“I AM GLAD TO SEE YOU WELL, Captain Laurence,” Mrs. Erasmus said—or rather Lethabo, as she informed him she had resumed her childhood name, from before her abduction. Indeed there seemed nothing left of the subdued, silent woman Laurence had first met on the way to Capetown. She now wore the elaborate Tswana dress of patterned cloth, and much gold jewelry bright against her skin, but these were mere externals: the true distinction lay rather in the stern carriage of her neck, the severely pulled-back hair which disdained to hide the scarring upon her forehead, and her direct look.
“But I hope you are not come as an enemy,” she added, bluntly.
She had returned hence with Kefentse to direct the search for more Tswana survivors among the slaves on the estates. Brazil had been the destination of nearly all those slavers who had preyed upon the villages of the Tswana before the Tswana’s armies, being roused, had struck against the slave ports of Africa and stifled the trade. She herself had been brought here as a mere slip of a girl, abducted from her home and sold into bondage; only great good fortune had preserved her to obtain her freedom and eventually return to her homeland. Yet there could not be any great number of similar survivors: apart from the hideous toll of the ocean crossing in the foulness of a slave-ship’s hold, those who lived to reach Brazil would for the most part have been set to hard labor clearing the deadly jungle or harvesting cane.
“You must know you are being used, by Napoleon,” Laurence said, “to an end which would see more and not less of the world reduced to a subjugated state; indeed he has reinstated slavery, rather than forbidden it, in the territories of France. Can you have found so many survivors of your own particular tribe, with this assault, as to justify the toll in life among the innocent?”
“There has been no slaughter,” she said. “We did not burn the city: the Portuguese did that themselves, in their panic, while we stayed upon the mountains and made our demands for the return of the stolen. We took the city only after they had fled it. As for the survivors, you may come and see for yourself.”
With a word to Kefentse, she guided Laurence and Granby and Hammond down to the encampment and through its cramped and narrow lanes, which housed to his surprise many thousands: men, women, children, dazed with both destruction and liberation. “Some are the descendants of those stolen,” she said, “and do not remember their home in Africa.”
“And others,” Granby said to Laurence in an undertone, “haven’t anything to do with the Tswana at all, I imagine: those dragons don’t seem likely to me to be so very particular about who they have found, so long as they have found someone.” He started guiltily, seeing Lethabo’s eye upon him overhearing.
“But he cannot be wrong,” Laurence said to her, when they had gone back into the dockside house which, being one of the remaining standing buildings, served presently as her headquarters. Supplies of foodstuffs and clothing salvaged from the wreckage filled the rooms, and they sat among barrels of salt beef. “I can scarcely believe that so many would have been taken before provoking that answer, which your dragon country-men have made, of smashing the slave ports; and you yourself have told me that not one in ten could have survived this far. The greater share of those you have rescued cannot be of the Tswana.”
“If it were so,” Lethabo said, “and yet they claimed ancestry or some distant memory, would that be less true than the rebirth of our ancestors as the dragons who guard us?”
He did not know how to answer her: she had been the wife of a missionary and, he thought, too good a Christian to believe in that superstition; she saw his confusion and shook her head. “I do not call that a lie,” she said, “which when believed is true; and I think God loves justice better than the letter of the law. You will forgive me a moment.”
She rose, for another four survivors had that moment come rushing into the house: a man and a woman with a child in arms and an older one clinging to her hand. They looked with fear over their shoulders at the middle-weight dragon who had deposited them before the door; in contrast the beast stood outside hunched down and peering in after them, with a hopeful air.