The Call of Zulina (28 page)

“Each of you look to your leader!” Cabeto commanded. “Then do exactly what he tells you! Ask no questions. Just obey!”

Two shots rang out and then another and then one more as the four Africans fired into startled attackers. Three white men fell. All the while, Cabeto and Grace worked their ramrods and prepared their muskets for the next round.

Lingongo pushed the immobilized men aside and shoved her way into the dungeon. “Attack them, you cowards!” she bellowed. “Attack them!” Her whip whistled through the air and ripped Antonio's gun from his hands, slashing his wrists and arms.

Grace aimed and fired. A trustee next to Lingongo grabbed his shoulder and fell to the floor. Then Cabeto aimed and pulled the trigger. Screaming in fury, Lingongo ducked down just in time to avoid becoming the next casualty.

“Retreat!” one of the white men cried. “Retreat!”

“No!” Lingongo shrieked. “Fight on! Fight on!”

Leaping to her feet, Lingongo turned her whip on the white fighters as they tried to turn back. She drove them forward, down onto the dungeon floor and directly into the line of fire.

Then seemingly out of nowhere, Ikem rose up before them. “This be our time, African warriors!” he cried. “Follow me to war!”

Before the wide-eyed white men, Ikem's tattooed face transformed from a frightening shadow into a war mask of pure terror—alive and in person! Fearlessly, Ikem dashed toward the attackers, his long-bladed knife high in the air. The attackers dissolved in howls of panic.

“’Tis a demon come to drag us all to ’ell!” Henry Taylor gasped before he fell down in a dead faint.

More than one man chose Lingongo's whip rather than face the black tattooed specter who charged toward them with his killer knife.

Whether or not the captives were actually moving toward their assigned rooms as the leaders directed, Grace could not tell.
If I could just get these people out of the middle of the fight!
she thought. She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through the confusion and blinding smoke. She reached her hands out to hysterical men and women, one by one, and she held on to them with a reassuring, gentle firmness.

“We’ll be all right,” she whispered into the ears of each one. “Do not be afraid. Cabeto is in control.”

Despite the ferocious din around her, Grace continued to crawl from one person to the next. “The attackers are moving down onto the floor. Go up the steps just as soon as you can get through,” she softly instructed each person. “Here, let me help you. Let me show you the way. As soon as you get out of the dungeon, go to your leader's room and wait for instructions. Don’t be afraid.”

Again and again, Grace whispered words of hope. “Today is the beginning of our victory! Tomorrow is freedom day!”

So, one person at a time, panic began to die down. But even as the screams and shrieks of terror faded, they were replaced by cries and moans of the injured and dying.

“Grace!” It was Oyo's voice, and she sounded urgent. “Over here!”

Grace followed the call. When she reached the far wall, she anxiously asked Oyo, “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Oyo said. “But I have three people here who are bleeding badly, and I don’t have anything to stop the blood from flowing.”

Without hesitation, Grace stood up and ripped the skirt off her blue day dress and tore the material into two flat pieces. “Here,” she said as she handed one piece to Oyo. “We can tear this into strips to make bandages.” Together they set to work. Only then did Grace look down at the wounded one whom Oyo had carefully and tenderly tucked back against the wall. What she saw caused Grace to fall to her knees.

“Hola!” she gasped. “Oh, poor Hola!”

The boy looked up at her. “Ikem said I fought … like an African warrior.”

“And you will fight again!” Oyo promised him. Then she quickly turned away so the boy wouldn’t see her tears.

Together, Oyo and Grace wrapped the boy's bloody arm in strips of cloth woven with ferns of silver.

“Are we winning?” Hola asked.

Musket fire echoed from the corridor outside. But when Grace looked around the dungeon, she was amazed to see that not nearly so many white men remained in the fight.

“Why, yes, I do believe we
are
winning!” Grace answered.

Just at that moment another round of gunfire erupted. Sunba and his group burst through the door. It didn’t take them long to roust the last of the attackers and push them back outside the dungeon into the narrow passageway. Lingongo and Joseph's forces seemed to grow sparser by the minute. They had the weapons, it was true, but now that the rebels had shown their strength and were actually fighting back, the intruders lost their desire to attack. They were definitely on the defensive.

More musket fire rang out, though less and less by the minute. Outside the dungeon, angry voices burst through and then died away. Grace didn’t recognize any of them—other than her father's, on occasion.

“I’ll let you know everything that happens just as soon as I know,” Grace promised Hola. “You won’t miss a thing.”

Grace made her way up to the broken door and ducked through. For the first time since she was dragged unconscious into the dungeon, she stepped back outside its walls. But when she gazed around her, she caught her breath. The stone passageway was a mass of rubble. At each end the blue sky showed through gaping holes knocked into the fortress wall. What could have caused such damage? Did these men actually bring cannons off their ships?

“We cannot be that important to your parents,” Cabeto said, shaking his head in perplexed disbelief. He had come up behind Grace, and now he stood alongside her to stare at the destruction. “Why would the lioness and the slave trader destroy their own fortress just to get back at a few captives? What sense does it make?”

Grace sighed. In a voice weary from far too much experience, she said, “You don’t know Lingongo. She will not rest until her pride is avenged, no matter what the cost.”

C
harlotte Stevens sat in the straight-backed chair she had pushed up against the front window of her father's house. She leaned forward and thrust her head as far out as she could manage, paying not the least attention to the wind that raged and whipped at her white-blonde hair. Half-written invitations stood in a neat stack on the table behind her, but Charlotte was too intrigued by the activity outside to pay them any mind. Along the beach, half a dozen men scurried this way and that with a flash of swords and pistols. Some rushed boxes and barrels into longboats and then rowed them out to load onto waiting ships.

What was happening?

“Charlotte and I will leave Africa immediately!” Henrietta proclaimed in a voice shrill with fear. “This very day! Arrange a ship to London for us now, Benjamin.”

“Have you not listened to a thing I’ve said?” her husband exclaimed. “You cannot leave. That would be the most foolhardy action of all.”

Charlotte turned to face her parents. “Personally, I think this is all quite wonderful,” she announced.

Both Henrietta and Benjamin stopped short, their mouths hanging open and the next arguments poised on their tongues, as they stared at their daughter.

“I truly do!” Charlotte insisted. “Chain up Africans and push them here. Whip them and push them there. You always talk about Mr. Winslow and Lingongo, Father, and of the horrible way they treat their slaves. Well, if they truly are as bad as you say, I think it time the Africans made a stand on their own behalf.”

“You do not know what you are talking about,” Benjamin Stevens snapped.

“If Mr. Winslow and Lingongo are so horrid, then Grace must be a true heroine for risking her life to—”

“Charlotte!” Henrietta exclaimed. “I must say your attitude shocks and distresses me! Your own father could fall victim to a rebellion provoked by those soulless heathens. How can you possibly defend them?”

“Mother, the Quakers at the docks say—”

“Never you mind what Quakers say,” Henrietta shot back. “Low-class emotionalism is all one can expect from the likes of them. Religious drivel and nothing more! Not one of them has ever had to cross the ocean in a ship loaded with Africans, who would like nothing better than to see all white people dead. Your father knows what these … these
beasts
… are really like. And as for Grace, well, one can hardly expect more from her, can one?”

Benjamin sighed and ran his hand through his thinning hair. Yes, he did know. He knew far more than he wanted to acknowledge, especially right now. The horrors of the Middle Passage—every day, lugging the bodies of those who had not survived the night up from the hold and dumping them overboard. When rations ran short, he cut them so close he had to choose which captives were to eat and which were to starve … packing them together in such misery that men and women chose to plunge overboard and drown in the icy sea rather than continue to sail on his ship. Oh, yes, he knew. He knew.

“I did my part,” Benjamin said. “When Joseph called, I sent men to fight alongside him. That they did not stay and fight to the death is neither my fault nor my business.”

“What about those men out there?” Charlotte asked, gesturing to the ones at work on the beach.

“What they do is no concern of mine,” Benjamin answered. “Or yours.”

“Will they fight the slave rebels?” she asked.

“They may wait a bit, my dear, but in time they will surely fight because it is the right thing to do,” Henrietta said. “Things will go much differently when those horrible rebels are well starved for food and water. I actually think it a very clever idea to cut off their supplies.”

Now she had Charlotte's attention. “Admiral Winslow and Lingongo are going to starve them? Grace too? Her own parents?”

“Never you mind,” Henrietta said. “Grace made her decision and her parents made theirs.”

“Well, I wash my hands of the entire affair,” Benjamin declared. “We will carry on with our lives, and we will pray to God above that the troubles stay up at Zulina and do not affect us here.”

“And you will search for a ship to take us back home to England,” Henrietta reminded him.

“Not right now,” Benjamin answered.

“The soonest possible then.”

“The soonest possible,” he said.

Charlotte said nothing. She leaned her head back and shut her eyes tight. Grace Winslow. She was more African than English
—
that was certain. Mother always said there was more of their kind in her blood than ours.

Suddenly, Charlotte had an overwhelming desire to talk to Grace—to ask her what she thought about the Quakers, and about men like Charlotte's father who ran slave houses, and to tell her about Reginald Witherham's unpleasant way of knowing everything about everything. Oh, and to tell Grace she thought it was absolutely wonderful to do something in one's life that really mattered.

A great gust of wind roared through the window and whipped the neatly folded party invitations off the table and down to the gritty floor. Charlotte did not even bother to pick them up. She had more important things on her mind.

“D
urbar!”

Throughout the dungeon, voices rose up and joined together to shout out the joyful cheer. Soon it rang from one liberated cell to the next.

“
Durbar!
This day we celebrate!”

But in the midst of all the laughter and singing and shouting and dancing, Grace sat apart from the others and wept. Too many men and women had died. Too many lay injured. Although others made light of Lingongo's threats, Grace knew full well that the worst was yet to come.

“To our chief!” a wide-faced man called out in an enthusiastic salute to Cabeto. With a rousing cheer, the others shouted as one, “To our chief!”

Grace watched Cabeto's face. She could tell by the way he avoided looking the others in the eye that he was uncomfortable with his new position. Nor could she miss the jealousy in Tungo's gaze.