Veil of Centuries. Book One: The Wound
Book One
A city built on forgetting. A man condemned to remember.
Cape Town, 1720. Dirck van der Linde steps ashore from De Hoop with a modest cargo and a life to build. Within months, he has a place in the market, friends at the tavern, and reasons to linger at the stall of a green-eyed cloth seller named Elena.
He is beginning to belong. He has not yet learned when to look away.
When Company men threaten Elena, Dirck speaks up.
One sentence is enough.
They leave him on the cobbles with a broken face and legs that will not answer. In the Company hospital, the fever comes. Then a woman appears at his bedside.
By morning, his wounds have vanished. His legs move. He can see a spider breathe in the dark and hear a dying man’s heart across the ward.
Something has saved him. Something in him is hungry.
Four men were responsible. He will learn their names.
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“We have been sailing for a hundred days on the scales of a snake.”Chapter One
The forge
“So that when it snaps,” Frans said, “the town knows which half was mine.”
The market,
February 1721
He had made himself visible. That was the offence. The words were only the occasion.
The Company hospital
…the left side of his face was making the beginning of a smile it never finished.
The ward, before dawn,
March 1721
He had never been able to see a spider in the dark before.
A kloof above the town
“You asked to live.”
Doorways at night,
May 1721
He had not been an event. He had been a Tuesday.
Afterwards
Nobody hunts a man the town has promoted to devil.
Chapter One
The plank gave under his boot and he was on land.
He had been imagining this for a hundred days. The image he had built was a clean one. Sun, a clean wind, the smell of something growing. The ground holding still beneath him in the way ground was meant to. He had pictured himself stepping ashore into a kind of silence, the kind that comes after long noise.
That was not what he got.
The smell hit him before anything else. It was hot and it was wet and it sat at the back of his throat in a way he could taste. Fish guts on the boards underfoot, gone over in the sun. Tar from the boat behind him. Animal – something killed close by, the iron of it. Sewage running somewhere he could not see but could place by the change in the air every few yards. And under all of it, threaded through everything, men. The press of them. Months of them, washed and unwashed, the same as he was washed and unwashed, the same fug he had carried on his own skin from Texel and not noticed because it had been everywhere on the ship and was therefore nowhere.
He stood for a moment with his bag at his feet and let his weight settle. His legs were doing the thing legs did after a long voyage, expecting a roll that was not coming, correcting for it, and then correcting for the correction. He had been told to expect it. It was still strange.
Behind him the boat that had brought him in was already pulling back out to De Hoop at her anchor, the oars knocking in the thole pins, and the sound was a finished sound. Done with him. He did not turn to look.
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Producers, agents, publishers
All rights are available worldwide, including screen. Book One maps onto a feature or a tight limited series; the four books onto a returning series.
movie@veilofcenturies.com
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In Cape Town for MIP Africa, 28–30 October.
Jason Bronkhorst
Jason Bronkhorst lives in Cape Town, under the same mountain. He is a creative director and a fine artist. Veil of Centuries is a novel in four books; The Wound is the first.