Wilbur Smith - C09 Birds Of Prey

by C09 Birds Of Prey(Lit)

  "Gundwane!" He heard a well-beloved voice call to him, but he knew it was delirium and he laughed aloud. "Don't play tricks on me now," he said, "I do not have the stomach for it. Let me be in peace."

  Then, out of the darkness, he saw a shape emerge, heard the splash of oars pulling hard towards him, and the voice called again, "Gundwane!"

  "Aboli! his voice cracked. "I am here!" Those great black hands reached down and seized him, lifted him and the child over the side of the longboat. As soon as he was aboard Hal looked about him. With all her lanterns lit, the Golden Bough lay hove to half a league across the water but Judith Nazet sat before him in the stern sheets and she took the child from Hal and wrapped him in her cloak. She crooned to Iyasu and spoke soothingly to him in Geez, while the crew pulled back towards the ship. Before they reached the GoLden Bough Iyasu was asleep in her arms.

  "The Tabernacle?" Hal asked Aboli hoarsely. "Is it safe?" "It is in your cabin,"Aboli assured him, and then dropped his voice. "All of this is as your father foretold. At last the stars must set you free, for you have fulfilled the prophecy."

  Hal felt a deep sense of Mfilment come over him, and the desperate weariness slid from his shoulders like a discarded mantle, He felt light and free as though released from some long, onerous penance. He looked across at Judith, who had been watching him. There was something in her dark gaze that he could not fathom, but she dropped her eyes before he could read it clearly. Hal wanted to move closer to her, to touch her, speak to her and tell her about these strange, powerful feelings that possessed him, but four ranks of rowers separated them in the small, crowded boat.

  As they approached the Golden Bough her crew were in the rigging and they cheered him as the longboat latched onto her chains. Aboli offered Hal a hand to help him climb the ladder to the deck but Hal ignored it and went up alone. He paused as he saw the long line of canvas shrouded corpses laid out in the waist, and the terrible damage that the Gull's gunfire had wrought to his ship. But this was not the time to brood on that, he thought. They would send the dead men over side and mourn them later, but now was the hour of victory. Instead he looked around the grinning faces of his crew. "Well, you ruffians paid out the Buzzard and his cutthroats in a heavier coin than they bargained for. Mister Tyler, break out the rum barrel and give a double ration to every hand aboard to toast the Buzzard on his way to hell. Then set a course back to Mitsiwa roads."

  He took the child from Judith Nazet's arms and carried him down to the stern cabin. He laid him on the bunk, and turned to Judith who stood close beside him. "He is a sturdy lad, and has come to little harm. We should let him sleep."

  "Yes" she said quietly, looking up at him with that same inscrutably dark gaze. Then she took his hand and led him to the curtained alcove where the Tabernacle of Mary stood.

  "Will you pray with me, El Tazar?" she asked, and they knelt together.

  "We thank you, Lord, for sparing the life of our Emperor, your tiny servant, Iyasu. We thank you for delivering him from the wicked hands of the blasphemer. We ask your blessing upon his arms in the conflict that lies ahead. When the victory is won, we beseech you, Lord, to grant him a long and peaceful reign. Make him a wise and gentle monarch. For thy name's sake, Amen!"

  "Amen!" Hal echoed, and made to rise, but she restrained him with a hand on his arm.

  "We thank you also, Lord God, for sending to us your good and faithful Henry Courtney, without whose valour and selfless service the godless would have triumphed. May he be fully rewarded by the gratitude of all the people of Ethiopia, and by the love and admiration that your servant, Judith Nazet, has conceived towards him."

  Hal felt the shock of her words reverberate through his whole body and turned to look at her, but her eyes were closed. He thought that he had misheard her, but then her grip on his arm tightened. She stood and drew him up with her.

  Still without looking at him she led him out of the main cabin to the small adjoining one, closed the door and bolted it.

  "Your clothes are wet," she said, and, like a handmaiden, began to undress him. Her movements were calm and slow. She touched his chest when it was bared and ran her long brown fingers down his flanks. She knelt before him to loosen his belt and peel down his breeches. When he was completely naked she stared at his manhood with a dark profound gaze, but without touching him there. She rose to her feet, took his hand and led him to the hard wooden bunk. He tried to pull her down beside him, but she pushed away his hands.

  Standing before him she began to undress. She unlaced the chain-mail shirt, which fell to the deck around her feet. Beneath the heavy, masculine, warlike garb, her body was a paradox of femininity. Her skin was a translucent amber. Her breasts were small, but the nipples were hard, round and dark red as ripe berries. Her lean hips were sculpted into the sweet sweep of her waist. The bush of curls that covered her mount of Venus was crisp and a lustrous black.

  At last she came to where he lay, and stooped over and kissed deeply into his mouth. Then she gave an urgent little cry and with a lithe movement fell upon him. He was astonished by the strength and suppleness of her body as he reached up and cleaved to her.

  In the late afternoon of that hot, dreamlike day, they were aroused by the crying of the child in the cabin next door. Judith sighed but rose immediately. While she dressed she watched him as though she wished to remember every detail of his face and body. Then, as she laced her armour she came to stand over him, "Yes, I do love you. But, in the same fashion as he chose you, God has singled me out for a special task. I must see the boy Emperor safely installed upon the throne of Prester John in Aksurn." She was silent a while longer, then said softly, "If I kiss you again, I may lose my resolve. Goodbye, Henry Courtney. I wish with all my heart that I were a common maid and that it could have been otherwise." She strode to the door and went to wait upon her King.

  Hal anchored off the beach in Mitsiwa roads and lowered the longboat. Reverently Daniel Fisher placed the Tabernacle of Mary on its floorboards. Judith Nazet, in full armour and war helmet, stood in the bows holding the hand of the little boy beside her. Hal took the tiller and ten seamen rowed them in through the low surf towards the beach.

  Bishop Fasilides and fifty war captains waited for them on the red sands. Ten thousand warriors lined the cliffs above. As they recognized their general and their monarch, they began to cheer and the cheering swept away across the plain, until it was carried by fifty thousand voices to echo along the desert hills.

  Those regiments that had lost heart and were already on the road back to the mountains and the far interior, believing themselves deserted by their General and their Emperor, heard the sound and turned back. Rank upon rank, column upon column, a mighty confluence, the hoofs of their horses raising a tall cloud of red dust, their weapons sparkling in the sunlight and their voices swelling the triumphant chorus, they came pouring back out of the hills.

  Fasilides came forward to greet lyasu, as he stepped ashore, hand in hand with Judith. The fifty captains knelt in the sand, raised their swords and called down God's blessings upon him. Then they crowded forward and competed fiercely for the honour of bearing the Tabernacle of Mary upon their shoulders. Singing a battle hymn, they wound in procession up the cliff path.

  Judith Nazet mounted her black stallion with its golden chest armour and its crest of ostrich feathers. She wheeled the horse and urged him, rearing and prancing, to where Hal stood at the water's edge.

  "If the battle goes with us, the pagan will try to escape by sea. Visit the wrath and the vengeance of Almighty God upon him with your fair ship," she ordered. "If the battle goes against us, have the Golden Bough waiting here at this place to take the Emperor to safety."

  "I will be here waiting for you, General Nazet." Hal looked up at her and tried to give the words a special emphasis.

  She leaned down from the saddle and her eyes were dark and bright behind the steel nose-piece of her helmet, but he could not be sure whether the brightness was warrior ferocity or
the tears of the lost lover.

  "I will wish all the days of my life that it could have been otherwise, El Tazar." She straightened up, wheeled the stallion away and went up the cliff path. The Emperor Iyasu turned in Bishop Fasilides" arms and waved back at Hal. He called something in Geez, and his high, piping voice carried down faintly to where Hal stood at the water's edge, but he understood not a word of it.

  He waved back and shouted, "You too, lad! You too!" The Golden Bough put out to sea and, beyond the fifty-fathom line with their heads bared in the stark African sunlight, they committed their dead to the sea. There were forty-three in those canvas shrouds, men of Wales and Devon and the mysterious lands along the Zambere River, all comrades now for ever.

  Then Hal ran the ship back into the shallow protected waters where he put every man to work repairing the battle damage and recharging the powder magazine with the munitions that General Nazet sent out from the shore.

  On the third morning he woke in the darkness to the sound of the guns. He went on deck immediately. Aboli was standing by the lee rail. "It has begun, Gundwane. The General has pitted her army against El Grang in the final battle."

  They stood together at the rail and looked towards the dark shore, where the far hills were lit by the hellish flashes of the battlefield and a vast pall of dust and smoke climbed slowly into the windless sky and billowed out into the anvil shape of a tall tropical thunderhead.

  "If El Grang is beaten, he will try to escape with all his army across the sea to Arabia," Hal told Ned Tyler and Aboli, as they listened to the ceaseless pandemonium of the cannon. "Weigh anchor and put the ship on a southerly course. We will go down to meet the fugitives as they try to escape from Adulis Bay."

  It was past noon when the Golden Bough took up her station off the mouth of the bay and shortened sail. The sound of the guns never ceased and Hal climbed to the masthead and focused his telescope on the wide plain beyond Zulla where the two great hosts were locked in the death struggle.

  Through the curtains of dust and smoke he could make out the tiny shapes of the horsemen as they charged and counter-charged, wraithlike in the dust of their own hoofs. He saw the long flashes of the great guns, pale red in the sunlight, and the snaking regiments of foot-soldiers winding through the red fog like dying serpents, their spearheads glistening like the reptiles" scales.

  Slowly the battle rolled towards the shoreline and Hal saw a charge of cavalry sweep along the top of the cliffs and tear into a loose, untidy formation of infantry. The sabres rose and fell and the foot-soldiers scattered before them. Men began to hurl themselves from the cliffs into the sea below.

  "Who are they?" Hal fretted. "Whose horses are those?" And then through the lens he made out the white cross of Ethiopia at the head of the mass of horsemen as they raced on towards Zutla.

  "Nazet has beaten them," said Aboli. "El Grang's army is in rout!"

  "Put a leadsman to take soundings, Mister Tyler. Take us in closer."

  The Golden Bough glided silently into the mouth of the bay, cruising only a cable's length offshore. From the masthead Hal watched the dun clouds of war roll ponderously towards the beach, and the rabble of El Grang's defeated army streaming back before the Ethiopian cavalry squadrons.

  They threw down their weapons and stumbled down to the water's edge to find any vessel to take them off, A motley armada of dhows of every size and condition, packed with fugitives, set out from the beaches around the blazing port of Zulla towards the opening of the bay.

  "Sweet heavens!" laughed Big Daniel. "They are so thick upon the water that a man might cross from one side of the bay to the other over their crowded hulls without wetting his feet."

  "Run out your guns, please, Master Daniel, and let us see if we can wet more than their feet for them," Hal ordered. The Golden Bough ploughed into this vast fleet and the little boats tried to flee, but she overhauled them effortlessly and her guns began to thunder. One after the other they were shattered and capsized, and their cargoes of exhausted, defeated troops hurled into the water. Their armour bore them down swiftly.

  It was such a terrible massacre that the gunners no longer cheered as they ran out the guns, but served them in grim silence. Hal walked along the batteries, and spoke to them sternly. "I know how you feel, lads, but if you spare them now, you may have to fight them again tomorrow, and who can say that they will give you quarter if you ask for it then?"

  He, also, was sickened by the slaughter, and longed for the setting of the sun, or any other chance to cease the carnage. That opportunity came from an unlooked-for direction.

  Aboli left his station at the starboard battery of cannon and ran back to where Hal paced his quarterdeck. Hal looked up at him sharply, but before he could snap a reprimand, Aboli pointed out over the starboard bow.

  "That ship with the red sail. The man in the stern. Do you see him, Gundwane?"

  Hal felt the prickle of apprehension on his arms and the cold sweat sliding down his back as he recognized the tall figure standing and leaning back against the tiller arm. He was clean-shaven now, the spiked moustaches were gone. He wore a turban of yellow, and the heavily embroidered dolman of an Islamic grandee over baggy white breeches and soft knee-high boots, but his pale face stood out like a mirror among the dark-bearded men around him. There may have been others with the same wide set of shoulders and tall athletic figure, but none with the same sword upon the hip, in its scabbard of embossed gold.

  "Bring the ship about, Mister Tyler. Heave to alongside that dhow with the red sail," Hal ordered.

  Ned looked where he pointed then swore. "Son of a bawd, that's Schreuder! May the devil damn him to hell." The Arab crew ran to the side of the dhow as the tall frigate bore down upon them. They jumped overboard and tried to swim back towards the beach, choosing the sabres of the Ethiopian cavalry rather than the gaping culver ins of the Golden Bough's broadside. Schreuder stood alone in the stern and looked up at the frigate with his cold, unrelenting expression. As they drew closer, Hal saw that his face was streaked with dust and powder soot, and that his clothing was torn and soiled with the muck of the battlefield.

  Hal strode to the rail and returned his stare. They were so close that Hal had hardly to raise his voice to make himself heard. "Colonel Schreuder, sir, you have my sword."

  "Then, sir, would you care to come down and take it from me?" Schreuder asked.

  "Mister Tyler, you have the con in my absence. Take me closer to the dhow so that I may board her.

  "This is madness, Gundwane,"Aboli said softly.

  "Make sure neither you nor any man intervenes, Aboli," Hal said, and went to the entry port As the little dhow bobbed close alongside, he slid down the ladder and jumped across the narrow gap of water, landing lightly on her single deck.

  He drew his sword and looked to the stern. Schreuder stepped away from the tiller bar and shrugged out of the stiff dolman tunic.

  "You are a "romantic fool, Henry Courtney," he murmured, and the blade of the Neptune sword whispered softly from its scabbard.

  "To the death?" Hal asked, as he drew his own blade. "Naturally." Schreuder nodded gravely. "For I am going to kill you."

  They came together with the slow grace of two lovers beginning a minuet. Their blades met and flirted as they circled, tap and brush and slither of steel on steel, their feet never still, points held high and eyes locked.

  Ned Tyler held the frigate fifty yards off, keeping that interval with deft touches of helm and trim of her shortened sails. The men lined the near rail. They were quiet and attentive. Although few understood the finer points of style and technique, they could not but be aware of the grace and beauty of this deadly ritual.

  "An eye for his eyes!" Hal seemed to hear his father's voice in his head. "Read in them his soul!"

  Schreuder's face remained gravel but Hal saw the first shadow in his cold blue eyes. It was not fear, but it was respect. Even with these light touches of their blades, Schreuder had evaluated his man. Remembering
their previous encounters, he had not expected to be met with such strength and skill. As for Hal he knew that, if he lived through this, he would never again dance so close to death and smell its breath as he did now.

  Hal saw it in his eyes, the moment before Schreuder opened his attack, stepping in lightly and then driving at him with a rapid series of lunges. He moved back, checking each thrust but feeling the power in it. He hardly heard the excited growl of the watchers on the deck of the frigate above them, but he watched Schreuder's eyes and met him with the high point. The Dutchman drove suddenly for his throat, his first serious stroke, and the moment Hal blocked he disengaged fluidly and dropped on bent right knee and cut for Hal's ankle, the Achilles stroke intended to cripple him.