The Call of Zulina (35 page)

Never could Lingongo's people have risen to the respected stature of the most powerful chiefdom in the Kingdom of Gold had they not understood the importance of stealth in conquest. Her father never could have earned the right to rest his feet on the
sika’gua
, the Golden Stool of Power, had he not mastered the secrets of silent subjugation that took so many of his enemies in their sleep. As darkness overtook the room, Lingongo began to work a piece loose from the finely woven cloth she wore wrapped around her. Slowly, painstakingly, she picked at the weave until she had a strip just the right length and width. Then she rolled it and rolled it until it was long and tight and strong. Only then did she lay back to wait.

No longer were moans and wails the sounds of Zulina. New hope sprang up from the ashes and rubble and diffused a happy clamor throughout the fortress. Old threats crumbled under the promise of a new beginning. Hope and possibility floated on the breeze. So as the darkness deepened, the tall guard smiled and lay down his musket. He settled himself as comfortably as he could on the roughly hewn stone and allowed his eyes to close. Soon he was snoring loudly.

As silently as a python slithering through the trees, Lingongo edged away from Joseph. Through the slit openings of her eyes, she watched the short guard as he tried to get comfortable.

“Hunnnh,” Lingongo moaned softly.

When nothing happened, she tried again, only this time a little bit louder: “
Hunnnh
!”

The short guard turned his eyes to her, and Lingongo twisted her lovely face into a grimace of pain.

The short guard crept over to where she lay. “Does something cause you pain?” he whispered.

“My arm.”

Lingongo's words were barely audible, little more than a wispy breath. The short guard had to come closer to hear her. He bent down and inclined his ear to her silky smooth face, just to make certain he didn’t miss a single word.

“What?” he asked.

“The white man,” she breathed. “He may have broken my arm.”

The guard lay his gun down and reached out toward her smooth chocolate arm.

In the flash of an eye, Lingongo's arm shot upward. Before the short guard had time to cry out, the chain between her wrists caught him across his windpipe and he fell into her lap. Lingongo pulled out the cloth rope she had made and jerked it around the man's throat, squeezing it tighter and tighter, just as a python would do to its victim, until with the faintest gurgle, the guard stopped breathing. Quickly, Lingongo pulled the key from the string tied around his neck, and with it she unlocked the chains from her wrists and ankles. Just before she slipped through the door, she turned to admire her escape. Without so much as a twitch, the tall guard and Joseph Winslow continued to snore in their sleep.

Much later, when the tall guard finally sounded the alarm, Tungo was furious. He wanted to tie the tall guard up by his neck and leave him to hang in the scorching sun until he was dead. Just to be certain no one misunderstood the message, he wanted the body of the short guard to hang beside him upside down.

“What is the good in that?” Cabeto asked. “The lioness is safely back in her compound. It will not drive her out, nor will it bring her back to us. Nothing will do that.”

But Tungo would not be placated.

“She laughs at us!” he said bitterly.

“But we will walk free,” Cabeto pointed out. “So why is it not we who laugh?”

“It is a plot,” Tungo said. “Lingongo will be back for us.” Grace said nothing. Cabeto was right; they were now free to go. This was what they had fought for. And yet … she knew her mother. Grace glanced over at Yao, who at long last stood at her side.

Yao stared straight at her. “Please, may I speak?” he asked. The others nodded, so he looked over at Tungo and continued, “You speak well. Grace knows the truth in what you say, but how can she speak against her own mother?”

“As long as the lioness lives, she will hunt us,” Tungo insisted. “She must be stopped. Today is the day.”

Tungo fixed Yao in a hard stare. Yao returned his stare, just as steady and just as hard.

Without another word, Tungo grabbed up the flint box Pieter had brought them with their supplies, turned, and strode from the room. Without a word, Yao followed
—
out of the room, through the corridors, and out of the charred fortress.

The truth was, Tungo knew what he needed to do, but he couldn’t do it alone. He needed Yao. Tungo didn’t know his way around the lioness's lair. Only once had he been in her compound, and that was in the dark of the night with Antonio and Joseph Winslow. Up at the fortress, Joseph had directed the two trustees to load up a horsedrawn wagon with guns and gunpowder and to hide the load under sacks of millet. When night had fallen, Antonio took Tungo and the wagon down to the London house. Joseph Winslow met them at the gate and led them to the storeroom. There they unloaded the crates of munitions, stacking them one box on top of the other until the storeroom was filled. Nervous and agitated, Joseph had continually pressed and threatened them to work faster: “’Urry now, if’n ye ’opes to see tomorrow!” Almost before the last crate was unloaded, Joseph himself had turned the wagon around. On the way back to Zulina, he had hissed, “One word ’bout this to anyone an’ I’ll put a bullet ’twixt yer eyes, I will!”

But Yao … it was different for him. Yao knew every clod of dirt on the compound grounds. He knew how to get over the wall, he knew the number of steps between the mango grove and the cashew grove, and he knew how to steal silently through the sweet potato fields and the kitchen garden. Like Antonio, he could creep right up to the front door.

As soon as Tungo told Yao about the gunpowder stacked up in the storage shed behind the house, Yao knew exactly what they must do.

As Yao left the fortress, he paused to pick up a long piece of tightly twisted fabric rope from the ground. Perhaps it was the bright colors that caught his eye. Or maybe it was the sparkle of gold thread that ran through it. All the way to the London house he worked and twisted the fabric so that by the time he and Tungo got to the kitchen garden, it was as hard and stiff as a stick. He found the palm oil on the other side of the house
—
just what he needed to soak his new rope.

Grace was in the fortress kitchen with Safya and Oyo and other women, boiling millet and stirring in pieces of the fish that Ikem and his men brought up from the sea, when the sky suddenly roared to life and rained fire. The room whirled and tossed like a ship on a stormy sea.

“The end is upon us!” Oyo screamed as she flung herself to the floor. Cooking pots crashed down around her.

“Hola!” Safya cried in alarm. Frantically, she stumbled from the room, calling out for the boy. “Hola! Where are you, child? Where are you?” Safya had come to think of him as her own, and she could not abide the thought of losing him. Certainly not like this!

Grace was only vaguely aware of the screams and terror around her. She had been hanging cloths out the window, and from there she had a good view of the flat grassland below, including part of the compound wall. When the explosion rocked the fortress, she saw pillars of flame shoot high into the air, and they came from inside the wall. Grace bolted for the doorway. She pushed past Safya and ran down the passageway, out to the scorched front of the fortress, and on to the road that led down to the baobab tree.

When she caught sight of the cataclysm that stretched out before her, Grace shrieked in horror. Much of her father's stone wall lay in ruins, and the entire London house was ablaze.

“Mama Muco!” Grace screamed.

She fell to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed.

“I
was wrong about you,” Yao said when he saw Grace again. “You did not stay a slave.” He bowed his head before her in respect.

“No,” Grace answered. “And neither did you.” But there was no triumph in her voice, only profound weariness.

“It will do no good to talk of what is past,” Cabeto said from his resting place beside the window. “Good or bad, right or wrong, it is over. All is behind us.”

“All is not behind us!” Tungo declared. “We have one prisoner left. Slice his throat and throw him into the sea, I say. Only then will all be behind us!”

Grace sprang to her feet. “No!” she protested. “You will not murder my father too!”

“Not murder,” Tungo answered. “Justice. Remember the hundreds and hundreds he sent to their deaths. Give to him what he deserves.”

Grace looked around at the others assembled in the room— the same room that less than two weeks earlier had been her father's favorite place in Zulina, and her mother's most hated. Somehow, it had come through the attack with little damage. Her eyes settled on Pieter. With an entirely new authority, she said to him, “Bring in my father, Captain. We all fought this battle together. Together we will decide his fate.”

Pieter left with Ikem right behind. Tungo sat in stony silence.

“He is your father,” Cabeto said to Grace. “It was to you he did the greatest injustice.”

Grace didn’t answer. She turned her attention to the corner window and looked down at the remains of her father's stone wall and the still-smoldering ruins within it. Imagine! All this time Joseph Winslow could sit in this awful fortress, its walls echoing with agony and horror, and he could see her entire world.

The door opened and Joseph, shackled in chains, hobbled into the room. Grace mustered every effort to force herself to turn around and look her father straight in the face.

Joseph blinked and gazed around him, first at the desk, then at the maps piled on the side table. He seemed confused, uncertain of what was happening.

“Me ol’ office!” he said with the trace of a smile. “Thank God in ’eaven it ain’t burnt down!” He looked around and said with a conspirator's wink and a chuckle, “Used to throw dice in ’ere wi’ any man wot had a big enough stake, I did.”

Grace's eyes never wavered from her father's face, yet Joseph didn’t seem to be aware of her presence.

“Where's ’Tonio?” Joseph asked suddenly. “Where's me ol’
juju
? Could use ’im ’bout now, is wot.”

“Father … ,” Grace said softly as she moved toward him. Joseph's face suddenly twisted, and he struggled against his chains. Still, he refused to look at his daughter.

“This fortress be
mine
!” Joseph shouted in defiance. “’Ow dare the likes o’ ye truss me up like a dirty slave? An’ in me own castle at that!”

Although he couldn’t understand a word Joseph said, Tungo ordered in the tongue of his own people, “Silence! You lost the battle, white man! This is the day you die!”

Joseph glared back at Tungo. He might not understand the African language, but he couldn’t miss the tone of voice.

“Ye ’eathen murderer!” Joseph spat. “Ye thinks ye kin git away wi’ killin’ a white man? Kill me an’ ye will die. Me mates will slice ye open an’ leave ye so's all kin see yer black ’eart!”

Suddenly, Joseph spied Pieter DeGroot at the back of the room. “An’ ye, ye dirty, rotten traitor!” he bellowed. “Yer soul be damned fer turnin’ yer back on yer own kind!”

“And may God have mercy on yours … Admiral,” Pieter replied softly.

Tungo moved forward, his knife pointed toward Joseph's throat. Joseph let out a sharp cry. His bluster gone, he began to sob.

Grace positioned herself between her father and the blade of Tungo's knife.

“No!” she ordered. “He does not have to die. We are not murderers, Tungo. We can put him on his ship, and he can sail back to England where he belongs. He will be gone from us forever.”

“Let him go?” Tungo roared. “After what he did to all of us? And to our villages and our kin?”

“Please!” Grace pleaded. “How can it hurt us? If he's gone from Africa, he can never again do harm to anyone here.”

“No!” Tungo insisted. “The slave trader dies today. Right here! Right now! He will leave this earth crying and begging like the despicable coward he is!”

“I will not allow it!” Grace moved over and resolutely placed herself in front of her cowering, whimpering father.

Cabeto grabbed up the crutch Pieter had made for him from a tree branch and struggled to lift himself to his feet. “Listen to me, Tungo!” he said. “This man caused terrible things to happen to my village, to my kinsmen and my friends. He allowed evil things to happen to us here in this wretched place, things too horrible to speak about. Every one of us has a right to hate him. Grace has more of a right than any of us. But what Grace says is true—to kill him now would be to murder him. And we are not murderers.”