Wilbur Smith - C09 Birds Of Prey

by C09 Birds Of Prey(Lit)

  "Whenever the red wine is poured, my lovely little darling is happy." Van de Velde was proud of her unusual penchant for blood sport. She never missed a tournament of ipie, and had even enjoyed the English sport of bare fisted fighting. However, wrestling was one of her favourite diversions, and she knew all the holds and throws.

  Now she was enchanted by the lad's graceful movements and impressed by his technique. She could tell that he had been well instructed, for although his opponent was heavier Hal was quicker and stronger. He used his opponent's weight against him, and the older man had to grunt and thrash around to recover himself as Hal tipped him to the edge of his balance. At his next lunge Hal offered no resistance but gave to his opponent's rush, and went over backwards, still maintaining his grip. As he struck the ground, he broke his own fall with an arch to his back, at the same time thrusting his heels into his opponent's belly to catapult him overhead. While the older man lay stunned, Hal whipped round to straddle his back and pin him face down. He grabbed the man's pigtail and forced his face into the fine white sand, until he slapped the earth with both hands to signal his surrender.

  Hal released him and sprang to his feet with the agility of a cat.

  The seaman came to his knees gasping and spitting sand. Then, unexpectedly, he launched himself at Hal just as he was beginning to turn away. From the corner of his eye Hal spotted the swing of the bunched fist coming at his head and rolled away from the blow, but not quite quickly enough. It swiped across his face, bringing a flash of blood from one nostril. He seized the man's wrist as he reached the limit of his swing, twisting his arm and then lifting his wrist up between his shoulder-blades. The seaman squealed as he was forced up on his toes.

  St. "Mary's milk, Master John, but you must like the taste of sand."

  Hal placed one bare foot on his backside and sent him sprawling head first on to the beach once more.

  "You grow too clever and cocky, Master Hal!" Big Daniel strode up to him, frowning, and his voice was gruff as he tried to hide his delight at his pupil's performance. "Next time I'll give you a harder match. And don't let the captain hear that milky blasphemy of yours or more than good clean beach sand you'll be tasting yourself."

  Still laughing, delighting in Daniel's ill-concealed approbation and in the hoots of encouragement from the other wrestlers, Hal swaggered to the lagoon's edge and scooped up a double handful of water to wash the blood from his upper lip.

  "Joseph and Mary, but he loves to win." Daniel grinned behind his back. "Try as he will, Captain Franky will not break that one down. The old dog has sired a puppy of his own blood."

  "How old do you think he is?" Katinka asked her maid, in a reflective tone.

  "I'm sure I don't know," said Zelda primly. "He's just a child."

  Katinka shook her head, smiling, remembering him standing naked in the stern of the pinnace. "Ask our blackamoor watch-dog."

  Obediently Zelda looked back at Aboli, and asked in English, "How old is the boy?"

  "Old enough for what she wants from him," Aboli grunted in his own language, a puzzled frown on his face as he pretended not to understand. These last few days, while he guarded her, he had studied this woman with sun coloured hair. He had recognized the bright, predatory glimmer in the depths of those demure violet eyes. She watched a man the way a mongoose watches a plump chicken, and she carried her head in an affectation of innocence that was belied by the wanton swing of her hips beneath the layers of bright silks and gossamer lace. "A whore is still a whore, whatever the colour of her hair and no matter if she lives in a beehive hut or a governor's palace." The deep cadence of his voice was punctuated by the staccato clicks of his tribal speech.

  Zelda turned away from him with a flounce. "Stupid animal. He understands nothing."

  Hal left the water's edge and came up into the trees. He reached up to the branch on which hung his discarded shirt. His hair was still wet and his naked chest and shoulders were blotched red with the rough contact of the wrestling. A smear of blood was still streaked across his cheek.

  His hand raised towards his shirt, he looked up. His eyes met Katinka's level violet regard. Until that moment he had been unaware of her presence. Instantly his arrogant swagger evaporated, and he stepped back as though she had slapped him unexpectedly. Now a dark blush spread over his face, obliterating the lighter blotches left by his opponent's blows.

  Coolly Katinka looked down at his bare chest. He folded his arms across it, as if ashamed.

  "You were right, Zelda," she said, with a dismissive flick of her hand. "Just a grubby child," she added in Latin, to make certain that he understood. Hal stared after her miserably as she gathered her skirts and, followed by Aboli and her maid, sailed regally down the beach to the waiting pinnace.

  That night, as he lay on the lumpy straw pallet on his narrow bunk, he heard movement, soft voices and laughter from the cabin next door. He propped himself up on one elbow. Then he recalled the insult she had thrown at him so disdainfully. "I will not think of her ever again," he promised himself, as he sank back onto the pallet and placed his hands over his ears to block out the lilting cadence of her voice. In an attempt to drive her from his mind, he repeated softly, "In Arcadia habito." But it was long before weariness allowed him at last to fall into a deep black dreamless sleep. The head of the lagoon, almost two miles from where the Resolution lay at anchor, a stream of clear sweet water tumbled down through a narrow gorge to mingle with the brackish waters below. As the two longboats moved slowly against the current into the mouth of the gorge, they startled the flocks of water birds from the shallows into the air.

  They rose in a cacophony of honks, quacks and cackles, twenty different varieties of ducks and geese unlike any they knew from the north. There were other species, too, with strangely shaped bills or disproportionately long legs trailing, and herons, curlews and egrets that were not quite the same as their English counterparts, bigger or brighter in plumage. The sky was darkened with their numbers, and the men rested for a minute upon their oars to gaze in astonishment at these multitudes.

  "It's a land of marvels, Sir Francis murmured, staring up at this wild display. "Yet we have explored only a trivial part of it. What other wonders lie beyond this threshold, deep in the hinterland, that no man has ever laid eyes upon?"

  His father's words excited Hal's imagination, and conjured up once more the images of dragons and monsters that decorated the charts he had studied.

  "Heave away!" his father ordered, and they bent to the long sweeps again. The two were alone in the leading boat. Sir Francis pulled the starboard oar with a long powerful stroke that matched Hal's tirelessly. Between them stood the empty water casks, the refilling of which was the ostensible purpose of this expedition to the head of the lagoon. The real reason, however, lay on the floorboards at Sir Francis's feet. During the night Aboli and Big Daniel had carried the canvas sacks of coin and the chests of gold ingots down from the cabin and had hidden them under the tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat. In the bows they had stacked five kegs of powder and an array of weapons, captured along with the treasure from the galleon, cutlass, pistol and musket, and leather bags of lead shot.

  Ned Tyler, Big Daniel and Aboli followed closely in the second boat, the three men in his crew whom Sir Francis trusted above all others. Their boat, too, was loaded with water casks.

  Once they were well into the mouth of the stream, Sir Francis stopped rowing and leaned over the side to scoop a mugful of water and taste it. He nodded with satisfaction.

  "Pure and sweet." He called across to Ned Tyler, "Do you begin to refill here. Hal and I will go on upstream."

  As Ned steered the boat in towards the riverbank, a wild, booming bark echoed down the gorge. They all looked up. "What are those creatures? Are they men?" demanded Ned. "Some kind of strange hairy dwarfs?" There was fear and awe in his voice, as he stared up at the ranks of human-like shapes that lined the edge of the precipice high above them.

  "Apes." Sir Fran
cis called to him as he rested on his oar. "Like those of the Barbary Coast."

  Aboli chuckled, then threw back his head and faithfully mimicked the challenge of the bull baboon that led the pack. Most of the younger animals leaped up and nervously skittered along the cliff at the sound.

  The huge bull ape accepted the challenge. He stood on all fours at the edge of the precipice, and opened his mouth wide to display a set of terrible white fangs. Emboldened by this show, some of the younger animals returned and began to hurl small stones and debris down upon them. The men were forced to duck and dodge the missiles.

  "Give them a shot to see them off," Sir Francis ordered. "It's a long one." Daniel unslung his musket and blew on the burning tip of the slow-match as he raised the butt to his shoulder. The gorge echoed to the thunderous blast, and they all burst out laughing at the antics of the baboon pack, as it panicked at the shot. The ball knocked a chip off the lip of the ledge, and the youngsters of the troop somersaulted backwards with shock. The mothers seized their offspring, slung them under their bellies and scrambled up the sheer face, and even the brave bull abandoned his dignity and joined the rush for safety. Within seconds, the cliff was deserted and the sounds of the terror-stricken retreat dwindled.

  Aboli jumped over the side, waist deep into the river, and dragged the boat onto the bank while Daniel and Ned un stoppered the water casks to refill them. In the other boat Sir Francis and Hal bent to the oars and rowed on upstream. After half a mile the river narrowed sharply, and the cliffs on both sides became steeper. Sir Francis paused to get his bearings and then turned the longboat in under the cliff and moored the bows to the stump of a dead tree that sprang from a crack in the rock. Leaving Hal in the boat he jumped out onto the narrow ledge below the cliff and began to climb upwards. There was no obvious path to follow but Sir Francis moved confidently from one handhold to another. Hal watched him with pride. in his eyes, his father was an old man he must have long passed the venerable age of forty years yet he climbed with strength and agility. Suddenly, fifty feet above the river, he reached a ledge invisible from below and shuffled a few paces along it. Then he knelt to examine the narrow cleft in the cliff face, the opening was blocked with neatly packed rocks. He smiled with relief when he saw that they were exactly as he had left them many months previously. Carefully he pulled them out of the cleft and laid them aside, until the opening was wide enough for him to crawl through.

  The cave beyond was in darkness but Sir Francis stood up and reached to a stone shelf above his head where he groped for the flint and steel he had left there. He lit the candle he had brought with him, and then looked around the cave.

  Nothing had been touched since his last visit. Five chests stood against the back wall. That was the booty from the Heerlycke Nacht, mostly silver plate and a hundred thousand guilders in coin that had been intended for payment of the Dutch garrison in Batavia. A pile of gear was stacked beside the entrance, and Sir Francis began work on this immediately. It took him almost half an hour to rig the heavy wooden beam as a gantry from the ledge outside the cave entrance, and then to lower the tackle to the boat moored below.

  "Make the first chest fast!" he called down to Hal.

  Hal tied it on and his father hauled it upwards, the sheave squeaking at each heave. The chest disappeared and a few minutes later the rope end dropped back and dangled where Hal could reach it. He tied on the next chest.

  It took them well over an hour to hoist all the ingots and the sacks of coin and stack them in the back of the cave. Then they started work on the powder kegs and the bundles of weapons. The last item to go up was the smallest. a box into which Sir Francis had packed a compass and backstaff, a roll of charts taken from the Standvasdgheid, flint and steel, a set of surgeon's instruments in a canvas roll, and a selection of other equipment that could make the difference between survival and a lingering death to a party stranded on this savage, unexplored coast.

  "Come up, Hal," Sir Francis called down at last, and Hal went up the cliff with the speed and ease of one of the young baboons.

  When Hal reached him, his father was sitting comfortably on the narrow-ledge, his legs dangling and his clay stemmed pipe and tobacco pouch in his hands.

  "Give me a hand here, lad." He pointed with his empty pipe at the vertical crack in the face of the cliff. "Close that up again."

  Hal spent another half-hour packing the loose rock back into the entrance, to conceal it and to discourage intruders. There was little chance of men finding the cache in this deserted gorge, but he and his father knew that the baboons would return. They were as curious and mischievous as any human.

  When Hal would have started back down the cliff, Sir Francis stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. "There is no hurry. The others will not have finished refilling the water casks."

  They sat in silence on the ledge while Sir Francis got his long-stemmed pipe to draw sweetly. Then he asked, through a cloud of blue smoke, "What have I done here?"

  "Cached our share of the treasure."

  "Not only our share alone, but that of the Crown and of every man aboard, sir Francis corrected him. "But why have I done that?"

  "Gold and silver is temptation even to an honest man." Hal repeated the lore his father had drummed into his head so many times before.

  "Should I not trust my own crew?" Sir Francis asked.

  "If you trust no man, then no man will ever disappoint you. "Hal repeated the lesson.

  "Do you believe that?" Sir Francis turned to watch his face as he replied, and Hal hesitated. "Do you trust Aboli?" "Yes, I trust him," Hal admitted, reluctantly, as though it were a sin.

  "Aboli is a good man, none better. But you see that I do not bring even him to this place." He paused, then asked, "Do you trust me, lad?"

  "Of course."

  "Why? Surely I am but a man and I have told you to trust no man?"

  "Because you are my father and I love you."

  Sir Francis's eyes clouded and he made as if to caress Hal's cheek. Then he sighed, dropped his hand and looked down at the river below. Hal expected his father to censure his reply, but he did not. After a while Sir Francis asked another question. "What of the other goods I have cached here? The powder and weapons and charts and the like. Why have I placed those here?"

  "Against an uncertain future, Hal replied confidently he had heard the answer often enough before. "A wise fox has many exits to his earth."

  Sir Francis nodded. "All of us who sail in the guerre de course are always at risk. One day, those few chests may be worth our very lives."

  His father was silent again as he smoked the last few shreds of tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. Then he said softly, "If God is merciful, the time will come, perhaps not too far in the future, when this war with the Dutch will end. Then we will return here and gather up our prize and sail home to Plymouth. It has long been my dream to own the manor of Gainesbury that runs alongside High Weald-" He broke off, as if not daring to tempt fate with such imagining. "If harm should befall me, it is necessary that you should know and remember where I have stored our winnings. It will be my legacy to you."

  "No harm can ever come your way!" Hal exclaimed in agitation. It was more a plea than a statement of conviction. He could not imagine an existence without this towering presence at the centre of it.

  "No man is immortal," said Sir Francis softly. "We all owe God a death." This time he allowed his right hand to settle briefly on Hal's shoulder. "Come, lad. We must still fill the water casks in our own boat before dark." the longboats crept back down the edge of the darkening lagoon, Aboli had taken Sir *-AFrancis's place on the rowing thwart, and now Hal's father sat in the stern, wrapped in a dark woollen cloak against the evening chill. His expression was. remote and sombre. Facing aft as he worked one of the long oars, Hal could study him surreptitiously.

  Their conversation at the mouth of the cave had left him troubled with a presentiment of ill-fortune ahead.

  He guessed that since they had a
nchored in the lagoon his father had cast his own horoscope. He had seen the zodiacal chart covered with arcane notations lying open on his desk in his cabin. That would account for his withdrawn and introspective mood. As Aboli had said, the stars were his children and he knew their secrets.

  Suddenly his father lifted his head and sniffed the cool evening air. Then his face changed as he studied the forest edge. No dark thoughts could absorb him to the point where he was unaware of his surroundings.

  "Aboli, take us in to the bank, if you please."

  They turned the boat towards the narrow beach, and the second followed. After they had all jumped out onto the beach and moored both boats, Sir Francis gave a quiet order. "Bring your arms. Follow me, but quietly."

  He led them into the forest, pushing stealthily through the undergrowth, until he stepped out suddenly onto a well-used path. He glanced back to make certain they were following him, then hurried along.

  Hal was mystified by his father's actions until he smelt a trace of woodsmoke on the air and noticed for the first time the bluish haze along the tops of the dense forest trees. This must have been what had alerted his father.