Birds of Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  The following morning the Gull and the Swallow sailed in company back into Table Bay, and as soon as they had anchored under the guns of the fort the Colonel and Cumbrae went ashore. They landed through the surf, where a party of slaves and convicts waded out shoulder deep to drag their boat up the beach before the next wave could capsize it, and stepped out onto dry land without wetting their boots. As they strode together towards the gates of the fort they made a striking and unusual pair: Schreuder was in full uniform, his sashes, ribbons and the plumes in his hat fluttering in the sou’-easter. Cumbrae was resplendent in his plaid of red, russet, yellow and black. The population of this remote way-station had never seen a man dressedin such garb and crowded to the verge of the unpaved parade ground to gape at him.

  Some of the doll-like Javanese slave girls caught Cumbrae’s attention, for he had been at sea for months without the solace of feminine company. Their skin shone like polished ivory, and their dark eyes were languid. Many had been dolled up in European style by their owners, and their small, neat bosoms were jaunty under their lacy bodices.

  Cumbrae acknowledged their admiration like royalty on a progress, lifting his beribboned bonnet to the youngest and prettiest of the girls, reducing them to titters and blushes with the bold stare of his blue eyes over the fiery bush of his whiskers.

  The sentries at the gates of the fort saluted Schreuder, who was well known to them, and they went through into the interior courtyard. Cumbrae glanced around him with a penetrating eye, assessing the strength of the defences. It might be peace now, but who could tell what might transpire a few years from now? One day he might be leading a siege against these walls.

  He saw that the fortifications were laid out in the shape of a five-pointed star. Clearly they had as their model the new fortress of Antwerp, which had been the first to adopt this innovative ground-plan. Each of the five points was crowned by a redoubt, the salient angles of which made it possible for the defenders to lay down a covering fire on the curtain walls of the fort, which before would have been dead ground, and indefensible. Once the massive outer walls of masonry were completed, the fort would be wellnigh impregnable to anything other than an elaborate siege. It might take many months to sap and mine the walls before they could be breached.

  However, the work was far from finished. Gangs of hundreds of slaves and convicts were labouring in the moat and on top of the half-raised walls. Many of the cannon were stored in the courtyard and had not yet been sited in their redoubts atop the walls overlooking the bay.

  ‘An opportunity lost!’ the Buzzard wailed. This intelligence had come to him too late to be of profit.‘With another few Knights of the Order to help me – Richard Lister, and even Franky Courtney, before we fell out – I could have taken this fort and sacked the town. If we had combined our forces, the three of us could have sat here in comfort, commanding the entire southern Atlantic and snapping up every Dutch galleon that tried to round the Cape.’

  As he looked around the courtyard, he saw that part of the fort was also used as a prison. A file of convicts and slaves in leg-irons was being led up from the dungeons under the northern wall. Barracks for the military garrison had been built above these foundations.

  Although piles of masonry and scaffolding littered the courtyard, a company of musketeers in the green and gold doublets of the VOC was drilling in the only open space in front of the armoury.

  Ox-drawn wagons, heavily laden with lumber and stone, rumbled in and out of the gates or cluttered the yard, and a coach, standing in splendid isolation, waited outside the entrance to the south wing of the building. The horses were a matching team of greys, groomed so that their hides gleamed in the sunlight. The coachman and footmen were in the green and gold Company livery.

  ‘His excellency is in his office early this morning. Usually we don’t see him before noon,’ Schreuder grunted. ‘News of your arrival must have reached the residence.’

  They went up the staircase of the south wing and entered through teak doors with the Company crest carved into them. In the entrance lobby, with its polished yellowwood floors, an aide-de-camp took their hats and swords, and led them through to the antechamber. ‘I will tell his excellency that you are here,’ he excused himself, as he backed out of the room. He returned in minutes. ‘His excellency will see you now.’

  The Governor’s audience room overlooked the bay through narrow slit windows. It was furnished in a strange mixture of heavy Dutch furniture and Oriental artifacts. Flamboyant Chinese rugs covered the polished floors, and the glass-fronted cabinets displayed a collection of delicate ceramic ware in the distinctive and colourful glazes of the Ming dynasty.

  Governor Kleinhans was a tall, dyspeptic man in late middle age, his skin yellowed by a life in the tropics and his features creased and wrinkled by the cares of his office. His frame was skeletal, his Adam’s apple so prominent as to seem deformed, and his full wig too young in style for the withered features beneath it.

  ‘Colonel Schreuder.’ He greeted the officer stiffly, without taking his faded eyes, in their pouches of jaundiced skin, off the Buzzard. ‘When I woke this morning and saw your ship was gone I thought you had sailed for home without my leave.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir. I will give you a full explanation, but may I first introduce the Earl of Cumbrae, an English nobleman.’

  ‘Scots, not English,’ the Buzzard growled.

  However, Governor Kleinhans was impressed by the title, and switched into good grammatical English, marred only slightly by his guttural accent. ‘Ah, I bid you welcome to the Cape of Good Hope, my lord. Please be seated. May I offer you a light refreshment – a glass of Madeira, perhaps?’

  With long-stemmed glasses of the amber wine in their hands, their high-backed chairs drawn up in a circle, the colonel leaned towards Kleinhans and murmured, ‘Sir, what I have to tell you is a matter of the utmost delicacy,’ and he glanced at the hovering servants and aide-de-camp. The Governor clapped his hands and they disappeared like smoke on the wind. Intrigued, he inclined his head towards Schreuder. ‘Now, Colonel, what is this secret you have for me?’

  Slowly, as Schreuder talked, the Governor’s gloomy features lit with greed and anticipation, but, when Schreuder had finished his proposition he made a show of reluctance and scepticism. ‘How do we know that this pirate, Courtney, will still be anchored where last you saw him?’ he asked Cumbrae.

  ‘As recently as twelve days ago the stolen galleon, the Standvastigheid, was careened upon the beach with all her cargo unloaded and her mainmast unstepped. I am a mariner, and I can assure you that Courtney could not have had her ready for sea again within thirty days. That means that we still have over two weeks in which to make our preparations and to launch our attack upon him,’ the Buzzard explained.

  Kleinhans nodded. ‘So whereabouts is the anchorage in which this rascal is hiding?’ The Governor tried to make the question casual, but his fever-yellowed eyes glinted.

  ‘I can only assure you that he is well concealed.’ The Buzzard side-stepped the question with a dry smile. ‘Without my help your men will not be able to hunt him down.’

  ‘I see.’ With his bony forefinger the Governor picked at his nostril, then inspected the flake of dried snot he had retrieved. Without looking up, he went on, still casually, ‘Naturally you would not require a reward for thus performing what is, after all, merely your bounden and moral duty, to root out this pirates’ nest.’

  ‘I would not ask for a reward, other than a modest amount to compensate me for my time and expenses,’ Cumbrae agreed.

  ‘One hundredth part of what we are able to recover of the galleon’s cargo,’ Kleinhans suggested.

  ‘Not quite so modest,’ Cumbrae demurred. ‘I had in mind a half.’

  ‘Half!’ Governor Kleinhans sat bolt upright and his complexion turned the colour of old parchment. ‘You are jesting, surely, sir.’

  ‘I assure you, sir, that when it comes to money I seldom jest,’ said the Buzzar
d. ‘Have you considered how grateful the director-general of your company will be when you return his daughter to him unharmed, and without having to make the ransom payment? That alone would be a compelling factor in augmenting your pension, without even taking into account the value of the cargo of spice and bullion.’

  While Governor Kleinhans considered this he began to excavate his other nostril, and remained silent.

  Cumbrae went on persuasively, ‘Of course, once van de Velde is released from the clutches of this villain and arrives here, you will be able to hand over your duties to him, and then you will be free to return home to Holland where the rewards of your long and loyal service await you.’ Colonel Schreuder had remarked on how avidly the Governor was looking forward to his imminent retirement, after thirty years in the Company’s service.

  Kleinhans stirred at such an inviting prospect, but his voice was harsh. ‘A tenth of the value of the recovered cargo, but not to include the value of any pirates captured and sold on the slave block. A tenth, and that is my final offer.’

  Cumbrae looked tragic. ‘I shall have to divide the reward with my crew. I could not consider a lesser figure than a quarter.’

  ‘A fifth,’ grated Kleinhans.

  ‘I agree,’ said Cumbrae, well content.

  ‘And, of course, I will need the services of that fine naval frigate anchored in the bay, and three companies of your musketeers with Colonel Schreuder here to command them. And my own vessel needs to be replenished with powder and cartridge, not to mention water and other provisions.’

  It had taken a prodigious effort by Colonel Schreuder, but by late afternoon the following day the three companies of infantry, each comprising ninety men, were drawn up on the parade ground outside the walls of the fort, ready to embark. The officers and non-commissioned officers were all Dutch, but the musketeers were a mixture of native troops, Malaccans from Malaysia, Hottentots recruited from the tribes of the Cape, and Sinhalese and Tamils from the Company’s possessions in Ceylon. They were bowed like hunchbacks under their weapons and heavy backpacks but, incongruously, they were barefoot.

  As Cumbrae watched them march out through the gates, in their flat black caps, green doublets and white cross belts, their muskets carried at the trail, he remarked sourly, ‘I hope they fight as prettily as they march, but I think they may be in for a wee surprise when they meet Franky’s sea-rats.’

  He could carry only a single company with all its baggage on board the Gull. Even then her decks would be crowded and uncomfortable, especially if they ran into heavy weather on the way.

  The other two companies of infantry went on board the naval frigate. They would have the easier passage, for De Sonnevogel,the Sun Bird, was a fast and commodious vessel. She had been captured from Oliver Cromwell’s fleet by the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter during the battle of the Kentish Knock, and had been in de Ruyter’s squadron during his raid up the Thames only months previously to her arrival off the Cape. She was sleek and lovely in her glossy black paint, and snowy-white trim. It was easy to see that her sails had been renewed before she sailed from Holland, and all her sheets and rigging were spanking new. Her crew were mostly veterans of the two recent wars with England, prime battle-hardened warriors.

  Her commander, Captain Ryker, was also a tough, rugged deep-water mariner, wide in the shoulder and big in the gut. He made no attempt to hide his displeasure at finding himself under the direction of a man who, until recently, had been his enemy, an irregular whom he considered little short of a greedy pirate. His bearing towards Cumbrae was cold and hostile, his scorn barely concealed.

  They had held a council of war aboard De Sonnevogel which had not gone smoothly, Cumbrae refusing to divulge their destination and Ryker making objection to every suggestion and arguing every proposal that he put to him. Only the arbitration of Colonel Schreuder had kept the expedition from breaking down irretrievably before they had even left the shelter of Table Bay.

  It was with a profound feeling of relief that the Buzzard at last watched the frigate weigh anchor and, with almost two hundred musketeers lining her rail waving fond farewells to the throng of gaudily dressed or half-naked Hottentot women on the beach, follow the little Gull out towards the entrance to the bay.

  The Gull’s own deck was crowded with infantrymen, who waved and jabbered and pointed out the landmarks on the mountain and on the beach to each other, and hampered the seamen as they worked the Gull off the lee shore.

  As the ship rounded the point below Lion’s Head and felt the first majestic thrust of the south Atlantic, a strange quiet fell over the noisy passengers, and as they tacked and went onto a broad easterly reach, the first of the musketeers rushed to the ship’s side, and shot a long yellow spurt of vomit directly into the eye of the wind. A hoot of laughter went up from the crew as the wind sent it all back into the wretch’s pallid face and splattered his green doublet with the bilious evidence of his last meal.

  Within the hour most of the other soldiers had followed his example, and the decks were so slippery and treacherous with their offerings to Neptune that the Buzzard ordered the pumps to be manned and both decks and passengers to be sluiced down.

  ‘It’s going to be an interesting few days,’ he told Colonel Schreuder. ‘I hope these beauties will have the strength to carry themselves ashore when we reach our destination.’

  Before they had half completed their journey, it became apparent that what he had said in jest was in fact dire reality. Most of the troops seemed moribund, laid out like corpses on the deck with nothing left in their bellies to bring up. A signal from Captain Ryker indicated that those aboard the Sonnevogel were in no better case.

  ‘If we put these men straight from the deck into a fight, Franky’s lads will eat them up without spitting out the bones. We’ll have to change our plans,’ the Buzzard told Schreuder, who sent a signal across to the Sonnevogel. While he hove to, Captain Ryker came across in his skiff with obvious bad grace to discuss the new plan of assault.

  Cumbrae had drawn up a sketch map of the lagoon and the shoreline that lay on each side of the heads. The three officers pored over this in the tiny cabin of the Gull. Ryker’s mood had been alleviated by the disclosure of their final destination, by the prospect of action and prize money, and by a dram of whisky that Cumbrae poured for him. For once he was disposed to agree with the plan with which Cumbrae presented him.

  ‘There is a another headland here, about eight or nine leagues west of the entrance to the lagoon.’ The Buzzard laid his hand on the map. ‘With this wind there will be enough calm water in the lee to send the boats ashore and land Colonel Schreuder and his musketeers on the beach. Then he will begin his approach march.’ He stabbed at the map with a forefinger bristling with ginger hair. ‘The interlude on dry land and the exercise will give his men an opportunity to recover from their malaise. By the time they reach Courtney’s lair they should have some fire in them again.’

  ‘Have the pirates set up any defences at the entrance to the lagoon?’ Ryker wanted to know.

  ‘They have batteries here and here, covering the channel.’ Cumbrae drew a series of crosses down each side of the entrance. ‘They are so well protected as to be invulnerable to return fire delivered by a ship entering or leaving the anchorage.’ He paused as he remembered the rousing send-off those culverins had given the Gull as she fled from the lagoon after his abortive attack on the encampment.

  Ryker looked sober at the prospect of subjecting his ship to close-range salvoes from entrenched shore batteries.

  ‘I will be able to deal with the batteries on the western approaches,’ Schreuder promised them. ‘I will send a small detachment to climb down the cliffs. They will not be expecting an attack from their rear. However, I will not be able to cross the channel and reach the guns on the eastern headland.’

  ‘I will send in another raiding party to put those guns out of the game,’ Ryker cut in. ‘As long as we can devise a system of signals to co-ordinate our attacks.�
� They spent another hour working out a code with flag and smoke between the ships and the shore. By this time the blood of both Ryker and Schreuder was a-boil, and they were vying for the opportunity to win battle honours.

  Why should I risk my own sailors when these heroes are eager to do the work for me? the Buzzard thought happily. Aloud he said, ‘I commend you, gentlemen. That is excellent planning. I take it you will delay the attacks on the batteries at the entrance until Colonel Schreuder has brought up his main force of infantry through the forest and is in a position to launch the main assault on the rear of the pirate encampment.’

  ‘Yes, quite so,’ Schreuder agreed eagerly. ‘But as soon as the batteries on the heads have been put out of action, your ships will provide the diversion by sailing in through them and bombarding the pirates’ encampment. That will be the signal for me to launch my land attack into their rear.’

  ‘We will give you our full support.’ Cumbrae nodded, thinking comfortably to himself, How hungry he is for glory, and restrained an avuncular urge to pat him on the shoulder. The idiot is welcome to my share of the cannonballs, just as long as I can get my hands on the prize.

  Then he looked speculatively at Captain Ryker. It only remained to arrange that the Sonnevogel lead the squadron through the heads into the lagoon, and in the process draw the main attentions of Franky’s culverins along the edge of the forest. It might be to his advantage if she were to sustain heavy damage before Franky was overwhelmed. If the Buzzard were in command of the only seaworthy ship at the end of the battle, he would be able to dictate his own terms when it came to disposing of the spoils of war.

  ‘Captain Ryker,’ he said with an arrogant flourish, ‘I claim the honour of leading the squadron into the lagoon in my gallant little Gull. My ruffians would not forgive me if I let you go ahead of us.’

  Ryker’s lips set stubbornly. ‘Sir!’ he said stiffly. ‘The Sonnevogel is more heavily armed, and better able to resist the balls of the enemy. I must insist that you allow me to lead the entry into the lagoon.’