Skeleton Coast Read online

What he didn’t know was how much ground their stalkers had gained during the day—for they seemed superhuman in their abilities to withstand the sun and heat. H. A. had estimated that when they entered the desert they had a five-day lead on their pursuers. He felt confident that they held no more than a day’s advantage now. By tomorrow that would be whittled further to half a day. And then? The next day would be when they would pay for abandoning their weapons when the packhorse went lame.

  Their only chance was to find enough water tonight for the horses so they could ride them once again.

  Not enough of the precious fluid remained to water the horses, and the men’s ration was half of what they’d had just after dawn. For Ryder it was like adding insult to injury. The warm trickle seemed to just seep into his tongue rather than slake his thirst, which was now a gnawing ache in his stomach. He forced himself to eat some dried beef.

  Looking at the raw-boned faces around him, H. A. knew that tonight’s march was going to be torture. Peter Smythe couldn’t stop himself from swaying where he stood. Jon Varley wasn’t much better off. Only the brothers, Tim and Tom Watermen, seemed okay, but they had been in Africa longer than Smythe or Varley, working as farmhands on a big Cape cattle ranch for the past decade. Their bodies were more acclimated to Africa’s brutal sun.

  H. A. ran his hands through his big muttonchop sideburns, combing sand from the coarse graying hair. When he bent to tighten his boot laces he felt twice his fifty years. His back and legs ached fiercely and the vertebrae popped when he stood again.

  “This is it, lads. You have my word that tonight we will drink our fill,” he said to bolster their flagging morale.

  “On what, sand?” Tim Watermen joked to show he still could.

  “The Bushmen who call themselves the San have lived in this desert for a thousand years or more. It’s said they can smell water a hundred miles off and that’s not far off the mark. When I came though the Kalahari twenty years ago I had a San guide. The little bugger found water where I would have never thought to look. They scooped it from plants when there was a fog in the morning and drank from the rumen of the animals they killed with their poison arrows.”

  “What’s a rumen?” Varley asked.

  Ryder exchanged a glance with the Watermen brothers as if to say everyone should know the term. “It’s the first stomach in an animal like a cow or antelope where they produce their cud. The fluid in it is mostly water and plant juice.”

  “I could go for some of that now,” Peter Smythe managed to mumble. A single drop of claret-red blood clung to the corner of his cracked lip. He licked it away before it could fall to the earth.

  “But the San’s greatest ability is to find water buried under the sand in dried-out riverbeds that haven’t flowed in a generation.”

  “Can you find water like them?” Jon Varley asked.

  “I’ve been looking in every streambed we’ve crossed for the past five days,” H. A. said.

  The men were startled. None of them had realized they’d crossed any dried-out rivers. To them the desert had been featureless and empty. That H. A. had known about the wadis increased their confidence that he would see them out of this nightmare.

  Ryder continued, “There was a promising one day before yesterday but I couldn’t be certain and we can’t afford the time for me to be wrong. I estimate we’re two, maybe three days from the coast, which means this part of the desert gets moisture off the ocean, plus the occasional storm. I’ll find us water, lads. Of that you can be sure.”

  It was the most H. A. had spoken since telling the men to dump their guns and it had the desired effect. The Watermen brothers grinned, Jon Varley managed to square his shoulders, and even young Smythe stopped swaying.

  A cold moon began to climb behind them as the last rays of the sun sank into the distant Atlantic, and soon the sky was carpeted with more stars than a man could count in a hundred lifetimes. The desert was as silent as a church save for the hiss of sand shifting under boots and hooves and the occasional creak of leather saddlery. Their pace was steady and measured. H. A. was well aware of their weakened condition, but never forgot the hordes that were surely on their trail.

  He called the first halt at midnight. The nature of the desert had changed slightly. While they still slogged through ankle-deep sand there were patches of loose gravel in many of the valleys. H. A. had spotted old watering holes in a few of the washes, places where eland and antelope had dug into the hard pan searching for underground water. He saw no sign of humans ever using them, so he assumed they had dried out eons ago. He didn’t mention his discovery to the men but it served to bolster his confidence in finding them a working well.

  He allowed the men a double share of water, sure now that he could replenish the canteens and water the horses before sunup. And if he didn’t, there was no use in rationing, for the desert would claim them on the morrow. Ryder gave half his ration to his horse although the others eagerly drank theirs down with little regard to the pack animals.

  A rare cloud blotted the moon a half hour after they started marching again, and when it passed, the shifting illumination caused something on the desert floor to catch Ryder’s eye. According to his compass and the stars, he’d been following a due-westerly direction, and none of the men commented when he suddenly turned north. He paced ahead of the others, aware of the flaky soil crunching under his boots, and when he reached the spot he dropped to his knees.

  It was merely a dimple in the otherwise flat valley, no more than three feet across. He cast his gaze around the spot, smiling tightly when he found bits of broken eggshell, and one that was almost intact except for a long crack that ran like a fault line along its smooth surface. The shell was the size of his fist and had a neat hole drilled through the top. Its stopper was a tuft of dried grass mixed with native gum. It was one of the San’s most prized possessions, for without these ostrich eggs they had no way to transport water. That one broke when they were refilling could have very well doomed the party of Bushmen who last used the well.

  H. A. almost felt their ghosts staring down on him from the ancient riverbed’s bank, tiny little spirits wearing nothing but crowns of reeds around their heads and rawhide belts festooned with pouches for their ostrich eggs and quivers for the small poisoned arrows they used to take game.

  “What have you found, H. A.?” Jon Varley asked, kneeling in the dirt next to the guide. His once shining dark hair fell lank around his shoulders, but he had somehow maintained the piratical gleam in his eyes. They were the eyes of a desperate schemer, a man driven by dreams of instant wealth and one willing to risk death to see them fulfilled.

  “Water, Mr. Varley.” Though twenty years his senior, H. A. tried to speak deferentially to all his clients.

  “What? How? I don’t see anything.”

  The Watermen brothers sat on a nearby boulder. Peter Smythe collapsed at their feet. Tim helped the lad move upright so his back was against the water-worn rock. His head lolled against his thin chest and his breathing was unnaturally shallow.

  “It’s underground, like I told you.”

  “How do we get it out?”

  “We dig.”

  Without another word the two men began scraping back the soil that a Bushman had laboriously used to refill the precious well so that it didn’t dry out. H. A.’s hands were broad and so callused that he could use them like shovels, tearing into the friable earth with little regard to the flinty shards. Varley had the hands of a gambler, smooth and, at one point, neatly manicured, but he dug just as hard as the guide—raging thirst allowing him to ignore the cuts and scrapes and the blood that dripped from his fingertips.

  They excavated two feet of earth and still no sign of water. They had to expand the hole because they were much bigger than the Bushmen warriors whose job it was to dig these wells. At three feet H. A. took out a scoopful of dirt and when he dropped it away from the hole a thin layer clung to his skin. He rolled it between his fingers until he’d produced a litt
le ball of mud. When he squeezed it a quivering drop of water shone in the starlight.

  Varley whooped and even H. A. cracked an uncommon smile.

  They redoubled their efforts, slinging mud from the hole with reckless abandon. Ryder had to put a restraining hand on Varley’s shoulder when he felt they’d dug deep enough.

  “Now we wait.”

  The other men crowded around the well and they watched in expectant silence as the darkened bottom of the excavation suddenly turned white. It was the moon reflecting off water seeping into the hole from the surrounding aquifer. H. A. used a piece torn from his shirt as a filter and dipped his canteen into the muddy water. It took several minutes for it to fill halfway. Peter moaned when he heard it sloshing as H. A. lifted it from the hole.

  “Here you go, lad,” Ryder said, handing over the canteen. Peter reached for it eagerly but Ryder didn’t let go. “Slowly, my boy. Drink it slowly.”

  Smythe was too far gone to listen to H. A.’s advice; his first massive gulp sent him into a paroxysm of coughing and the mouthful of water was wasted on the desert floor. When he’d recovered he took tentative sips, looking sheepish. It took four hours to recover enough water for the men to drink their fill and finally manage to eat their first meal in days.

  H. A. was still watering the horses when the sun began to brush against the eastern horizon. He was careful with them so they wouldn’t bloat or cramp, and fed them sparingly, but still their great bellies rumbled with contentment as they ate and managed to stale for the first time in days.

  “H. A.!” Tim Watermen had gone over the riverbank to relieve himself in private. He stood silhouetted against the dawn frantically waving his hat and pointing toward the rising sun.

  Ryder plucked his telescope from his saddlebag and raced from the horses, climbing the hill like a man possessed. He smashed into Watermen so both fell to the dust. Before Tim could protest, Ryder clamped a hand over his companion’s mouth and hissed, “Keep your voice down. Sound travels well over the desert.”

  Lying flat, H. A. extended the telescope and set it against his eye.

  Look at them come, he thought. God, they are magnificent.

  WHAT had brought these five men together was Peter Smythe’s utter hatred of his father, a fearsome man who claimed to have had a vision of the archangel Gabriel. The angel had told Lucas Smythe to sell everything he owned and travel to Africa to spread the word of God among the savages. While not particularly religious before his vision, Smythe devoted himself to the Bible with such urgency that when he applied to the London Missionary Society they considered denying his application because he had become a zealot. But in the end the Society accepted him if for no other reason than to get him away from their offices. They sent him and his begrudging wife and son to Bechuanaland, where he was to replace a minister who’d died of malaria.

  Away from the constraints of society at a tiny mission in the heart of the Herero people, Smythe became a religious tyrant, for his was a vengeful God who demanded total self-sacrifice and severe penitence for even the most minor transgressions. It was nothing for Peter to be cane-whipped by his father because he mumbled the last words of a prayer or be denied dinner for not being able to recite a particular psalm on command.

  At the time of the family’s arrival, the Herero king, Samuel Maharero, who had been baptized some decades earlier, was in a bitter dispute with the colonial authorities, and thus shunned the German minister sent to his lands by the Rhenish Mission Society. Lucas Smythe and his family enjoyed the patronage of the king even if Maharero was hesitant of Smythe’s rantings of hellfire and brimstone.

  While young Peter enjoyed his friendships with the king’s many grandchildren, life as a teen near the royal kraal was tedium punctuated with moments of terror when the Spirit seized his father, and he wanted nothing more than to run away.

  And so he plotted his escape, confiding in Assa Maharero, one of the king’s grandsons and his best friend, what he intended to do. It was during one of their many strategy sessions that Peter Smythe made the discovery that would change his life.

  He was in a storage rondoval, a circular hut the Herero used to store fodder when the fields were too barren for their thousands of cattle. It was the place he and Assa had chosen as their hide out, and though Peter had been there dozens of times, this was the first he noticed that the hard-packed earth along one mud-and-grass wall had been dug up. The black soil had been carefully tamped down but his sharp eye spotted the irregularity.

  He used his hands to dig into the spot, and discovered that there was only a thin layer of soil laid over a dozen large earthen beer pots. The jugs were the size of his head, and a membrane of cowhide had been stretched over their tops. He lifted one from its resting place. It was heavy and he could feel something rattling around inside.

  Peter carefully worked the stitches around the rim, loosening them just enough so that when he tipped the pot a few unremarkable stones dropped into his palm. He began to shake. While they looked nothing like the stylized drawings of faceted stones he’d seen, he knew by how they scattered the meager light in the hut that he was holding six uncut diamonds. The smallest was the size of his thumbnail. The largest more than twice as big.

  Just then Assa ducked through the arched doorway and saw what his friend had uncovered. His eyes went wide with terror and he quickly looked over his shoulder to see if any adults were about. Across the fenced stockade a couple of boys were watching some cattle and a woman was walking a few hundred yards away with a bundle of grass perched atop her head. He leapt across the rondoval and took the beer pot from Peter’s startled fingers.

  “What have you done?” Assa hissed in his odd German-accented English.

  “Nothing, Assa, I swear,” Peter cried guiltily. “I saw that something had been buried and I just wanted to see what it was, is all.”

  Assa held out a hand and Peter dumped the loose stones into his palm. The young African prince spoke as he tucked the stones back under the leather cover. “On pain of death you must never speak of this to anyone.”

  “Those are diamonds, aren’t they?”

  Assa regarded his friend. “Yes.”

  “But how? There are no diamonds here. They’re all down in the Cape Colony around Kimberley.”

  Assa sat cross-legged in front of Peter, torn between his oath to his grandfather and pride at what his tribe had accomplished. He was three years younger than Peter, just thirteen, so youthful boasting won out over his solemn promise. “I will tell you but you must never repeat it.”

  “I swear, Assa.”

  “Since diamonds were first discovered, men of the Herero tribe have traveled to Kimberley to work in the pits. They worked a one-year contract and came home with the pay the white miners gave them, but they also took something else. They stole stones.”

  “I heard that the men are searched before they are allowed to leave the miners’ camps, even their bums.”

  “What our men did was cut their skin and place the stones inside the wound. When it scarred over there was no evidence. Upon their return they reopened the wounds with assegais and retrieved the stones to present to my great-grandfather, Chief Kamaharero, who had first ordered them south to Kimberley.”

  “Assa, some of these stones are pretty big—surely they would have been discovered,” Peter protested.

  Assa laughed. “And some Herero warriors are pretty big, too.” He then turned serious as he continued the tale. “This went on for many years, as many as twenty, but then the white miners discovered what the Herero were doing. A hundred were arrested and even those who hadn’t yet hid a stone under their skin were found guilty of stealing. They were all put to death.

  “When the time is right we will use these stones to throw off the yoke of the German colonial office”—his dark eyes shone—“and we will again live as free men. Now, swear to me again, Peter, that you will tell no one that you have discovered the treasure.”

  Peter’s gaze met that of hi
s young friend and said, “I swear.”

  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.