These men, however, were taking the threat very seriously indeed.
At midday the sergeant ordered a halt. One of the troopers prepared food on a small fire, which he doused as soon as it was cooked. They moved on a few miles before stopping once more to eat the meal. Sean was given an equal share. The maize meal was cooked stiff and fluffy and was well salted, but the meat was rancid and on the point of putrefying. In the average white man it would have caused an immediate attack of enteritis, but Sean's stomach was as conditioned as any African's. He ate it without relish, but without trepidation either.
"The food is good," the sergeant told Sean in Shangane as he sat beside him. "Do you want more?" Sean made a pantomime of incomprehension and said in English, "I'm sorry, I don't know what you are saying." The sergeant shrugged and went on eating.
A few minutes later he turned back to Sean and said sharply, "Look behind you, there's a snake!" Sean resisted the natural impulse to jump to his feet. Instead he grinned ingratiatingly and repeated, "I'm sorry, I don't understand."
The sergeant relaxed, and one of his men remarked. "He does not understand Shangane. It is all right to speak in front of him."
They ignored him for the remainder of the meal and chatted among themselves, but as soon as they had finished the sergeant produced a pair of light manacles from his pack and locked one side on to Sean's wrist and the other onto his own. He delegated sentry duty to two of his men, and the rest of them settled down to sleep. Despite Sean's'exhaustion-he had been going for days now on only brief snatches of sleep-he lay awake and pondered all he had learned and the missing pieces of the puzzle. He was still not certain that he was in Renamo hands; he had only Claudia's brief note to suggest that. Comrade China had been a commissar in Robert Mugabe's Marxist ZANLA army, but Renamo was a rabidly anticommunist organization committed to the overthrow of the Marxist Frefimo government. It didn't add up correctly.
Furthermore, China had fought the Rhodesian army of Ian Smith. What was he doing here across the border, involved in another struggle in a foreign country? Was China a soldier of fortune, a turncoat, or an independent warlord taking advantage f the Mozambican chaos for his own private ends? It would be interesting to find out.
With all this to think about, his last thought before sleep finally overcame him was of Claudia Monterro. If China wanted him alive, it was highly probable that he wanted the girl alive as well.
With that thought, he fell into a deep, dark sleep with a faint smile on his lips.
He woke to the ache of abused muscles and the bruises left by gun butts, but the sergeant had him up and running immediately southward again into the cool shades of evening. Within a mile his muscles warmed and the stiffness evaporated. He settled into the run, matching his escorts easily. Always he looked ahead, hoping at any moment to see the tail of the main column emerge from the darkness ahead, and to see Job and Dedan carrying Claudia's litter.
They ran through the night, and when they stopped again to eat, his captors began to discuss him through their mouthfuls of maize and high-smelling meat.
"They say in the other war he was a lion, an eater of men," the sergeant told them. "It was he that led the attack at Inhlozane, the training camp at the Hills of the Maiden's Breasts."
The troopers looked at him with interest and dawning respect.
"They say that it was veritably he, in person, who destroyed one ear of General China."
They chuckled and shook their heads; that was a fine joke.
"He has the body of a warrior," said one of them, and they considered him frankly, discussing his physique as though he were an in ammate object.
"Why has General China ordered this?" another asked. The sergeant grinned and picked a shred of meat from his back teeth with a fingernail.
"We must run the pride and anger out of him," he grinned.
"General China wants us to change him from a lion into a dog who will wag his tail and do his bidding."
"He has the body of a warrior," the first man repeated. "Now we must discover if he has the heart of a warrior." And they all laughed again.
"So it's a contest, then." Sean kept his face impassive. "All right, you bastards, let's see which dog wags its tail first."
In a perverse fashion Sean began to enjoy himself The challenge was much to his taste. There were ten of them, all in their twenties.
He was just over forty years of age, but that handicap made it even sweeter and helped him to endure the monotony and hardship of the days that followed.
He was careful not to let them know that he understood it was a contest. He knew it would be dangerous to antagonize or humiliate them. Their goodwill and respect would be more valuable than their hatred and resentment.
Sean had spent his entire adult life in the close company of black men. He knew them as servants and as equals, as hunters and as soldiers, as good and loyal friends and as bitter cruel enemies. He knew their strengths and weaknesses and how to exploit them. He understood their tribal customs and their social etiquette, he knew how to flatter and please and impress them, how to gain their respect and make himself agreeable to them.
He showed them just the right degree of respect, but not enough to make them contemptuous. He took special care not to challenge the sergeant's authority or force him to lose face in front of his men. He made the most of their sense of humor and fun. With sign language and a little clowning he made them laugh, and once they had laughed with him their relationship altered subtly. He became more a companion than a captive, and they no longer used the steel-edged gun butts as instruments of casual persuasion. Most important, he every day was picking up little snippets of information.