by Wilbur Smith
‘Gently,’ she whispered. Straddling him, she untied his waist cloth and parted the folds. Her long hair brushed his chest; her lips covered his face with kisses. She rubbed herself against him.
Ruth, a small corner of his mind pleaded, but he ignored it. His desire was compelling, a raging fire that would burn through his skin rather than be held in check.
With a soft cry of longing, he rolled over on top of her. She lay back and opened her thighs, then she clamped them around him. She crossed her ankles over his buttocks, and hunted for his manhood with her lower body. She found it standing out hard and hot to meet her. She gasped as she engulfed it with the lubricious lips of her vagina, and he met her thrust for thrust. It seemed to last for an instant and forever, and then she felt his body convulse above her and his penis throbbing as it pumped his generative essence into her womb. She drove her heels into his buttocks, forcing him deeper still into herself, determined to suck in every drop he had to offer her.
Christopher woke late. In the kalari, he always rose before dawn, performing his chores before the day’s training began. He could not remember the last time he had slept past sunrise.
He savoured the luxury. Memories of the night raced back, so vividly he felt himself beginning to stiffen again. Had it really happened, or was it a dream? No. He could smell her scent on his skin, the smells of coconut and musk and sweat.
A smile spread across his face. His body glowed from the night before, and the sun was warm on his skin. He put out an arm, but Tamaana was no longer with him. Maybe she didn’t want Jayanthan to find them together. With a pang of residual lust, he sat up and looked around.
Her blanket was there, spread over the crushed grass. Her donkey still stood tethered to the same tree, munching on weeds. But she was gone.
A crow flew across the courtyard and glided into the pagoda. He wondered why Jayanthan had not come to wake him. Normally, he never missed a chance to point out Christopher’s failings.
Reluctantly, he went to find Jayanthan. Climbing the steps to the pagoda, he saw the crow just inside the door, pecking at something on the ground, but from where he stood he couldn’t make out what it was. A cloud of flies buzzed around the crow. Rats scuttled into the gloom as he stepped into the building, and he remembered the warning he’d given Jayanthan. These buildings are nests of vermin.
After the bright sun outside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then another moment to understand what he was looking at.
Jayanthan lay on his back, but he wasn’t asleep. His throat had been cut in a long vertical slit from the point of his chin to his sternum. The gash was opened so wide that Christopher could see the vertebrae poking through. The bag with the rubies was gone. A puddle of drying blood surrounded him, crawling with flies. At its edge, a small bare footprint lay stamped in blood on the stone floor. The same size as the feet that had been clenched against his buttocks the night before.
With a snarl of fury, Christopher ran outside. He strapped on his sword, grabbed the urumi and ran out to the road.
Morning mist had damped down the dust, and there was no one else abroad that early. He could read Tamaana’s naked footprints plainly. He followed them towards the mountain, every step fired by his hatred. The urumi hissed at his side, and he imagined the things he would do to her when he caught her.
Not far up the road, her footprints veered off towards a goat track that led out along a spur of the mountain. Christopher paused. The path was stony, too hard for Tamaana’s light feet to have made any impression. Had she gone this way? Or was it merely a feint to throw him off her scent?
She had tricked him all along. The mango farm, the poor old father who couldn’t afford her dowry: all lies. The rape had been staged. Jayanthan had been right about that, though Christopher was too angry to feel guilt. The rapist must have been Tamaana’s accomplice. No doubt he was meant to escape as soon as Christopher appeared, perhaps return to Tamaana in the night. At least that part of the plan had failed.
He wondered why she hadn’t killed him when she had the chance. Sentiment? He remembered the feel of her body around him, the touch of her skin, and clenched his fists in rage at her betrayal. He would make her suffer when he caught up with her.
He checked further up the road, but there were no more footprints. She must have taken the goat track. He followed it, winding across the steep face of the mountain. He was not an expert tracker, but in a small depression where the earth was still damp he saw a bare footmark, freshly printed. He hurried on, flexing the urumi.
The path rounded a bulge in the mountain, and came out suddenly in a small ravine. And there she was. Alone, standing on a boulder unarmed. She must have heard him coming, but she had made no attempt to escape from him. She had lost her sari, wearing only her bodice and a pair of short deerskin trousers he had not seen before.
‘You followed me,’ she said. She sounded amused.
In his fury, he almost rushed her at once. But something in her pose stopped him. There was a power within her – a sense of self satisfaction with what she had achieved – that penetrated his anger and made him wary.
‘Where are the rubies?’ he demanded.
‘In a safe place. Your friend Jayanthan was a loyal servant. When he saw me coming, he tried to swallow his master’s gems to keep them from me. I had to cut them out of his gullet to retrieve them.’
‘I will make you pay for that.’
‘You would have done the same thing. I saw the way you looked at him yesterday. I know what was in your heart.’
Christopher didn’t deny it. ‘But now I have you trapped.’
‘Do you?’ She clicked her tongue. Five men rose from behind the rocks that had hidden them: rough, unshaven men in ragged clothes. All of them carried sharp blades.
‘I think I have you trapped.’
‘You will need more men than that,’ said Christopher. As he spoke, he scanned the faces of the men around her, judging who would be the fastest, the first to move, the hardest to kill. He saw nothing that gave him pause.
‘The first man who comes near will lose his head,’ Christopher warned. Tamaana was about ten paces away, just out of range of the urumi. He edged forward. Almost close enough. He readied his muscles to strike.
Tamaana reached behind her and pulled a long, brass-muzzled pistol from the waist of her trousers. In a single gesture, she levelled it at Christopher and pulled the hammer back to full cock.
He stopped dead. She saw the impotence in his face and laughed. ‘Even the greatest kalari warrior cannot fight a bullet.’
‘Then why did you bring me here? Why not just murder me in my sleep the way you did Jayanthan?’
‘Because I do not want to kill you.’ Christopher edged a fraction closer. ‘But I will if you come any closer.’
‘Why?’
‘Is it really your ambition to be an errand boy for the rest of your life? To serve fat men you could kill with a single blow, letting them lord themselves over you merely because they have money? I saw how you wielded that urumi. A fighter like you could be the most feared man on the Malabar coast.’
‘And become what? A brigand?’
‘Become free.’
Tamaana stared down the barrel of the gun. Her arm was slender, but the pistol never wavered.
‘What do you wish to choose?’
Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?’ Tom wondered aloud.
He and Dorian sat in the stern of the pinnace, Tom resting one arm on the tiller to steer through the fleet of merchantmen anchored in Table Bay. Sarah, Yasmini and Ana sat facing them on the thwart, while behind them Alf Wilson had the crew pulling on their oars in perfect unison. Alf’s father had been a Bristolian, but his dark complexion came from his mother, a high born Mughal woman. Tom could guess how excited Alf was to be returning to the country of his birth.
‘If we were ever truly certain of what we were doing, then it would certainly be the wrong thing,’ laughed Doria
n. ‘It is doubt that gives the adventure substance.’
Sarah cocked an eyebrow at Tom. ‘It is unlike you to have doubts, husband dear.’
‘I was merely thinking aloud.’ In truth, he had had no time for doubts since that extraordinary night when Francis had appeared unbidden and unknown at their boarding house intent on killing him, and Ana had proposed their joint venture. Since then, life had been ceaseless activity: acquiring a ship and outfitting her, filling her hold with a cargo that would turn a handsome profit in India, and taking on a crew to man her. Tom had overseen almost every aspect of it, rising before dawn and staying late at the harbour, trudging up the hill in the dark to pore over his accounts by lantern light.
‘Some women are widowed when their husbands go to sea,’ Sarah had said. ‘I must look forward to him sailing so I can get him back.’
Tom had taken her in his arms. ‘When we are at sea, I will have eyes only for you.’
‘You will have eyes for the horizon, and the weather, and the set of the sails and the well-being of your crew,’ she retorted. ‘But at least you will not be able to wander too far from me.’
‘There will be many hours to while away before we reach India,’ he promised with a gleam in his eye.
Now, he nudged the tiller to guide the boat past a deeply laden Indiaman. Her golden gun ports gleamed in the midday sun, reminding him of the Seraph, the ship that had first brought him to Africa when he sailed with his father Hal, hunting the pirate Jangiri. He wondered how much all the Indiaman’s gilding had cost the East India Company, and what infinitesimal fraction of their profits it represented.
‘It is a lot of money,’ said Yasmini.
He knew she wasn’t talking about the Indiaman. She was talking about what they’d spent these last few weeks. The ship had cost them dear: there were few to be had in Cape Town, and her owner had pushed Tom so hard he had nearly given up. They had emptied their account in the bank on the Heerengracht, and found they still needed more. The War of Spanish Succession, which had dragged on in Europe for nearly ten years, had inflated the prices of cordage, powder, shot and a hundred other sundries.
‘But look what we have got for the money.’ He straightened course. The longboat came out from under the Indiaman’s stern, and there she was dead ahead: a three-masted ship in the Dutch style which they called schoeners, meaning ‘beautiful’. In English, the word had become ‘schooners’. It was an apt name. Longer and leaner than the great Indiamen, she was graced with elegant lines, from her raked bowsprit to the fine carvings around her stern cabin. From the moment she had arrived in Cape Town, Tom knew he had to have her. He had named her the Kestrel, after the birds he had hunted with in his youth in Devon. Like her namesake, she would fly in the slightest of breezes.
She lay at anchor beyond the rest of the fleet, with only the Courtneys’ faithful sloop Centaurus for company. She was out of range of the fort’s battery: a wise precaution that Tom had learned from his father.
He brought the pinnace alongside the Kestrel and they climbed the ladder. Aboli was already aboard, supervising the last preparations. Francis was beside him, listening carefully and writing everything down in the ledger.
He ran to the side as he saw Tom’s head appear through the sally port.
‘Welcome aboard, Uncle. All is ready and the wind is fair. Aboli says we only await your order to weigh anchor.’
Tom smiled at the boy’s eagerness. He had sent him to live aboard the Kestrel as soon as the ink was dry on the purchase, lest anyone ask questions about Jacob de Vries and the other men who had gone missing the day Francis arrived. From Aboli, he had heard nothing but good reports: the boy was an eager student, a quick learner and an able pupil. Though he had never set foot on a ship before the voyage to Africa, Tom could see he had the makings of a formidable mariner.
‘He has Black Billy’s mind for business,’ Aboli told Tom one night. ‘But his heart comes entirely from his mother.’
Tom realized that Francis was no longer looking at him. He was staring over his shoulder, the ship and her cargo forgotten. His face lit up with undisguised joy. Ana had come aboard.
I must watch those two, he thought. Aboli’s report on Francis had touched on more than the boy’s nautical learning. ‘He has fallen in love, Klebe. Every time Ana comes aboard, he forgets everything but her.’
‘But he is only a boy,’ Tom had exclaimed. ‘Ana is a grown woman.’ Though in truth, as he thought about it, he realized there were only a few years between the two. ‘Does Ana reciprocate his feelings?’
‘She does not yet see him as he sees her,’ Aboli had said. ‘But it will be a long voyage. Perhaps he has reasons to hope.’
Tom sighed. Neither Francis nor Ana were in his charge: both were of age, and free to marry whom they chose. But he felt a responsibility for Francis, not far off what he would have felt for any son of his own. And he knew from experience that love affairs in the claustrophobic confines of a ship could have unwelcome consequences.
Sarah had arrived at his side. ‘Francis,’ she said sweetly, ‘could you carry Miss Duarte’s baggage to her berth?’
‘You should not put him in the way of temptation,’ Tom grumbled when they had gone below.
‘Whether I do or not makes no odds,’ she replied. ‘What will happen will happen. You, of all people, should know that.’
Dorian strode up to them. ‘She is a fine ship,’ he applauded. ‘God speed, brother, until we meet again.’
‘Until then.’
Their plan, deliberated over many weeks, was that Tom and Sarah, with Francis and Ana, would sail the Kestrel to Madras. Dorian and Yasmini, with Aboli, would take the Centaurus up the coast of Africa to the Arab ports at Gombroon and Mocha. They would rendezvous at the Laquedivas islands, a small archipelago a hundred miles off the southern coast of India, and sail home in company together.
Tom embraced his brother. ‘Farewell.’
‘Come back safely.’
‘I have to,’ said Tom. ‘It has cost us too much to do otherwise.’
He felt a pang as he watched his younger brother go. For almost ten years, he had believed him dead. To be parted again, even briefly, sent a tremor through his heart. What if this is the last time I see him?
‘Has Uncle Dorian gone?’
Francis had appeared through the companionway. Tom wondered how long he and Ana had been below.
‘You are just in time to say goodbye.’
The boat cast off, with Dorian, Aboli and Yasmini waving from her stern. Tom gave the order to weigh anchor, and the crew leaped to the capstan. He felt the familiar thrum of the deck beneath his feet as the anchor came free and the ship got under way.
He loved the freedom of the sea. Even so, the knowledge of his debts weighed on him. He had never in his life been in debt to any man, and it sat uncomfortably with him. He longed to finish the voyage, take his profit and pay back what he had borrowed. Then he could breathe easily once again.
The ocean smiled on them. Though it was late in the season, Tom could not remember an easier voyage. The rough seas that had given the Cape of Good Hope her other name, the Cape of Storms, were nowhere in evidence. The Kestrel lived up to her name, flying before the wind as if the sea beneath her keel were thin as air. Every day, Tom discovered something new to delight him about his ship.
He spent much time with Francis, teaching the boy everything he could, just as his father had taught him on their first voyage. He schooled him in navigation: how to shoot the sun and plot their latitude; how to use the log line to measure speed and the compass to measure heading, and how to peg out their progress on the traverse board by the helm.
‘For no man has yet devised a way to measure longitude, though many of the finest minds have tried,’ he explained to Francis. ‘The sun can tell us how far east or west we have gone, but not how much north or south. For that, we can only estimate that by our speed and our heading.’
In the afternoons, during the dog watch,
they sparred with swords. Francis had been well taught by his stepfather, and he had his father’s natural agility. Under Tom’s tutelage, he blossomed into a truly fearsome fighter.
They also exercised with heavier weapons. The Kestrel carried ten nine-pounder cannons, and every day Tom trained his men to use them. He hardly dared hope that they would reach India without incident, and he was determined to take no risks. He worked the crews until they could fire as quick as an English man-of-war, a broadside every two minutes. Francis laboured with the crew, until he could sponge out, load, aim and fire a cannon as well as any man aboard.
‘For if it comes to it, we shall need every pair of hands to work the guns,’ Tom said one evening. ‘I have wagered my fortune on this voyage. I will not have some pirate snatch it from me.’
‘You think we will meet with pirates?’ Tom saw the look on Francis’ face and had to hide a smile. The boy could not hide his eagerness, to test himself in battle.
It’s good, Tom told himself. You were like that, at his age. He remembered begging Big Daniel Fisher, his father’s chief warrant officer, to be allowed to sign on – and his joy when his father finally allowed it.
‘It is not only the pirates,’ he cautioned. ‘If Guy hears of our little interloping expedition, he will call the East India Company’s entire fleet down on us.’
Francis squinted into the glare of the sun. ‘Why does Uncle Guy hate you so much? You never told me in Cape Town.’
‘It is a long story.’ Tom hesitated, wondering what he should say. There were few things in life he shied away from, but talking about his brother was one. ‘When we were your age …’
A sail billowed. One of the clew lines had come loose, the rope end darting around the deck. Instantly, Tom felt the change in momentum ring through the hull.
‘I must attend to that.’ He clapped Francis on the shoulder. ‘Some other day, I promise I will tell you.’
Francis didn’t ask again. Partly, that was because he sensed Tom’s reluctance to touch on the subject. Mostly, though, his head was full of thoughts of Ana. He had long since learned to be suspicious of the fair sex. By the time he reached an age where he might be considered eligible, his poverty had become too obvious. A few girls had shown an interest in him, impressed by the grandeur of High Weald, but that rarely endured beyond their first visit, when they saw the bare walls and empty rooms inside.
