Free The Call of Zulina by Kay Marshall Strom Page A

her legs and moved up to her arms. If she didn’t, she would cause the entire thornbush to quake.
     
    A sudden shriek jerked the man's attention back to the rope line of people. The woman with the baby tied to her back had fallen. Her little one tumbled loose and now hung upside down with his head on the ground. It was he who shrieked so piteously
     
    “Up!” black-man-in-white-man's-shirt ordered as he ran back. He jabbed at the fallen woman, all the while ordering, “Up! Up! Up!”
     
    The woman grabbed for her baby with her bound hands and tried to rise, but she kept stumbling and falling back down. She couldn’t get her footing because the human train never slowed its pace. Every time she seemed about to get back on her feet, the moving line yanked her down again.
     
    Forgetting the black man in the white man's shirt, Grace stretched forward.
     
    The man in front of the woman kept walking, and the woman behind her stared straight ahead as she lifted one foot after the other. They dragged the woman along between them. Grace could see the woman's mouth moving as she continued to grab for her screaming baby. Then the baby was silent. After that, the woman stopped trying. Still the line didn’t stop.
     
    “Won’t anyone help?” Grace breathed through her tears. This time no one heard her. Misery swallowed up her words.
     
    Then Yao shuffled past her hiding place. Grace could see fresh whip slashes crisscrossing his already deeply scarred back. Yet he held his head high. Even chained and beaten, he walked with pride.
     
    Grace covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her anguish.
     
    Long after the captives had passed out of sight, after the hot wind had swallowed up the sound of their footsteps, Grace trembled among the acacia thorns.
     
    To come up this forbidden road had never been her intent. Yet it would be useless to go back to the baobab tree now. If she returned to the place where the roads met, which one would she take? She had hoped to get aboard a ship and leave Africa, but that was before she climbed over the wall—before she saw this other side. Now she knew she could never make it to London by herself. Even if she did, how could she manage in a place she knew only through books? Charlotte Stevens? She wouldn’t speak to Grace in Africa, so why would she help her on the other side of the ocean? Grace would be even more of a stranger there than she was here. She didn’t belong in Africa, and she certainly would not belong in London.
     
    No. The only possible way to go was up. Frightening and unknown though it was, this road was the one that led to Yao. Yes, he was bound and in chains, but Grace had seen his face, and it was not the face of a slave. Besides, Yao had sworn to her that he would find a way out!
     
    With new resolve, Grace pulled herself free of the sharp acacia thorns. Scratched and bleeding, she scrambled up the embankment and set her sights on Zulina.
     

 
     
     
     
11
     
    O n a cloudless morning, the rising sun cast fiery embers across the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean. The spectacular dawn filled Pieter DeGroot with a great sense of renewed hope, for at long last he was ready to sail from Zulina's accursed harbor. Lucas Bass, the one-eyed, black-tempered captain of the notorious slaver The Raven , was not the person he would have chosen as a sailing mate. But then he didn’t have the luxury of choice. No other offers had come his way, and he was prepared to do anything to escape the constant wails from the slave cells.
     
    With the first rays of dawn, Captain Bass began to pace the deck. Now and then he paused to scowl at the horizon and then back toward the narrow doorway that led into the fortress—the loading gate everyone called the “door of no return.” His irritation mounted, and he paced some more. As the sand in the hourglass marked the passage of time, Captain Bass's mood grew blacker and blacker.
     
    “What's taking that devil of a priest so blasted