Fearless Master of the Jungle (A Bunduki Jungle Adventure (29 page)

‘
Does
she?’ the war-lady repeated, delivering a savage stamping kick to
the center of the captive’s chest.

‘
No!’
Bunduki said again, the word coming out in a pain-filled
gasp.

‘
He
won’t admit it even if she does,’ Charole stated. ‘Let’s catch her
and ask her about it.’

‘
How
do we do that?’ Torisaki inquired.

‘
Make
him use one of the “Hairy People’s” calls to bring her here,’ the
Protectress suggested. ‘If she hears it, she’ll come.’

‘
That’s a good idea,’ the warlord agreed and glanced around.
‘Here, some of you. I want him between those trees. Start to bend
them down.’

Eager hands took hold of
Bunduki and hauled him to the desired position. Other members of
the party grasped the ropes and began to pull. While they were
doing so, Torisaki grasped the blond giant by the hair
and hauled him into
a sitting position, telling Shushi to liberate his hands. By the
time the trees were bent sufficiently low, the war-lady had carried
out her task. Her husband took one of the shorter ropes and, while
she repeated the process at the other side, drew its noose tight
around their captive’s right wrist.

‘
Keep
them held down, but tight as he gets up,’ the warlord commanded, as
Shushi employed her
rentjong
again to sever the rest of the blond giant’s
bonds.

Although Deneb-Ginwe had told
his captors of the trees
’ purpose, he had not given precise details of how
they were employed. So Torisaki was making a few errors in the way
he was fastening the trees. In the first place, he should not have
allowed Bunduki to rise. Secondly and even more important, he ought
to have made sure that the blond giant was unable to grip the
wrist-ropes.

‘
Now,
“Earth”,’ the warlord said, after Bunduki had risen. ‘Call for your
woman to come.’

‘
No!’
the blond giant replied.

Standing on spread apart feet,
with his arms bent at shoulder height against the pressure being
applied by the taut ropes around his wrists, Bunduki appreciated
how his captors
had made another mistake in permitting him to adopt such a
posture. Not that, he told himself, it would make any great
difference in the long run; but it at least gave him a fighting
chance to prolong his life.

‘
You
might as well call her,’ Shushi remarked, almost as if tendering
kindly and well-meant advice to a friend. ‘If we have to go into
the village for her, we’ll not leave a man, woman or child alive.
And, when she sees how you’ve died, she’ll be only too willing to
talk.’

‘
I
won’t call!’ Bunduki declared.

‘
Then
die, damn you!’ Torisaki bellowed. ‘Release the ropes!’

Obeying their
leader
’s
command, the Cara-Buntes and Charole watched the trees—which had
required five men apiece to bend—starting to return to their
original positions.

They were stopped long before becoming
upright!

Bracing his giant body, Bunduki threw
every bit of his enormous strength into combating the strain. He
was helped by the various errors that had been made while preparing
him for the treatment. Usually the victim was given no chance to
make ready and was subjected to a sudden snapping jerk. While he
had none of that to add to his misfortunes, he was all too aware of
his position. Even if his captors did not take some action to make
him relax, he could only restrain the trees while his strength held
out. When he weakened, they would straighten and, at the very
least, he would be swung upwards and seriously injured.

~*~

‘
AAAH-EEE-AAAH-EEE-AAGH!’

The voice uttering the
challenging roar of an
Australopithecus
might be feminine in timbre, but the sound
lost little of its awesome menace because it had not been sent out
by a male of the species. Coming as it did so unexpectedly, from
beyond the bushes at the opposite side of the Place of Punishment
to that on which the Wurka-Telonga village was situated, it aroused
considerable alarm and consternation for most of the occupants of
the clearing.

Everybody except the prisoners looked
around, trying to discover who—or what—was responsible for the
inhuman-sounding roar. Of them all, probably only Charole and
Bunduki recognized the nature of the call and knew what it must
portend. However, the blond giant alone was able to guess at how
his wife was intending to try and effect his rescue.

Much as Dawn
Gunn
’s every
instinct had been to dash straight out of Hav-Bart’s house and warn
her husband of the terrible danger that lay waiting for him,
circumstances had prevented her from doing so immediately.
Attracted by the commotion, men and women had appeared from the
surrounding buildings and soon the whole of the grown up population
was foregathered. What was more, every man was carrying something
that could be used as a weapon.

One of the last to come on the
scene had been Tik-Felum. On seeing what had happened, his face had
registered more alarm than grief over finding that his younger son
was dead. He had seen enough to warn him that he had committed a
dangerous error in tactics. All the men upon whom he was best able
to rely for support were unavailable. From the comments he had
overheard and the way in which many of the crowd were behaving, he
had guessed that he might have need of his
coterie
’s
presence.

Sensing that the villagers were
close to rising against the Senior Elder
’s tyrannical regime and wanting to
avoid bloodshed if possible, Dawn had warned the assembled people
that the Cara-Buntes were in the vicinity. However, filled with
rage, grief and raw anxiety for her abducted husband’s welfare,
Marn-Bara had exposed the treachery of Tik-Felum and his sons.
Before Dawn could intervene, giving a cry of rage, Hav-Bart’s
younger brother, Kal-Bart, had sprung forward to bury the blade of
his
machete
in the Senior Elder’s skull.

Much to Dawn
’s relief, the killing had not
provoked an outbreak of inter-factional fighting. In fact, she
considered that it had averted hostilities. There were a few men
present who had agreed with Tik-Felum’s policy of keeping
themselves supplied through the efforts of others who were willing
to work, but none felt any inclination to try and avenge him.
Already aware of the majority of their fellow villagers’
sentiments, most of them had assumed airs of disinterest from the
beginning. The few who had showed resentment, despite appreciating
that their days of officially sponsored idleness were probably
coming to an end, had taken warning from the menacing attitudes of
the people around them. So they had decided that discretion was
called for, and they saw no reason to make a pointless display of
loyalty to a man who was already dead.

Satisfied that the situation
was well under control and needed no further attention on her part,
although it had taken several badly needed minutes to achieve this,
Dawn had announced that she was going to help her husband.
Immediately, Kal-Bart and several other men
had offered to accompany her.
Telling them that she would reconnoiter alone first and give the
call of a ‘Hairy Man if she needed assistance, she had prepared to
leave.

Taking her bow from Marn-Bara,
the girl had arranged to have the
m
’
kuki
retrieved. She had not waited for this to be done, but had
asked Hav-Bart’s wife to take care of it. Considering her
back-quiver would be more of a hindrance than an aid to the work
ahead, she had left it and Bunduki’s archery equipment behind.
Then, having cleaned and sheathed her knife, she had set
off.

By the time Dawn had reached the edge
of the clearing, Bunduki was sprawling motionless on the ground.
There had been no hope of achieving anything in the circumstances,
but she had drawn solace from observing that he was bound hand and
foot. That implied he was not only alive, but that he had suffered
no serious or incapacitating injury.

Hearing the elephants, the girl had
considered that they could offer a better and more readily
available source of assistance than the men of the village would
be. Passing around the fringe of the clearing, she had been too
preoccupied with moving as swiftly and quietly as possible to
wonder how the Protectress of the Quagga God—who she too had
recognized—had contrived to escape death at Bon-Gatah and arrive in
the Place of Punishment. Making contact with the animals and
obtaining their co-operation had consumed several valuable minutes,
but she had been convinced that it was time well spent.

Nor had the girl changed her point of
view on returning to the vicinity of the clearing.

That Dawn and her massive assistants
had arrived without their presence being detected was not as
remarkable as it might appear on the surface. For its size, a
forest elephant could move with great stealth and in almost
complete silence through even fairly dense undergrowth. Aware of
the need to do so, the half a dozen cows and the big herd bull she
was riding had approached the clearing with little noise. Their
task had been made easier because all the attention of the human
beings they were stalking was directed at the blond
giant.

Then the girl had impersonated
the
Australopithecus
’
challenge!

As the last note of the eerie
cry was ending, so did the elephants
’ silence!

Echoing the savage trumpeting of the
herd bull, the pachyderms rushed through the undergrowth as if it
did not exist. With their great sail-like ears spread and flapping,
trunks curled upwards and tusks elevated to the horizontal, they
thundered across the clearing.

Due to their homeland being
insufficient in size to support a resident population of elephants
and because it would have been impractical to transport living
specimens in any type of vessel available to the Cara-Buntes, the
huge beasts were something beyond the raiding party ken. Although
some of the rival clans had occasionally brought back tusks,
trunks, hides and meat,
Torisaki’s warriors had never seen the animals in
the flesh until that moment. However, despite the fact that their
nerves had been shaken by what had sounded like the roar from one
of the ‘Hairy People’, the discovery that the largest of the beasts
was ridden by a beautiful young woman—who also appeared to be able
to control the others—robbed the sight of some of its otherwise
awesome effect. So, while alarmed and prepared to take reasonable
precautions, they were not driven off in a state of panic as Dawn
had hoped would happen.

Only Charole, having been in
contact with the larger plains-dwelling sub-species of
Loxodonta
Africana,
fully appreciated the deadly danger of the situation. Nor
did she feel it was any the less dangerous because the elephants
brought by Dawn were somewhat smaller than those with which she was
acquainted. In fact, such was the extreme stress of the moment that
the approaching animals seemed to be even more enormous and
menacing than those she had previously encountered. For one of the
rare occasions in her life, Charole allowed fear to guide her
actions. Turning, she ran towards the brink of the escarpment. By
doing so, she was offering herself two possible avenues of escape.
There was a steep path leading down to the place at which they had
landed and where the ‘bullboats’ were now waiting. Or, if this
should prove unattainable for any reason, she was an excellent
swimmer and could dive with comparative safety into the deep water
that lapped along the foot of the majority of the wall. Once aboard
a ‘bullboat’, she was confident that she could make the
Yung-Lib
crew do her
bidding. They were aware that her status had gained importance
since forming an alliance with their owners.

While Torisaki lacked
Charole
’s
knowledge of elephants, he realized that Dawn would not have
brought them unless convinced they could cope with his party. Their
sheer size alone meant that they could prove very dangerous. Nor
would the small force at his disposal be able to stop them. What
was more, he suspected that the roar made by the girl was to signal
for reinforcements. So, for reasons of expediency rather than
humanity, he gave thought to saving his warriors from loss of
life.

‘
Scatter into the trees!’ the warlord thundered, snatching
the
lading
from its sheath. ‘Get back to the “bull-boats”, we’re
leaving!’

Sharing her
husband
’s
appreciation of the peril, Shushi did not wait to be given advice.
A glance over her shoulder warned that she could not follow Charole
and take the shortest way to safety. So she swung and set off in
what would be a semi-circular route to reach the edge of the
escarpment.

In spite of having started the
other members of his party on their way to safety, Torisaki did not
follow them immediately. As he was to be driven off without
learning the secret of the
‘Thunder Powder’ and doubted whether he would ever
again be fortunate enough to be in a position to learn it, he
intended to kill the blond giant before taking his departure.
Raising the
lading to
strike, he moved forward without showing any
caution.