Birds of Prey c-1

by Wilbur Smith

  Schreuder stared back at the land and made out the roof of the Governor's mansion among the trees at the base of the great mountain. He wondered if they had yet discovered Katinka's body, or whether she still lay joined in death to her base lover. He stood there at the stern rail until the great massif of Table Mountain was only a distant blue silhouette against the evening sky.

  "Farewell, my darling," he whispered.

  It was only when he lay sleepless in his hard bunk at midnight that the enormity of his situation began to dawn upon him. His guilt was manifest. Every ship that left Table Bay would carry the tidings across the oceans and to every port in the civilized world. From this day forward he was a fugitive and an outlaw.

  Hal woke to a sense of peace such as he had seldom known before. He lay with his eyes AH shut too lazy and weak to open them. He realized that he was warm and dry and lying on a comfortable mattress. He expected the dungeon stench to assail him, the mouldy odour of damp, rotting straw, the latrine bucket and the smell of men who had not bathed for a twelve-month -crowded together in a fetid hole in the earth. Instead he smelled fresh woodsmoke, perfumed and sweet, the scent of burning cedar faggots.

  Suddenly the memories came flooding back, and, with a great lift of the spirits, he remembered their escape, that he was no longer a prisoner. He lay and savoured that knowledge. There were other smells and sounds. It amused him to try to recognize them without opening his eyes. There was the smell of the newly cut grass mattress on which he lay and the fur blanket that covered him, the aroma of meat grilling on the coals and another tantalizing fragrance that he could not place. It was a mingling of wild flowers and a warm kittenish musk that roused him strangely and added to his sense of well-being.

  He opened his eyes slowly and cautiously, and was dazzled by the strong mountain light through the opening of the shelter in which he lay. He looked around and saw that it must have been built into the side of the mountain, for half the walls were of smooth rock and the sides nearest the opening were built of interwoven saplings daubed with red clay. The roof was thatch. Clay pots and crudely fashioned tools and implements were stacked against the inner wall. A bow and quiver hung from a peg near the door. Beside them hung his sword and pistols.

  He lay and listened to the burble of a mountain stream, and then he heard a woman's laughter, merrier and more lovely than the tinkle of water. He raised himself slowly on one elbow, shocked by the effort it required, and tried to look through the doorway. The sound of an infant's laughter mingled with that of the woman. Through all his long captivity he had heard nothing to equal it, and he could not help but chuckle with delight.

  The sound of feminine laughter ceased and there was a quick movement outside the hut. A lissom ga mine figure appeared in the opening, backlit by the sunshine so that she was only a lovely silhouette. Though he could not see her face, he knew straight away who it was.

  "Good morrow, Gundwane, you have slept long, but did you sleep well?" Sukeena asked shyly. She had the infant on her hip and her hair was loose, hanging in a dark veil to her waist. "This is my nephew, Bobby." She joggled the baby on her hip and he gurgled with delight.

  "How long did I sleep?" Hal asked, beginning to rise, but she passed the baby to someone outside, and came quickly to kneel beside the mattress. She restrained him with a small warm hand on his naked chest.

  "Gently, Gundwane. You have been in fever sleep for many days." " I'm well again now," he said, and then recognized the mysterious perfume he had noticed earlier. It was her woman smell, the flowers in her hair and the soft warmth of her skin.

  "Not yet," she contradicted him, and he let her ease his head back onto the mattress. He was staring at her and she smiled without embarrassment.

  "I have never seen anything so beautiful as you, he said, then reached up and touched his own cheek. "My beard?"

  "It is gone." She laughed, sitting back with her legs curled under her. "I stole a razor from the fat Governor especially for the task." She cocked her head on one side and studied him. "With the beard gone, you also are beautiful, Gundwane."

  She blushed slightly as she realized the import of her words, and Hal watched in delight as the red-gold suffused her cheeks. She turned her full attention to his injured leg, drew back the fur blanket to expose it and unwound the bandage.

  "Ah!" she murmured, as she touched it lightly. "It heals marvellously well with a little help from my medicines. You have been fortunate. The bite from the fangs of a hound is always poisonous, and then the abuse to which you put the limb during our flight might have killed you or crippled you for the rest of your life."

  Hal smiled at her strictures as he lay back comfortably and surrendered himself to her hands.

  "Are you hungry?" she asked, as she retied the dressing over his wound. At that question Hal realized that he was ravenous. She brought him the carcass of a wild partridge, grilled on the coals, and sat opposite him, watching with a proprietary air as he ate and then sucked the bones clean.

  "You will soon be strong again." She smiled. "You eat like a lion." She gathered up the scraps of his meal, then stood up. "Aboli and your other seamen have been pleading with me for a chance to come to you. I will call them now."

  "Wait!" He stopped her. He wished that this intimate time alone with her would not end so soon. She sank down beside him once more and watched his face expectantly.

  "I have not thanked you," he said lamely. "Without your care, I would probably have died of the fever."

  She smiled softly and said, "I have not thanked you either. Without you, I would still be a slave." For a time they looked at each other without speaking, openly examining each other's face in detail.

  Then Hal asked, "Where are we, Sukeena?" He made a gesture that took in their surroundings. "This hut?"

  "It is Sabah's. He has lent it to us. To you and me, and he has gone to live with the others of his band."

  "So we are in the mountains at last?"

  "Deep in the mountains." She nodded. "At a place that has no name. In a place where the Dutch can never find US."

  "I want to see," he said. For a moment she looked dubious, then nodded. She helped him to stand and offered her shoulder to support him as he hopped to the opening in the thatched shelter.

  He sank down and leaned against the doorpost of rough cedar wood. Sukeena sat close beside him as he gazed about. For a long time neither spoke. Hal breathed deeply of the crisp, high air that smelled and tasted of the wild flowers that grew in such profusion about them.

  "Tis a vision of paradise, he said at last. The peaks that surrounded them were wild and splendid. The cliffs and gorges were painted with lichens that were all the colours of the artist's palette.

  The late sunlight fell full upon the mountain tops across the deep valley and crowned them with a golden radiance. The long shadow thrown by the peak behind them was royal purple. The water of the stream below was clear as the air they breathed, and Hal could see the fish lying like long shadows on the yellow sandbanks, fanning their dark tails to keep their heads into the current.

  "It is strange, I have never seen this place nor any like it, and yet I feel as though I know it well. I feel a sense of homecoming, as though I was waiting to return here."

  "Tis not strange, Henry Courtney. I also was waiting." She turned her head and looked deep into his eyes. "I was waiting for you.

  I knew you would come. The stars told me. That day I first saw you on the Parade outside the castle, I recognized you as the one."

  There was so much to ponder in that simple declaration that he was silent again for a long while, watching her face. "My father was also an adept. He was able to read the stars, he said.

  "Aboli told me."

  "So you, too, can divine the future from the stars, Sukeena."

  She did not deny it. "My mother taught me many skills. I was able to see you from afar."

  He accepted her statement without question. "So you must know what is to become of us, you and me?"


  She smiled, and there was a mischievous gleam in her eye. She slipped a slim arm through his. "I would not have to be a great sage to know that, Gundwane. But there is much else that I am able to tell of what lies ahead."

  "Tell me, then," he ordered, but she smiled again and shook her head. "There will be time later. We will have much time to talk while your leg heals and you grow strong again." She stood up. "But now I will fetch the others, I cannot deny them any longer."

  They came immediately, but Aboli was the first to arrive. He greeted Hal in the language of the forests. "I see you well, Gundwane.

  I thought you would sleep for ever."

  "Without your help, I might indeed have done so."

  Then Big Daniel and Ned and the others came to touch their foreheads and mumble their self-conscious greetings and squat in a semi-circle in front of him. They were not much given to expressing their emotions in words, but what he saw in their eyes when they looked at him warmed and fortified him.

  "This is Sabah, whom you already know." Althuda led him forward.

  "Well met, Sabah!" Hal seized his hand. "I have never been happier to see another man than I was that night in the Gorge."

  "I would have liked to come to your aid much sooner," Sabah replied in Dutch, "but we are few and the enemy were as numerous as ticks on an antelope's belly in spring." Sabah sat down in the ring of men and, with an apologetic air, began to explain. "The fates have not been kind to us here in the mountains. We did not have the services of a physician such as Sukeena We who were once nineteen are now only eight and two of those a woman and an infant. I knew we could not help you fight out in the open, for in hunting for food we have used up all our gunpowder. However, we knew Althuda would bring you up Dark Gorge.

  We built the rockfall knowing that the Dutch would follow you."

  "You did the brave and wise thing," Hal said.

  Althuda brought his woman out of the gathering darkness. She was a pretty girl, small and darker-skinned than he was, but Hal could not doubt that Althuda was the father of the boy on her hip.

  "This is Zwaantie, my wife, and this is my son, Bobby." Hal held out his hands and Zwaantie handed him the child. He held Bobby in his lap, and the little boy regarded him with huge solemn black eyes.

  "He is a likely lad, and strong, Hal said, and father and mother smiled proudly.

  Zwaantie lifted the infant and strapped him on her back. Then she and Sukeena built up the fire and began to cook the evening meal of wild game and the fruits of the mountain forests, while the men talked quietly and seriously.

  First Sabah explained their circumstances, addressing himself directly to Hal, enlarging on the brief report he had already given. Hal soon understood that, despite the beauty of their surroundings now in the summertime and the seeming abundance of the meal that the women were preparing, the mountains were not always as hospitable. During winter the snows lay thick even in the valleys and game was scarce. However, they dared not move down to lower altitudes where they would be seen by the Hottentot tribes and their whereabouts reported to the Dutch at Good Hope.

  "The winters here are fierce," Sabah summed up. "If we stay here for another, then few of us will be left alive this time next year." During their captivity Hal's seamen had garnered enough knowledge of the Dutch language to enable them to follow what Sabah had to say, and when he had finished speaking they were all silent and stared glumly into the fire, munching disconsolately on the food the women brought to them.

  Then, one at a time, their heads turned towards Hal. Big Daniel spoke for them all when he asked, "What are we going to do now, Sir Henry?"

  "Are you seamen or mountaineers?" Hal answered his question with a question, and some of the men chuckled. "We were born in Davey Jones's locker and we were all of us given salt water for blood," Ned Tyler answered.

  "Then I will have to take you down to the sea and find you a ship, won't I?"" said Hal. They looked confused but some chuckled again, though halfheartedly.

  "Master Daniel, I want a manifest of all the weapons, powder and other stores that we were able to bring with us, Hal said briskly.

  "There weren't much of anything, Captain. Once we left the horses we had just about enough strength left to get ourselves up the mountains."

  "Powder?" Hal demanded.

  "Only what we had in our flasks."

  "When you went on ahead, you had two full kegs on the horses."

  "Those kegs weighed fifty pounds apiece." Daniel looked ashamed. "Too much cargo for us to haul."

  "I have seen you carry twice that weight." Hal was angry and disappointed. Without a store of powder they were at the mercy of this wild terrain, and the beasts and tribes that infested it.

  "Daniel carried my saddle-bags up Dark Gorge." Sukeena intervened softly. "No one else could do it."

  "I'm sorry, Captain," Daniel muttered.

  But Sukeena supported him fiercely. "There is not a thing in my bags that we could do without. That includes the medicines that saved your leg and will save every one of us from the hurts and pestilences that we will meet here in the wilderness."

  "Thank you, Princess," Daniel murmured, and looked at her like an affectionate hound. If he had possessed a tail Hal knew he would have wagged it.

  Hal smiled and clapped Daniel's shoulder. "I find no fault with what you did, Big Danny. There is no man alive who could have done better."

  They all relaxed and smiled. Then Ned asked, "Were you serious when you promised us a ship, Captain?" Sukeena stood up from the fire.

  "That's enough for tonight. He must regain his strength before you plague him further. You must go now. You may come again tomorrow." One at a time they came to Hal, shook his hand and mumbled something incoherent, then wandered off through the darkness towards the other huts spread out along the valley floor. When the last had gone Sukeena threw another cedar log on the fire then came and sat close beside him.

  In a natural, possessive manner, Hal placed his arm around her shoulders. She leaned her slim body against him and fitted her head into the notch of his shoulder. She sighed, a sweet, contented sound, and neither spoke for a while.

  "I want to stay here at your side like this for ever, but the stars may not allow it," she whispered. "The season of our love may be short as a winter day."

  "Don't say that," Hal commanded. "Never say that."

  They both looked up at the stars, and here, in the high thin air, they were so brilliant that they lit the heavens with the luminescence of the mother-of pearl that lines the inside of an abalone shell taken fresh from the sea. Hal looked upon them with awe and considered what she had said. He felt a sense of hopelessness and sadness come upon him. He shivered.

  Immediately she sat up straight and said softly, "You grow cold. Come, Gundwane!"

  She helped him to his feet and led him into the hut, to the mattress against the far wall. She laid him upon it and then lit the wick of the small clay oil lamp and placed it on a shelf in the rock wall. She went to the fire and lifted off the clay pot of water that stood on the edge of the coals. She poured steaming water into an empty dish and mixed in cold water from the pot beside the door until the temperature suited her.

  Her movements were unhurried and calm. Propped on one elbow, Hal watched her. She placed the dish of warm water in the centre of the floor then poured a few drops from a glass vial into it and stirred it again with her hand. He smelt its light, subtle perfume on the waft of steam.

  She rose, went to the doorway and closed the animals king curtain over the opening, then came back and stood beside the dish of scented water. She removed the wild flowers from her hair and tossed them onto the fur blanket at Hal's feet. Without looking at him, she let down the coils of her hair and combed them out until they shimmered like a wave of obsidian. She began to sing in her own language as she combed, a lullaby or a love song, Hal could not be certain. Her voice was mellifluous, it soothed and delighted him.