CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

HOTTENTOTS HOLLAND

The light was fading over the plain.

Lars Eltorp raised the musket to his shoulder. It was an old weapon, traded with an acquaintance, and the weighting made long-distance shots inaccurate. But it was adequate for his purposes.

For two weeks, he had been living in the area a half-day’s ride south-east of Stellenbosch on a settler farmstead. The farmer’s wife gave him a wide berth, and kept her daughters away, but he had sailed with her husband some years ago on a Barbary corsair ship and those bonds were hard to break. For now, Eltorp was comfortable enough, he had plenty of brandy and, if he landed his shot, there would be fresh meat tonight.

In the dusk, some eighty yards ahead on the low-lying plain, was a herd of grysbok, the smallest of the antelopes that inhabited the region. The red fur of the male seemed to catch the last rays of the sun and set its thin antlers gleaming. They were shy creatures, only coming out at the end of the day to graze. But the meat would be welcome and an unbutchered carcass could be carried by one man over his shoulders.

Eltorp took aim, and fired.

The herd scattered, fleeing back to the thicket and dense shrub. He cursed loudly, fumbling to prepare his next shot, but the clearing where the grysbok had been stood empty. He kicked the ground and cursed the rogue who had sold him a gun not fit for purpose. His hand went to the knife at his belt. He preferred to cut. He liked to see the whites of his victim’s eyes, man or beast.

He had laid low for the past weeks, keeping his ear to the ground, but had heard nothing. No VOC lackeys had been sighted in the vicinity, no one asking questions up-country. He was not surprised. Though both his victims had been white – Driek was just another sailor who couldn’t hold his drink, and the girl? A nobody shipped halfway across the world? She mattered little more than the Black devils under the overseer’s whip or incarcerated in the Slave House each night.

He laughed, a raw and ugly sound in the quiet of the plain. He’d outwitted them all. For all their airs and graces, they weren’t real men, these merchants and secretaries. They didn’t know how to fight, or hunt, or use a knife. He skimmed his finger along the blade, then slipped the weapon back into his belt.

Eltorp waited a while longer before accepting the grysbok would not return. No matter, he had bagged a brace of hyrax on his trek out here. They were small grubbing animals, and full of bones, but some meat was better than none. At his feet, the blood of his catch was seeping through the hessian of the sack, staining the green grasses red.