Birds of Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  Between her bloody thighs lay a tiny pink mannikin, glistening wet and bound to her still by a tangle of fleshy cord. The little head was only half formed, the eyes would never open and the mouth would never take suck, nor cry, nor laugh. But he saw that it was, indeed, a boy.

  He took her again in his arms and she opened her eyes and smiled softly. ‘I am sorry, my love. I have to go now. If you forget all else, remember only this, that I loved you as no other woman will ever be able to love you.’

  She closed her eyes and he felt the life go out of her, the great stillness descend.

  He waited with them, his woman and his son, until midnight. Then Althuda brought down a bolt of canvas and sailmaker’s needle, thread and palm. Hal placed the stillborn child in Sukeena’s arms and bound him there with a linen winding sheet. Then he and Althuda sewed them into a shroud of bright new canvas, a cannonball at Sukeena’s feet.

  At midnight Hal carried the woman and child in his arms up onto the open deck. Under the bright African moon he gave them both up to the sea. They went below the dark surface and left barely a ripple in the ship’s wake at their passing.

  ‘Goodbye, my love,’ he whispered. ‘Goodbye, my two darlings.’

  Then he went down to the cabin in the stern. He opened Llewellyn’s Bible and looked for comfort and solace between its black-leather covers, but found none.

  For six long days he sat alone by his cabin window. He ate none of the food that Aboli brought him. Sometimes he read from the Bible, but mostly he stared back along the ship’s wake. He came up on deck at noon each day, gaunt and haggard, and sighted the sun. He made his calculations of the ship’s position and gave his orders to the helm. Then he went back to be alone with his grief.

  At dawn on the seventh day Aboli came to him. ‘Grief is natural, Gundwane, but this is indulgence. You forsake your duty and those of us who have placed our trust in you. It is enough.’

  ‘It will never be enough.’ Hal looked at him. ‘I will mourn her all the days of my life.’ He stood up and the cabin swam around him, for he was weak with grief and lack of food. He waited for his head to steady and clear. ‘You are right, Aboli. Bring me a bowl of food and a mug of small beer.’

  After he had eaten, he felt stronger. He washed and shaved, changed his shirt and combed his hair back into a thick plait down his back. He saw that there were strands of pure white in the sable locks. When he looked in the mirror, he barely recognized the darkly tanned face that stared back at him, the nose as beaky as that of an eagle, and there was no spare flesh to cover the high-ridged cheek-bones or the unforgiving line of the jaw. His eyes were green as emeralds, and with that stone’s adamantine glitter.

  I am barely twenty years of age, he thought, with amazement, and yet I look twice that already.

  He picked up his sword from the desk top and slipped it into the scabbard. ‘Very well, Aboli. I am ready to take up my duty again,’ he said, and Aboli followed him up onto the deck.

  The boatswain at the helm knuckled his forehead, and the watch on deck nudged each other. Every man was intensely aware of his presence, but none looked in his direction. Hal stood for a while at the rail, his eyes darting keenly about the deck and rigging.

  ‘Boatswain, hold your luff, damn your eyes!’ he snapped at the helmsman.

  The leech of the main sail was barely trembling as it spilled the wind, but Hal had noticed it and the watch, squatting at the foot of the mainmast, grinned at each other surreptitiously. The captain was in command again.

  At first they did not understand what this presaged. However, they were soon to learn the breadth and extent of it. Hal started by speaking to every man of the crew alone in his cabin. After he had asked their names and the village or town of their birth, he questioned them shrewdly as to their service. Meanwhile he was studying each and assessing his worth.

  Three stood out above the others; they had all been watchkeepers under Llewellyn’s command. The boatswain, John Lovell, was the man who had served under Hal’s father.

  ‘You’ll keep your old rating, boatswain,’ Hal told him, and John grinned.

  ‘It will be a pleasure to serve under you, Captain.’

  ‘I hope you feel the same way in a month from now,’ Hal replied grimly.

  The other two were William Stanley and Robert Moone, both coxswains. Hal liked the look of them: Llewellyn had a good eye for judging men, he thought, and shook their hands.

  Big Daniel was his other boatswain, and Ned Tyler, who could both read and write, was mate. Althuda, one of the few other literates aboard, became the ship’s writer, in charge of all the documents and keeping them up to date. He was Hal’s closest remaining link with Sukeena, and Hal felt the greatest affection for him and wished to keep him near at hand. They could share each other’s grief.

  John Lovell and Ned Tyler went through the ship’s roster with Hal and helped him draw up the watch-bill, the nominal list by which every man knew to which watch he was quartered and his station for every purpose.

  As soon as this was done Hal inspected the ship. He started on the main deck and then, with his two boatswains, opened every hatch. He climbed and sometimes crawled into every part of the hull, from her bilges to her maintop. In her magazine he opened three kegs, chosen at random, and assessed the quality of her gunpowder and slow-match.

  He checked off her cargo against the manifest, and was surprised and pleased to find the amount of muskets and lead shot she carried, together with great quantities of trade goods.

  Then he ordered the ship hove to, and a longboat lowered. He had himself rowed around the ship so he could judge her trim. He moved some of the culverins to gunports further aft, and ordered the cargo swung out on deck and repacked to establish the trim he favoured. Then he exercised the ship’s company in sail setting and altering, sailing the Golden Bough through every point of the compass and at every attitude to the wind. This went on for almost a week, as he called out the watch below at noon or in the middle of the night to shorten or increase sail and push the ship to the limits of her speed.

  Soon he knew the Golden Bough as intimately as a lover. He found out how close he could take her to the wind, and how she loved to run before it with all her canvas spread. He had a bucket crew wet down her sails so they would better hold the wind, and then, when she was in full flight, took her speed through the water with glass and log timed from bow to stern. He found out how to coax the last yard of speed out of her, and how to have her respond to the helm like a fine hunter to the reins.

  The crew worked without complaint, and Aboli heard them talking among themselves in the forecastle. Far from complaining, they seemed to be enjoying the change from Llewellyn’s more complacent command.

  ‘The young ’un is a sailor. The ship loves him. He can drive the Bough to her limit, and make her fly through the water, he can.’

  ‘He’s happy to drive us to the limit, also,’ another opined.

  ‘Cheer up, all you lazy layabouts, I reckon there’ll be prize money galore at the end of this voyage.’

  Then Hal worked them at the guns, running them out then in again, until the men sweated, strained and grinned as they cursed him for a tyrant. Then he had the guncrews fire at a floating keg, and cheered with the best of them as the target shattered to the shot.

  In between times, he exercised them with the cutlass and the pike, and he fought alongside them, stripped to the waist and matching himself against Aboli, Big Daniel or John Lovell, who was the best swordsman of the new crew.

  The Golden Bough sailed on around the bulge of the southern African continent and Hal headed her up into the north. Now with every league they sailed the sea changed its character. The waters took on a vivid indigo hue that stained the sky the same colour. They were so clear that, leaning over the bows, Hal could see the pods of porpoises four fathoms down, racing ahead of the bows and frolicking like a pack of boisterous spaniels until they arched up to the surface. As they broke through it he could see the nos
tril on top of their head open to breathe, and they looked up at him with a merry eye and a knowing grin.

  The flying fish were their outriders, sailing ahead of them on flashing silver wings, and the mountains of towering cumulus clouds were the beacons that beckoned them ever northwards.

  When they sailed into the great calms he would not let his crew rest, but lowered the boats and raced watch against watch, the oars churning the water white. Then at the end of the course he had them board the Golden Bough as though she were an enemy, while he and Aboli and Big Daniel opposed them and made them fight for a footing on the deck.

  In the windless heat of the tropics, while the Bough rolled gently on the sluggish swells and the empty sails slatted and lolled, he raced the hands in relay teams to the top of the mainmast and down, with an extra tot of rum as the prize.

  Within weeks the men were fit and lean and bursting with high spirits, spoiling for a fight. Hal, however, was plagued by a nagging worry that he shared with nobody, not even Aboli. Night after night he sat at his desk in the main cabin, not daring to sleep, for he knew that the grief and the memories of the woman and the child he had lost would haunt his dreams, and he studied the charts and tried to puzzle out a solution.

  He had barely forty men under his command, only just sufficient to work the ship, but too few by far to fight her. If they met again, the Buzzard would be able to send a hundred men onto the Golden Bough’s deck. If they were to be able to defend themselves, let alone seek employment in the service of the Prester, then Hal must find seamen.

  When he perused the charts he could find few ports where he might enlist trained seamen. Most were under the control of the Portuguese and the Dutch, and they would not welcome an English frigate, especially one whose captain was intent on seducing their sailors into his service.

  The English had not penetrated this far ocean in any force. A few traders had factories on the Indian continent, but they were under the thrall of the Great Mogul, and, besides, to reach them would mean a voyage of several thousand miles out of his intended course.

  Hal knew that on the south-east shore of the long island of St Lawrence, which was also called Madagascar, the French Knights of the Order of the Holy Grail had a safe harbour which they called Fort Dauphin. If he called in there, as an English Knight of the Order he could expect a welcome but little else for his comfort, unless some rare circumstance such as a cyclone had caused a wreck and left sailors in the port without ship. However, he decided that he must take that chance and make Fort Dauphin his first call, and laid his course for the island.

  As he sailed on northwards, with Madagascar as his goal, Africa was always there off the larboard beam. At times the land dreamed in the blue distance, and at other times it was so close that they could smell its peculiar aroma. It was the peppery scent of spice and the rich dark odour of the earth, like new-baked biscuit hot from the oven.

  Often Jiri, Matesi and Kimatti clustered at the rail, pointing at the green hills and the lacy lines of surf, and talking together quietly in the language of the forests. When there was a quiet hour, Aboli would climb to the masthead and stare across at the land. When he descended his expression was sad and lonely.

  Day after day they saw no sign of other men. There were no towns or ports along the shore that they could spy out, and no sail upon the sea, not even a canoe or coasting dhow.

  It was not until they were less than a hundred leagues south of Cap St Marie, the southernmost point of the island, that they raised another sail. Hal stood the ship to quarters and had the culverin loaded with grape and the slow-match lit, for out here beyond the Line he dared take no ship on trust.

  When they were almost within hail of the other ship, it broke out its colours. Hal was delighted to see the Union flag and the croix pattée of the Order streaming from her masthead. He replied with the same show of cloth and both ships hove to within hail of each other.

  ‘What ship?’ Hal asked, and the reply came back across the blue swells, ‘The Rose of Durham. Captain Welles.’ She was an armed trader, a caravel with twelve guns a side.

  Hal lowered a longboat and had himself rowed across. He was greeted at the entryport by a spry, elfin captain of middle years. ‘In Arcadia habito.’

  ‘Flumen sacrum bene cognosco,’ Hal replied, and they clasped hands in the recognition grip of the Temple.

  Captain Welles invited Hal down to his cabin where they drank a tankard of cider together and exchanged news avidly. Welles had sailed four weeks previously from the English factory of St George near Madras on the east coast of Further India with a cargo of trade cloth. He intended to exchange this for slaves on the Gambian coast of West Africa, and then sail on across the Atlantic to the Caribbean where he would barter his slaves for sugar, and so back home to England.

  Hal questioned him on the availability of seamen from the English factories on the Carnatic, that stretch of the shore of Further India from East Ghats down to the Coromandel coast, but Welles shook his head. ‘You’ll be wanting to give the whole of that coast a wide berth. When I left the cholera was raging in every village and factory. Any man you take aboard might bring death with him as a companion.’

  Hal chilled at the thought of the havoc that this plague would wreak among his already depleted crew, should it take hold on the Golden Bough. He dared not risk a visit to those fever ports.

  Over a second mug of cider, Welles gave Hal his first reliable account of the conflict raging in the Great Horn of Africa. ‘The younger brother of the Great Mogul, Sadiq Khan Jahan, has arrived off the coast of the Horn with a great fleet. He has joined forces with Ahmed El Grang, who they call the Left-handed, the king of the Omani Arabs who holds sway over the lands bordering the Prester’s empire. These two have declared jihad, holy war, and together they have swept down like a raging gale upon the Christians. They have taken by storm and sacked the ports and towns of the coast, burning the churches and despoiling the monasteries, massacring the monks and the holy men.’

  ‘I intend sailing to offer my services to the Prester to help him resist the pagan,’ Hal told him.

  ‘It is another crusade, and yours is a noble inspiration,’ Welles applauded him. ‘Many of the most sacred relics of Christendom are held by the holy fathers in the Ethiopian city of Aksum and in the monasteries in secret places in the mountains. If they were to fall into the hands of the pagan, it would be a sad day for all Christendom.’

  ‘If you cannot yourself go upon this sacred venture, will you not spare me a dozen of your men, for I am sore pressed for the lack of good sailors?’ Hal asked.

  Welles looked away. ‘I have a long voyage ahead of me, and there are bound to be heavy losses among my crew when we visit the fever coast of the Gambia and make the middle passage of the Atlantic,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Think on your vows,’ Hal urged him.

  Welles hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I will muster my crew, and you may appeal to them and call for volunteers to join your venture.’

  Hal thanked him, knowing that Welles was on a certain wager. Few seamen at the end of a two-year voyage would forgo their share of profits and the prospect of a swift return home, in favour of a call to arms to aid a foreign potentate, even if he were a Christian. Only two men responded to Hal’s appeal, and Welles looked relieved to be shot of them. Hal guessed that they were trouble-makers and malcontents, but he could not afford to be finicky.

  Before they parted, Hal handed over to Welles two packets of letters, stitched in canvas covers with the address boldly written on each. One was addressed to Viscount Winterton, and in the long letter Hal had penned to him he set out the circumstances of Captain Llewellyn’s murder, and his own acquisition of the Golden Bough. He gave an undertaking to sail the ship in accordance with the original charter.

  The second letter was addressed to his uncle, Thomas Courtney, at High Weald, to inform him of the death of his father and his own inheritance of the title. He asked his uncle to continue to run the estate on his
behalf.

  When at last he took leave of Welles, the two seamen he had acquired went with him back to the Golden Bough. From his quarterdeck Hal watched the top sails of the Rose of Durham drop below the southern horizon, and days afterwards the hills of Madagascar rise before him out of the north.

  That night Hal, as had become his wont, came up on deck at the end of the second dog watch to read the traverse board and speak to the helmsman. Three dark shadows waited for him at the foot of the mainmast.

  ‘Jiri and the others wish to speak to you, Gundwane,’ Aboli told him.

  They clustered about him as he stood by the windward rail. Jiri spoke first in the language of the forests. ‘I was a man when the slavers took me from my home,’ he told Hal quietly. ‘I was old enough to remember much more of the land of my birth than these others.’ He indicated Aboli, Kimatti and Matesi, and all three nodded agreement.

  ‘We were children,’ said Aboli.

  ‘In these last days,’ Jiri went on, ‘when I smelled the land and saw again the green hills, old memories long forgotten came back to me. I am sure now, in my deepest heart, that I can find my way back to the great river along the banks of which my tribe lived when I was a child.’

  Hal was silent for a while, and then he asked, ‘Why do you tell me these things, Jiri? Do you wish to return to your own people?’

  Jiri hesitated. ‘It was so long ago. My father and my mother are dead, killed by the slavers. My brothers and the friends of my childhood are gone also, taken away in the chains of the slavers.’ He was silent awhile, but then he went on, ‘No, Captain, I cannot return, for you are now my chief as your father was before you, and these are my brothers.’ He indicated Aboli and the others who stood around him.

  Aboli took up the tale. ‘If Jiri can lead us back to the great river, if we can find our lost tribe, it may well be that we can find also a hundred warriors among them to fill the watch-bill of this ship.’

  Hal stared at him in astonishment. ‘A hundred men? Men who can fight like you four rascals? Then, indeed, the stars are smiling upon me again.’