staring in shock at the fleeing Chunus. Ann scooped him up in her arms and kept running.

  She did not stop until she had run far into the bush, until she could no longer hear the sound of Marius’s voice. The Chunus had scattered. She and Harry were alone.

  Ann saw she had come to the clearing Harry had found months earlier, with the ruined house and the five graves. A dread hung over the place, the memory of unspeakable things. They could not linger here.

  ‘Can we go home now, Mummy?’ Harry asked.

  ‘No, my darling. We have to go further.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where we can find a new home.’

  Night was falling; soon it would be dark. She could not run forever; she could not go back; she could not fight the slavers alone.

  But Marius and Ratray and Sterling would not stop until they had fulfilled the devilish bargain they had struck. They would organise hunting parties to round up the Chunus and bring them back. Some might escape, but there were pregnant women and children who would not get far, and husbands and fathers who would not abandon them. Ann could not leave them to their fate.