Birds of Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Did you descend into these plains?’

  ‘We went down a little way. We found strange creatures never before seen by the eyes of man – grey and enormous with long horns set upon their noses. One rushed upon us with terrible snorts and whistles. Though we fired our muskets at it, it came on and impaled the wife of Johannes upon its nose horn and killed her.’

  They all looked at little one-eyed Johannes, one of Sabah’s band of escaped slaves, who wept at the memory of his dead woman. It was strange to see tears squeezing out of his empty eye socket. They were all silent for a while, then Zwaantie took up the story. ‘My little Bobby was only a month old, and I could not place him in such danger. Without powder for the muskets we could not go on. I prevailed on Sabah to turn back, and we returned to this place.’

  ‘Why do you ask these questions? What is your plan, Captain?’ Big Daniel wanted to know, but Hal shook his head.

  ‘I’m not ready to explain it to you, but don’t lose heart, lads. I have promised to find you a ship, have I not?’ he said, with more confidence than he felt. In the morning, on the pretence of fishing, he led Aboli and Big Daniel up the stream to the next pool. When they were out of sight of the camp, they sat close together on the rocky bank.

  ‘It is clear that unless we can better arm ourselves, we are trapped in these mountains. We will perish as slowly and despondently as most of Sabah’s men already have. We must have powder for the muskets.’

  ‘Where will we get that?’ Daniel asked. ‘What do you propose?’

  ‘I have been thinking about the colony,’ Hal told them.

  Both men stared at him in disbelief. Aboli broke the silence. ‘You plan to go back to Good Hope? Even there you will not be able to lay your hands on powder. Oh, perhaps you might steal a pound or two from the green-jackets at the bridge, or from a Company hunter, but that is not enough to see us on our journey.’

  ‘I planned to break into the castle again,’ Hal said.

  Both men laughed bitterly. ‘You lack not in enterprise or in heart, Captain,’ Big Daniel said, ‘but that is madness.’

  Aboli agreed with him, and said, in his deep, thoughtful voice, ‘If I thought there were even the poorest chance of success, I would gladly go alone. But think on it, Gundwane, I do not mean merely the impossibility of winning our way into the castle armoury. Say, even, that we succeeded in that, and that the store of powder we destroyed has since been replenished by shipments from Holland. Say that we were able to escape with some of it. How would we carry even a single keg back across the plains with Schreuder and his men pursuing us? This time we would not have the horses.’

  In his heart Hal had known that it was madness, but he had hoped that even such a desperate and forlorn proposal might fire them to think of another plan.

  At last, Aboli broke the silence. ‘You spoke of a plan to find a ship. If you tell us that plan, Gundwane, then perhaps we can help you to bring it to pass.’ Both men looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Where do you suppose the Buzzard is at this very moment?’ Hal asked.

  Aboli and Big Daniel looked startled. ‘If my prayers have prevailed he is roasting in hell,’ Daniel replied bitterly.

  Hal looked at Aboli. ‘What do you think, Aboli? Where would you look for the Buzzard?’

  ‘Somewhere out on the seven seas. Wherever he smells gold or the promise of easy pickings, like the carrion bird for which he is named.’

  ‘Yes!’ Hal clapped him on the shoulder. ‘But where might the smell of gold be strongest? Why did the Buzzard buy Jiri and our other black shipmates at auction?’

  Aboli stared blankly at him. Then a slow smile spread over his wide, dark face. ‘Elephant Lagoon!’ he exclaimed.

  Big Daniel boomed with excited laughter. ‘He scented the treasure from the Dutch galleons and he thought our Negro lads could lead him to it.’

  ‘How far are we from Elephant Lagoon?’ Aboli asked.

  ‘By my reckoning, three hundred sea miles.’ The immensity of the distance silenced them.

  ‘It’s a long tack,’ said Daniel, ‘without powder to defend ourselves on the way or with which to fight the Buzzard if we get there.’

  Aboli did not reply, but looked at Hal. ‘How long will the journey take us, Gundwane?’

  ‘If we can make good ten miles a day, which I doubt, perhaps a little over a month.’

  ‘Will the Buzzard still be there when we arrive, or will he have given up his search and sailed away?’ Aboli thought aloud.

  ‘Aye!’ Daniel muttered. ‘And if he has gone what will become of us then? We’d be marooned there for ever.’

  ‘Do you prefer to be marooned here, Master Daniel? Do you want to die of cold and starvation on this God-forsaken mountain when winter comes round again?’

  They were quiet again. Then Aboli said, ‘I am ready to leave now. There is no other path open to us.’

  ‘But what of Sir Henry’s leg? Is it strong enough yet?’

  ‘Give me another week, lads, and I’ll walk the hind legs off all of you.’

  ‘What do we do if we find the Buzzard still roosting at Elephant Lagoon?’ Daniel was not ready to agree so easily. ‘He has a crew of a hundred well-armed ruffians and, if all of us survive the journey, we will be a dozen armed with swords alone.’

  ‘That’s fine odds!’ Hal laughed at him. ‘I’ve seen you take on much worse. Powder or no powder, we’re off to find the Buzzard. Are you with us or not, Master Daniel?’

  ‘Of course, I’m with you, Captain.’ Big Daniel was affronted. ‘What made you think I was not?’

  That night, around the council fire, Hal explained the plan to the others. When he had finished he looked at their sombre faces in the firelight. ‘I will prevail on no man to come with us. Aboli, Daniel and I are determined to go, but if any among you wishes to remain here in the mountains we will leave half the store of weapons with you, including half the remaining gunpowder, and we will think no ill of you. Are there any of you who wish to speak?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sukeena, without looking up from the food she was cooking. ‘I go wherever you go.’

  ‘Bravely spoken, Princess,’ grinned Ned Tyler. ‘And I go also.’

  ‘Aye!’ said the other seamen in unison. ‘We are all with you.’

  Hal nodded his thanks to them, and then looked at Althuda. ‘You have a woman and your son to think of, Althuda. What say you?’

  He could see the distress on the face of little Zwaantie as she suckled the baby at her breast. Her dark eyes were filled with doubts and misgivings. Althuda lifted her to her feet and led her away into the darkness.

  When they were gone Sabah spoke for all his band. ‘Althuda is our leader. He brought us out of captivity, and we cannot leave him and Zwaantie alone in the wilderness to perish with the baby of cold and hunger. If Althuda goes we go, but if he stays we must stay with him.’

  ‘I admire your resolve and your loyalty, Sabah,’ said Hal.

  They waited in silence, hearing Zwaantie weeping with fear and indecision in the darkness. Then, after a long while, Althuda led her back to the fire, his arm around her shoulders, and they took their places in the circle.

  ‘Zwaantie fears not for herself but for the baby,’ he said. ‘But she knows that our best chance will be with you, Sir Hal. We will come with you.’

  ‘I would have mourned if your decision had been different, Althuda.’ Hal smiled with genuine pleasure. ‘Together our chances are much increased. Now we must make our preparations and agree on the time when we will set out.’

  Sukeena came from the fire to sit beside Hal, and spoke out firmly: ‘Your leg will not be healed for at least another five days. I will not allow you to march upon it before then.’

  ‘When the Princess speaks,’ Aboli declared, in his deep voice, ‘only a foolish man does not listen.’

  During those last days Hal and Sukeena foraged for the herbs and plants that she would use for medicine and food. The last of the infection in Hal’s woun
ds yielded to her treatment, while climbing and descending the steep and rugged slopes of the mountains rapidly strengthened his injured limb.

  On the day before the journey was due to commence, the two stopped at midday to bathe and rest and make love in the soft grass beside the stream. This was a branch of the river that they had not visited on their previous forays, and while Hal lay surfeited with passion in the warm sunlight, Sukeena stood up naked and moved away up the ravine a short distance to ease herself.

  Hal watched her squat behind a patch of low bush, lay back and closed his eyes, drifting lazily to the edge of sleep. He was roused by the familiar sound of Sukeena’s sharp pointed digging stick pounding into the earth. A few minutes later she returned, still naked, but with a crumbling lump of yellow earth in her hand.

  ‘Flower crystals! The first I have found in these mountains.’ She looked delighted with her discovery, and emptied some of the less valuable herbs from her basket to make place for the lumps of friable earth. ‘Part of these mountains must once have been volcanoes for the flower crystals are spewed up from the earth in the lava.’

  Hal watched her work, more interested in the way her naked body gleamed in the sunlight, like molten gold, and the way her small breasts changed shape as she wielded the stick vigorously, than in the crystalline lumps of yellow earth she was prising from the bank of the ravine.

  ‘What do you use this earth for?’ he asked, without rising from his grassy nest.

  ‘It has many uses. It is a sovereign cure for headaches and colic. If I mix it with the juice of the verbena berry it will soothe palpitations of the heart and ease a woman’s monthly courses …’ She reeled off a list of the ailments that she could treat with it, but to Hal it did not seem to have any special virtue, and looked like any other clod of dry earth. The basket was so heavy by now that, on their return to camp, Hal had to take it from her.

  That night while the band sat around the fire and held their final council before beginning the long journey east, Sukeena pounded the clods of earth in the crude stone mortar she had made and mixed the powder into a pot of water. She heated this over the fire, then came to sit beside Hal as he went over the order of march for the following day. He was allocating weapons and loads to the men. The weight and bulk of each load would be dictated by the age and strength of the man carrying it.

  Suddenly Hal broke off and sniffed the air. ‘Sweet heaven and all the apostles!’ he cried. ‘What have you in this pot, Sukeena?’

  ‘I told you, Gundwane. ’Tis the yellow flowers.’ She looked alarmed as he rushed back to her, picked her up in his arms, tossed her high in the air and caught her as she came down, skirts fluttering around her.

  ‘’Tis not any type of flower at all! I would know that smell in hell itself where it truly belongs!’ He kissed her until she pushed his face away.

  ‘Are you mad?’ She laughed and gasped for breath.

  ‘Mad with love for you!’ he said, and turned her to face the men who had watched this display in amazement. ‘Lads, the Princess has created the miracle which will save us all!’

  ‘You speak in riddles!’ said Aboli.

  ‘Yes!’ the others cried. ‘Speak plain, Captain.’

  ‘I’ll speak plain enough so even the slowest-witted of you sea-rats will understand my words.’ Hal laughed at their confusion. ‘Her pot is filled with brimstone! Magical yellow brimstone!’

  It was Ned Tyler who understood first, for he was the master gunner. He also leaped to his feet, rushed to kneel over the pot and inhaled the fumes as though they were the smoke of an opium pipe.

  ‘The captain’s right, lads,’ he howled with glee. ‘It’s brimstone sulphur, sure enough.’

  Sukeena led a party, headed by Aboli and Big Daniel, back to the ravine in which she had discovered the sulphur deposit, and they returned to camp staggering under their loads of the yellow earth, packed into baskets or sewn into sacks made of animal skins.

  While Sukeena supervised the boiling and leaching of the sulphur crystals from the ore, one-eyed Johannes and Zwaantie tended the slow fires, banked with earth, in which the baulks of cedarwood were being gradually reduced to pure black nuggets of charcoal.

  Hal and Sabah’s band climbed the steep mountainside above the camp to reach the cliffs in which the multitudes of rock rabbits had their colonies. Sabah’s men clung to the precipice like flies to the wall as they scraped away the amber coloured crystals of dried urine. The little animals defecated in communal middens, and while the round pellets of dung rolled away, the urine dribbled down and soaked the rock face. They discovered that, in some places, this coating was several feet thick.

  They lowered skin sacks of these odoriferous deposits to the foot of the cliff, then lugged them down to the camp. They worked in shifts to keep the fires burning all day and night under the clay pots, extracting the sulphur from the powdered earth and the saltpetre from the animal excreta.

  Ned Tyler and Hal, the two gunners, hovered over these steaming pots like a pair of alchemists, straining the liquid and reducing it with heat. Finally they dried the thick residual pastes in the sun. From the first brewing of the stinking compounds they were left with a store of dried crystalline powders that filled three large pots.

  When crushed the charcoal was a smooth black powder, while the saltpetre was pale brown and fine as sea salt. When Hal placed a small pinch of it on his tongue it was indeed as pungent and salty as the sea. The flowers of sulphur were daffodil yellow and almost odourless.

  The entire band of fugitives gathered round to watch when, at last, Hal started to mix the three constituents in Sukeena’s stone mortar. He measured the proportions and first ground together the charcoal and the sulphur, for without the final vital ingredient these were inert and harmless. Then he added the saltpetre and gingerly combined it with the dark grey primary powder until he had a flask filled with what looked and smelt like veritable gunpowder.

  Aboli handed him one of the muskets and he measured a charge, dribbled it down the barrel, stuffed a wad of fibrous dried bark on top of it and rodded home a round pebble he had selected from the sandbank of the stream. He would not waste a lead ball in this experiment.

  Meanwhile, Big Daniel had set up a wooden target on the opposite bank. While Hal squatted and took his aim the rest spread out on either side of him and plugged their ears with their fingers. An expectant silence fell as he took aim and pressed the trigger.

  There was a thunderous report and a blinding cloud of smoke. The wooden target shattered and toppled down the bank into the water. An exultant cheer went up from everyone, and they pounded each other upon the back and danced delirious jigs of triumph in the sunlight.

  ‘It’s as fine a grade of powder as any you can find in the naval stores in Greenwich,’ Ned Tyler opined, ‘but it will have to be properly caked afore we can bag it and carry it away.’

  To this end Hal ordered a large clay pot to be placed behind a grass screen at the edge of the camp, and all were strictly enjoined to make use of it on every possible occasion. Even the two women went behind the screen to make their demure contributions. Once the pot was filled, the gunpowder was moistened into paste with the urine, then formed into briquettes, which dried hard in the sun. These were packed into reed baskets for ease of transporting.

  ‘We will grind the cakes as we need them,’ Hal explained to Sukeena. ‘Now we do not have to carry such a weight of dried fish and meat for we will hunt as we travel. If there is such an abundance of game, as Sabah tells us there is, we will not go short of fresh meat.’

  Ten days later than they had first intended, the band was ready to set out into the east. Hal, as the navigator, and Sabah, who had travelled that route before, led the column; Althuda and the three musketeers were in the centre to guard the women and little Bobby, while Aboli and Big Daniel brought up the rear under their ponderous burdens.

  They travelled with the grain and run of the range, not attempting to scale the high ground but followi
ng the valleys and crossing only through the passes between the high peaks. Hal estimated the distances travelled by eye and time, and the direction with the leather-cased compass. These he marked on his charts every evening before the light faded.

  At night they camped in the open, for the weather was mild and they were too tired to build a shelter. When they woke each dawn, their skin blankets, that Sabah called karosses, were soaked with dew.

  As Sabah had warned, it was six days of hard travel through the labyrinth of valleys before they reached the steep eastern escarpment and looked down from its crest on the lower ground.

  Far out to their right they could make out the blue stain of the ocean merging with the paler heron’s-egg blue of the sky, but below the land was not the true plains that Hal had expected but was broken up with hillocks, undulating grassy glades and streaks of dark green forest that seemed to follow the courses of the many small rivers that criss-crossed the littoral as they meandered down to the sea.

  To their left, another range of jagged blue mountains marched parallel to the sea, forming a rampart that guarded the mysterious hinterland of the continent. Hal’s sharp eyesight picked out the dark stains on the golden grassy plains, moving like cloud shadows when there were no clouds in the sky. He saw the haze of dust that followed the moving herds of wild game, and now and then he spotted the reflection of sunlight from tusks of ivory or from a polished horn.

  ‘This land swarms with life,’ he murmured to Sukeena, who stood at his shoulder. ‘There may be strange beasts down there that man has never before laid eyes upon. Perhaps even fire-breathing dragons and unicorns and griffons.’ Sukeena shivered and hugged her shoulders, even though the sun was high and warm.

  ‘I saw such creatures drawn on the charts I brought for you,’ she agreed.

  There was a path before them, beaten by the great round pads of elephant and signposted by piles of their fibrous yellow dung, that wound down the slope, picking the most favourable gradient, skirting the deep ravines and dangerous gorges, and Hal followed it.