Birds of Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  The fabled flat-topped mountain seemed to fill most of the blue African sky, a great cliff of yellow rock slashed by deep ravines choked with dense green forest. The top of the mountain was so geometrically level, and its proportions so pleasing, that it seemed to have been designed by a celestial architect. Over the top of this immense tableland spilled a standing wave of shimmering cloud, frothy as milk boiling over the rim of a pot. This silver cascade never reached the lower slopes of the mountain, but as it fell it evaporated in mid-flight with a magical suddenness, leaving the lower slopes resplendent in their cloaking of verdant natural forest.

  The grandeur dwarfed and rendered inconsequential the buildings that spread like an irritating rash along the shore above the snowy beach, from which a fleet of small boats put out to meet the Gull as soon as she dropped her anchor.

  Governor van de Velde refused to climb down the ladder, and was hoisted from the deck, swung outboard in a boatswain’s chair, all the while shouting nervous instructions at the men on the ropes. ‘Careful now, you clumsy oafs! Drop me and I will have the skin thrashed off your backs.’

  He was lowered into the longboat at the Gull’s side, in which his wife already waited. Assisted by Colonel Cornelius Schreuder, her descent had been considerably more graceful than her husband’s.

  They were rowed to the foreshore, where five strong slaves lifted the new Governor from the boat that danced in the shore break of white foam at the edge of the beach. They waded ashore with him and deposited him on the sand.

  As the Governor’s feet touched African soil the first cannon shot of a salute of fourteen rang out. A long plume of silver gunsmoke shot from the embrasure on the top of the southern redoubt, and the thunderous report so startled the new representative of the Company that he leapt a foot in the air and almost lost his plumed hat to the sou’-easter.

  Governor Kleinhans, overjoyed that his successor in office had at last arrived, was at the foreshore to meet him. The garrison commander, equally anxious to hand over to Colonel Schreuder and shake from his feet the rank African dust, was on the ramparts of the fortress, his telescope focused on the arriving dignitaries.

  The state carriage was waiting above the beach, six beautiful greys in the traces. Governor Kleinhans dismounted from it to greet the new arrivals, clutching his hat in the wind. An honour guard from the garrison was drawn up around the carriage. Gathered along the waterfront were several hundred men, women and children. Every resident of the settlement who could walk or crawl had turned out to welcome Governor van de Velde as he struggled through the loose sand.

  When at last he reached firm footing and had gathered his breath and dignity he accepted Governor Kleinhans’ welcome. They shook hands to cheering and applause from the Company officials, free burghers and slaves gathered to watch. The military escort presented their arms, and the band launched into a spirited patriotic air. The music ended with a clash of cymbals and a roll of kettle drums. The two Governors spontaneously embraced each other, Kleinhans delighted to be free to return to Amsterdam, and van de Velde overjoyed at having escaped death by storm and piracy and to have Dutch soil under his feet once more.

  While Sam Bowles and his mates were removing the corpses from the slave chains and tossing them overboard, Hal squatted in the rank of captives and watched from afar as Katinka was ushered into the carriage by Governor Kleinhans on one arm and Colonel Schreuder on the other.

  He felt his heart tear with love for her, and he whispered to Daniel and Aboli, ‘Is she not the most beautiful lady in the world? She will use her influence for us. Now that her husband has full powers, she will persuade him to treat us justly.’ Neither of the two big men replied, but they exchanged a glance. Daniel grinned with broken teeth and Aboli rolled his eyes.

  Once Katinka was settled on the leather seats, they boosted her husband aboard. The carriage swayed and rocked under his weight. As soon as he was safely installed beside his wife, the band struck up a lively march and the escort shouldered their muskets and stepped out, a stirring sight in their white cross belts and green jackets. The procession streamed across the open parade ground towards the fort, with the crowds running ahead of the carriage and lining both sides of the route.

  ‘Farewell, gentlemen. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have you aboard.’ The Buzzard touched the brim of his hat in an ironic salute as Sir Francis shambled across the deck dragging his chains, and led the file of his crew down the ladder into the boat moored alongside. So many men in chains made a heavy load for it in this condition of swell. They were left with only a few inches of freeboard as they pushed off from the Gull’s side.

  The oarsmen struggled to hold the longboat’s stern into the breaking white waves as they approached the beach, but a taller swell got under her and threw her off line. She broached heavily, dug in her shoulder and rolled over in four feet of water. Crew and passengers were thrown into the white water, and the capsized boat was caught up in the wash.

  Choking and coughing up seawater, the prisoners managed to drag each other from the surf by their chains. Miraculously none was drowned, but the effort taxed most to their limit. When the guards from the fortress hectored them to their feet and drove them with musket butt and curses up the beach, they were streaming water and coated with a sugaring of white sand.

  Having seen the state carriage safely through the gates of the fort, the crowds poured back to the waterfront to have a little sport with these wretched creatures. They studied them as though they were livestock at a market, and their laughter was unrestrained, their comments ribald.

  ‘Look more like gypsies and beggars than English pirates to me.’

  ‘I’m saving my guilders. I’ll not be bidding when that lot go up on the slave block.’

  ‘They don’t sell pirates, they burn them.’

  ‘They don’t look much, but at least they’ll give us all some sport. We haven’t had a really good execution since the slave revolt.’

  ‘There’s Stadige Jan over there, come to look them over. I’ll warrant he’ll have a few lessons to teach these corsairs.’

  Hal turned his head in the direction the speaker pointed to where a tall burgher in dark, drab clothing and a puritan hat stood a head above the crowd. He looked at Hal with pale expressionless yellow eyes.

  ‘What do you think of these beauties, Stadige Jan? Will you be able to get them to sing a pretty tune for us?’

  Hal sensed the repulsion and fascination this man held for those around him. None stood too close to him, and they looked at him in such a way that Hal instinctively knew that this was the executioner of whom they had been warned. He felt his flesh crawl as he looked into those faded eyes.

  ‘Why do you think that they call him Slow John?’ he asked Aboli, from the side of his mouth.

  ‘Let us hope we never have to find out,’ Aboli replied, as they passed where the tall, cadaverous figure stood.

  Small boys, both brown and white, danced beside the column of chained men, jeering and pelting them with pebbles and filth from the open gutters that carried the sewage from the town down to the sea front. Encouraged by this example a pack of mongrel dogs snapped at their heels. The adults in the crowd were turned out in their best clothes for such an unusual occasion and laughed at the antics of the children. Some of the women held sachets of herbs to their noses when they smelt the bedraggled file of prisoners, shuddering in horrified fascination.

  ‘Oh! What dreadful creatures!’

  ‘Look at those cruel and savage faces.’

  ‘I have heard that they feed those Negroes on human flesh.’

  Aboli contorted his face and rolled his eyes at them. The tattoos on his cheeks stood proud, and his great white teeth were bared in a fearsome grin. The women squealed with delicious terror, and their little daughters hid their faces in their mothers’ skirts as he passed.

  At the rear of the crowd, hanging back from the company of their betters, taking no part in the sport of baiting the captives,
were those men and women who, Hal guessed, must be the domestic slaves of the burghers. The slaves in the crowd ranged in colour from the anthracite black of Africa to the amber and gold skins of the Orient. Most were simply dressed in the cast-off clothing of their owners, although some of the prettier women wore the flamboyant finery that marked them as the favourite playthings of their masters.

  They looked on quietly as the seamen trudged past in their clanking chains, and there was no sound of laughter among them. Rather, Hal sensed a certain empathy behind their closed impassive expressions for they were captives also. Just before they entered the gate to the fort, Hal noticed one girl in particular at the back of the crowd. She had climbed up on a pile of masonry blocks for a better view and stood higher than the intervening ranks of spectators. This was not the only reason why Hal had singled her out.

  She was more beautiful than he had ever expected any woman to be. She was a flower of a girl, with thick glossy black hair and dark eyes that seemed too large for her delicate oval face. For one moment their eyes met over the heads of the crowd, and it seemed to Hal that she tried to pass him some message that he was unable to grasp. He knew only that she felt compassion for him, and that she shared in his suffering. Then he lost sight of her as they were marched through the gateway into the courtyard of the fort.

  The image of her stayed with him over the dreadful days that followed. Gradually it began to supersede the memory of Katinka, and in the nights sometimes returned to give him the strength he needed to endure. He felt that if there were but one person of such loveliness and tenderness out there, beyond the gaunt stone walls, who cared for his abject condition, then it was worth fighting on.

  In the courtyard of the fort, a military armourer struck off their shackles. A shore party under the command of Sam Bowles stood by to collect the discarded chains to take back aboard the Gull. ‘I will miss you all, my shipmates.’ Sam grinned. ‘The lower decks of the old Gull will be empty and lonely without your smiling faces and your good cheer.’ He gave them a salute from the gateway as he led his shore party away. ‘I hope they look after you as well as your good friend Sam Bowles did. But, never fear, I’ll be at the Parade when you give your last performance there.’

  When Sam was gone, Hal looked around the courtyard. He saw that the fortress had been designed on a substantial scale. As part of his training his father had made him study the science of land fortifications, so he recognized the classical defensive layout of the stone walls and redoubts. He realized that once these works were completed, it would take an army equipped with a full siege train to reduce them.

  However, the work was less than half finished, and on the landward side of the fort or, as their new gaolers referred to it, het kasteel, the castle, there were merely open foundations from which the massive stone walls would one day rise. Yet it was clear that the work was being hastened along. Almost certainly the two recent Anglo-Dutch wars had imparted this impetus. Both Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, during the interregnum, and King Charles, son of the man he had beheaded, could claim some credit for the frenzy of construction that was going on around them. They had forcibly reminded the Dutch of the vulnerability of their far-flung colonies. The half-finished walls swarmed with hundreds of workmen, and the courtyard in which they stood was piled with building timber and blocks of dressed masonry hewn from the mountain that loomed over it all.

  As dangerous captives they were kept apart from the other prisoners. They were marched from the courtyard down the short spiral staircase below the south wall of the fort. The stone blocks that lined floor, vaulted roof and walls glistened with moisture that had seeped in from the surrounding waterlogged soil. Even on such a sunny day in autumn the temperature in these dank forbidding surroundings made them shiver.

  At the foot of the first flight of stairs Sir Francis Courtney was dragged out of the file by his gaolers and thrust into a small cell just large enough to hold one man. It was one in a row of half a dozen or so identical cells, whose doors were of solid timber studded with iron bolts and the tiny barred peep-hole in each was shuttered and closed. They had no sight of the other inmates. ‘Special quarters for you, Sir Pirate,’ the burly Dutch gaoler told him as he slammed the door on Sir Francis and turned the lock with a huge iron key from the bunch on his belt. ‘We are putting you in the Skellum’s Den, with all the really bad ones, the murderers and rebels and robbers. You will feel at home here, of that I’m sure.’

  The rest of the prisoners were herded down to the next level of the dungeon. The sergeant gaoler unlocked the grille door at the end of the tunnel and they were shoved into a long narrow cell. Once the grille was locked behind them there was barely room for them all to stretch out on the thin layer of damp straw that covered the cobblestoned floor. A single latrine bucket stood in one corner, but murmurs of pleasure from all the men greeted the sight of the large water cistern beside the grille gate. At least this meant they were no longer on shipboard water rations.

  There were four small windows set in the top of one wall and, once they had inspected their surroundings, Hal looked up at them. Aboli hoisted him onto his shoulders and he was able to reach one of these narrow openings. It was heavily barred, like the others, but Hal tried the gratings with his bare hands. They were set rock-firm, and he was forced to put out of his mind any notion of escaping this way.

  Hanging on the grating, he drew himself up and peered through it. He found that his eyes were a foot or so above ground level, and from there he had a view of part of the interior courtyard of the castle. He could see the entrance gateway and the grand portals of what he guessed must be the Company offices and the Governor’s suite. To one side, through the gap where the walls had not yet been raised, he could see a portion of the cliffs of the table-topped mountain, and above them the sky. Against the cloudless blue sailed a flock of white gulls.

  Hal lowered himself and pushed his way through the throng of seamen, stepping over the bodies of the sick and wounded. When he reached the grille he looked up the staircase but could not see the door to his father’s cell.

  ‘Father!’ he called tentatively, expecting a rebuke from one of the gaolers, but when there was no response he raised his voice and shouted again.

  ‘I hear you, Hal,’ his father called back.

  ‘Do you have any orders for us, Father?’

  ‘I expect they’ll leave us in peace for a day or two, at least until they have convened a tribunal. We will have to wait it out. Tell the men to be of good heart.’

  At that a strange voice intervened, speaking in English but with an unfamiliar accent. ‘Are you the English pirates we have heard so much about?’

  ‘We are honest sailors, falsely accused,’ Sir Francis shouted back. ‘Who and what are you?’

  ‘I am your neighbour in the Skellum’s Den, two cells down from you. I am condemned to die, as you are.’

  ‘We are not yet condemned,’ Sir Francis protested.

  ‘It is only a matter of time. I hear from the gaolers that you soon will be.’

  ‘What is your name?’ Hal joined in the exchange. He was not interested in the stranger, but this conversation served to pass the time and divert them from their own predicament. ‘What is your crime?’

  ‘I am Althuda, and my crime is that I strive to be free and to set other men free.’

  ‘Then we are brothers, Althuda, you and I and every man here. We all strive for freedom.’

  There was a ragged chorus of assent, and when it subsided Althuda spoke again. ‘I led a revolt of the Company slaves. Some were recaptured. Those Stadige Jan burned alive, but most of us escaped into the mountains. Many times they sent soldiers after us, but we fought and drove them off and they could not enslave us again.’ His was a vital young voice, proud and strong, and even before Hal had seen his face he found himself drawn to this Althuda.

  ‘Then if you escaped, how is it that you are back here in the Skellum’s
Den?’ one of the English seamen wanted to know. They were all listening now. Althuda’s story had moved even the most hardened of them.

  ‘I came back to rescue somebody, another slave who was left behind,’ Althuda told them. ‘When I entered the colony again I was recognized and betrayed.’

  They were all silent for a space.

  ‘A woman?’ a voice asked. ‘You came back for a woman?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Althuda. ‘A woman.’

  ‘There is always an Eve in the midst of Eden to tempt us into folly,’ one sang out and they all laughed.

  Then somebody else asked, ‘Was she your sweetheart?’

  ‘No,’ Althuda answered. ‘I came back for my little sister.’

  Thirty guests sat down to the banquet that Governor Kleinhans gave to welcome his successor. All the most important men in the administration of the colony, together with their wives, were seated around the long board.

  From the place of honour Petrus van de Velde gazed with delighted anticipation down the length of the rosewood table above which hung massive chandeliers, each burning fifty perfumed candles. They lit the great hall as if it was day, and sparkled on the silverware and crystal glasses.

  For months now, ever since sailing from the coast of Trincomalee, van de Velde had been forced to subsist on the swill and offal cooked on the galleon and then on the coarse fare that the English pirates had provided for him. Now his eyes shone and saliva flooded his mouth as he contemplated the culinary extravaganza spread before him. He reached for the tall glass in front of him, and took a mouthful of the rare wine from Champagne. The tiny seething bubbles tickled his palate and spurred his already unbridled appetite.

  Van de Velde considered this a most fortunate posting, for which his wife’s connection in the Council of Seventeen was to be thanked. Positioned here, at the tip of Africa, a constant procession of ships passed in both directions bringing the luxuries of Europe and the Orient into Table Bay. They would want for nothing.