Birds of Prey

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Your father is a great chief among lesser chieftains,’ Aboli murmured. ‘He is a warrior and he knows the secrets of the sea and the heavens. The stars are his children.’

  ‘I know all this is true,’ Hal answered, in the same language.

  ‘It was he who bade me take the sword to you this day,’ Aboli confessed.

  Hal raised himself on one elbow, and stared at the dark figure beside him. ‘My father wanted you to cut me?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘You are not as other lads. If your life is hard now, it will be harder still. You are chosen. One day you must take from his shoulders the great cloak of the red cross. You must be worthy of it.’

  Hal sank back on his pallet, and stared up at the stars. ‘What if I do not want this thing?’ he asked.

  ‘It is yours. You do not have a choice. The one Nautonnier Knight chooses the Knight to follow him. It has been so for almost four hundred years. Your only escape from it is death.’

  Hal was silent for so long that Aboli thought sleep had overcome him, but then he whispered, ‘How do you know these things?’

  ‘From your father.’

  ‘Are you also a Knight of our Order?’

  Aboli laughed softly. ‘My skin is too dark and my gods are alien. I could never be chosen.’

  ‘Aboli, I am afraid.’

  ‘All men are afraid. It is for those of us of the warrior blood to subdue fear.’

  ‘You will never leave me, will you, Aboli?’

  ‘I will stay at your side as long as you need me.’

  ‘Then I am not so afraid.’

  Hours later Aboli woke him with a hand on his shoulder from a deep and dreamless sleep. ‘Eight bells in the middle watch, Gundwane.’ He used Hal’s nickname: in his own language it meant ‘Bush Rat’. It was not meant pejoratively, but was the affectionate name he had bestowed on the four-year-old who had been placed in his care over a decade before.

  Four o’clock in the morning. It would be light in an hour. Hal scrambled up and, rubbing his eyes, staggered to the stinking bucket in the heads and eased himself. Then, fully awake, he hurried down the heaving deck, avoiding the sleeping figures that cluttered it.

  The cook had his fire going in the brick-lined galley and passed Hal a pewter mug of soup and a hard biscuit. Hal was ravenous and gulped the liquid, though it scalded his tongue. When he crunched the biscuit he felt the weevils in it pop between his teeth.

  As he hurried to the foot of the mainmast he saw the glow of his father’s pipe in the shadows of the poop and smelled a whiff of his tobacco, rank on the sweet night air. Hal did not pause but went up the shrouds noting the change of tack and the new setting of the sails that had taken place while he slept.

  When he reached the masthead and had relieved the lookout there, he settled into his nest and looked about him. There was no moon and, but for the stars, all was dark. He knew every named star, from the mighty Sirius to tiny Mintaka in Orion’s glittering belt. They were the ciphers of the navigator, the signposts of the sky, and he had learned their names with his alphabet. His eye went, unbidden, to pick out Regulus in the sign of the Lion. It was not the brightest star in the zodiac, but it was his own particular star and he felt a quiet pleasure at the thought that it sparkled for him alone. This was the happiest hour of his long day, the only time he could ever be alone in the crowded vessel, the only time he could let his mind dance among the stars and his imagination have full rein.

  His every sense seemed heightened. Even above the whimper of the wind and the creak of the rigging he could hear his father’s voice and recognize its tone if not the words, as he spoke quietly to the helmsman on the deck far below. He could see his father’s beaked nose and the set of his brow in the ruddy glow from the pipe bowl as he drew in the tobacco smoke. It seemed to him that his father never slept.

  He could smell the iodine of the sea, the fresh odour of kelp and salt. His nose was so keen, purged by months of sweet sea air, that he could even whiff the faint odour of the land, the warm, baked smell of Africa like biscuit hot from the oven.

  Then there was another scent, so faint he thought his nostrils had played a trick on him. A minute later he caught it again, just a trace, honey-sweet on the wind. He did not recognize it and turned his head back and forth, questing for the next faint perfume, sniffing eagerly.

  Suddenly it came again, so fragrant and heady that he reeled like a drunkard smelling the brandy pot, and had to stop himself crying aloud in his excitement. With an effort he kept his mouth closed and, with the aroma filling his head, tumbled from the crow’s nest, and fled down the shrouds to the deck below. He ran on bare feet so silently that his father started when Hal touched his arm.

  ‘Why have you left your post?’

  ‘I could not hail you from the masthead – they are too close. They might have heard me also.’

  ‘What are you babbling about, boy?’ His father came angrily to his feet. ‘Speak plainly.’

  ‘Father, do you not smell it?’ He shook his father’s arm urgently.

  ‘What is it?’ His father took the pipe stem from his mouth. ‘What is it that you smell?’

  ‘Spice!’ said Hal. ‘The air is full of the perfume of spice.’

  They moved swiftly down the deck, Ned Tyler, Aboli and Hal, shaking the off-duty watch awake, cautioning each man to silence as they shoved him towards his battle stations. There was no drum to beat to quarters. Their excitement was infectious. The waiting was over. The Dutchman was out there somewhere close, to windward in the darkness. They could all smell his fabulous cargo now.

  Sir Francis extinguished the candle in the binnacle so that the ship showed no lights, then passed the keys of the arms chests to his boatswains. They were kept locked until the chase was in sight for the dread of mutiny was always in the back of every captain’s mind. At other times only the petty officers carried cutlasses.

  In haste the chests were opened and the weapons passed from hand to hand. The cutlasses were of good Sheffield steel, with plain wooden hilts and basket guards. The pikes had six-foot shafts of English oak and heavy hexagonal iron heads. Those of the crew who lacked skill with the sword chose either these robust spears or the boarding axes that could lop a man’s head from his shoulders at a stroke.

  The muskets were racked in the blackpowder magazine. They were brought up, and Hal helped the gunners load them with a handful of lead pellets on top of a handful of powder. They were clumsy, inaccurate weapons, with an effective range of only twenty or thirty yards. After the lock was triggered, and the burning match mechanically applied, the weapon fired in a cloud of smoke, but then had to be reloaded. This operation took two or three vital minutes, during which the musketeer was at the mercy of his foes.

  Hal preferred the bow; the famous English longbow that had decimated the French knights at Agincourt. He could loose a dozen shafts in the time it took to reload a musket. The longbow carried fifty paces with the accuracy to strike a foe in the centre of the chest and with the power to spit him to the backbone, even though he wore a breastplate. He already had two bundles of arrows lashed to the sides of the crow’s nest, ready to hand.

  Sir Francis and some of his petty officers strapped on their half armour, light cavalry cuirasses and steel pot helmets. Sea salt had rusted them and they were dented and battered from other actions.

  In short order the ship was readied for battle, and the crew armed and armoured. However, the gunports were closed and the demi-culverins were not run out. Most of the men were hustled below by Ned and the other boatswains, while the rest were ordered to lie flat on the deck concealed below the bulwarks. No slow-match was lit – the glow and smoke might alert the chase to her danger. However, charcoal braziers smouldered at the foot of each mast, and the wedges were knocked out of the gunports with muffled wooden mallets so that the sound of the blows would not carry.

  Aboli pushed his way through the scurrying figures to where Hal stood at the foot of the mast. Around his bald
head he wore a scarlet cloth whose tail hung down his back, and thrust into his sash was a cutlass. Under one arm he carried a rolled bundle of coloured silk. ‘From your father.’ He thrust the bundle into Hal’s arms. ‘You know what to do with them!’ He gave Hal’s pigtail a tug. ‘Your father says that you are to remain at the masthead no matter which way the fight goes. Do you hear now?’

  He turned and hurried back towards the bows. Hal grimaced rebelliously at his broad back, but climbed dutifully into the shrouds. When he reached the masthead he scanned the darkness swiftly, but as yet there was nothing to see. Even the aroma of spice had evaporated. He felt a stab of concern that he might only have imagined it. ‘It is only that the chase has come out of our wind,’ he reassured himself. ‘She is probably abeam of us by now.’

  He attached the banner Aboli had given him to the signal halyard, ready to fly it at his father’s order. Then he removed the cover from the pan of the falconet. He checked the tension of the string before setting his longbow into the rack beside the bundles of yard-long arrows. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Below him the ship was unnaturally quiet, not even a bell to mark the passage of the hours, only the soft song of the sails and the muted accompaniment of the rigging.

  The day came upon them with the suddenness that in these African seas he had come to know so well. Out of the dying night rose a tall bright tower, shining and translucent as an ice-covered alp – a great ship under a mass of gleaming canvas, her masts so tall they seemed to rake the last pale stars from the sky.

  ‘Sail ho!’ he pitched his voice so that it would carry to the deck below but not to the strange ship that lay, a full league away, across the dark waters. ‘Fine on the larboard beam!’

  His father’s voice floated back to him. ‘Masthead! Break out the colours!’

  Hal heaved on the signal halyard, and the silken bundle soared to the masthead. There it burst open and the tricolour of the Dutch Republic streamed out on the southeaster, orange and snowy white and blue. Within moments the other banners and long pennants burst out from the head of the mizzen and the foremast, one emblazoned with the cipher of the VOC, die Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United East India Company. The regalia was authentic, captured only four months previously from the Heerlycke Nacht. Even the standard of the Council of Seventeen was genuine. There would scarce have been time for the captain of the galleon to have learned of the capture of his sister ship and so to question the credentials of this strange caravel.

  The two ships were on converging courses – even in darkness Sir Francis had judged well his interception. There was no call for him to alter course and alarm the Dutch captain. But within minutes it was clear that the Lady Edwina, despite her worm-riddled hull, was faster through the water than the galleon. She must soon begin to overtake the other ship, which he must avoid at all costs.

  Sir Francis watched her through the lens of his telescope, and at once he saw why the galleon was so slow and ungainly: her mainmast was jury-rigged, and there was much other evidence of damage to her other masts and rigging. He realized that she must have been caught in some terrible storm in the eastern oceans – which would also account for her belated arrival off her landfall on the Agulhas Cape. He knew that he could not alter sail without alarming the Dutch captain, but he had to pass across her stern. He had prepared for this: he signed to the carpenter, at the rail, who with his mate lifted a huge canvas drogue and dropped it over the stern. Like the curb on a headstrong stallion it bit deep in the water and pulled up the Lady Edwina sharply. Again Sir Francis judged the disparate speeds of the two vessels, and nodded with satisfaction.

  Then he looked down his own deck. The majority of the men were concealed below decks or lying under the bulwarks where they were invisible even to the lookouts at the galleon’s masthead. There was no weapon in sight, all the guns hidden behind their ports. When Sir Francis had captured this caravel she had been a Dutch trader, operating off the west African coast. In converting her to a privateer, he had been at pains to preserve her innocent air and prosaic lines. Only a dozen or so men were visible on the decks and in the rigging, which would be normal for a sluggish merchantman.

  As he looked up again the banners of the Republic and the Company broke out at the Dutchman’s mastheads. Only a trifle tardily she was acknowledging his salute.

  ‘She accepts us,’ Ned grunted, as he held the Lady Edwina stolidly on course. ‘She likes our sheep’s clothing.’

  ‘Perhaps!’ Sir Francis replied. ‘And yet she cracks on more sail.’ As they watched, the galleon’s royals and top-gallants bloomed against the morning sky.

  ‘There!’ he exclaimed a moment later. ‘She is altering course, sheering away from us. The Dutchman is a cautious fellow.’

  ‘Satan’s teeth! Just sniff her!’ Ned whispered, almost to himself, as a trace of spices scented the air. ‘Sweet as a virgin, and twice as beautiful.’

  ‘It’s the richest smell you’ll ever have in your nostrils.’ Sir Francis spoke loudly enough for the men on the deck below to hear him. ‘There lies fifty pounds a head in prize money if you have the notion to fight for it.’ Fifty pounds was ten years of an English workman’s wages, and the men stirred and growled like hunting hounds on the leash.

  Sir Francis went forward to the poop rail and lifted his chin to call softly up to the men in the rigging, ‘Make believe that those cheese-heads over there are your brothers. Give them a cheer and a brave welcome.’

  The men aloft howled with glee, and waved their bonnets at the tall ship as the Lady Edwina edged in under her stern.

  Katinka van de Velde sat up and frowned at Zelda, her old nurse. ‘Why have you woken me so early?’ she demanded petulantly, and tossed the tumble of golden curls back from her face. Even so freshly aroused from sleep, it was rosy and angelic. Her eyes were of a startling violet colour, like the lustrous wings of a tropical butterfly.

  ‘There is another ship near us. Another Company ship. The first we have seen in all these terrible stormy weeks. I had begun to think there was not another Christian soul left in all the world,’ Zelda whined. ‘You are always complaining of boredom. It might divert you for a while.’

  Zelda was pale and wan. Her cheeks, once fat, smooth and greased with good living, were sunken. Her great belly was gone, and hung in folds of loose skin almost to her knees. Katinka could see it through the thin stuff of her nightgown.

  She has puked away all her fat and half her flesh, Katinka thought, with a twinge of disgust. Zelda had been prostrated by the cyclones that had assailed the Standvastigheid and battered her mercilessly ever since they had left the Trincomalee coast.

  Katinka threw back the satin bedclothes and swung her long legs over the edge of the gilded bunk. This cabin had been especially furnished and redecorated to accommodate her, a daughter of one of the omnipotent Zeventien, the seventeen directors of the Company. The décor was all gilt and velvet, silken cushions and silver vessels. A portrait of Katinka by the fashionable Amsterdam artist Pieter de Hoogh hung on the bulkhead opposite her bed, a wedding present from her doting father. The artist had captured her lascivious turn of head. He must have scoured his paint pots to reproduce so faithfully the wondrous colour of her eyes – and their expression, which was at once both innocent and corrupt.

  ‘Do not wake my husband,’ she cautioned the old woman as she flung a gold-brocade wrap over her shoulders and tied the jewelled belt around her hourglass waist. Zelda’s eyelid drooped in conspiratorial agreement. At Katinka’s insistence the Governor slept in the smaller, less grand cabin beyond the door that was locked from her side. Her excuse was that he snored abominably, and that she was indisposed by the mal-de-mer. In truth, caged in her quarters all these weeks, she was restless and bored, bursting with youthful energy and aflame with desires that the fat old man could never extinguish.

  She took Zelda’s hand and stepped out onto the narrow stern gallery. This was a private balcony, ornately carved with cherubs and angels, loo
king out over the ship’s wake and hidden from the vulgar eyes of the crew.

  It was a morning dazzling with sunlit magic, and as she filled her lungs with the salt tang of the sea she felt every nerve and muscle of her body quiver with the impetus of life. The wind kicked creamy feathers from the tops of the long blue swells, and played with her golden curls. It ruffled the silk over her breasts and belly with the caress of a lover’s fingers. She stretched and arched her back sensuously like a sleek, golden cat.

  Then she saw the other ship. It was much smaller than the galleon but with pleasing lines. The pretty flags and pennants that streamed from her masts contrasted with the pile of her white sails. She was close enough for Katinka to make out the figures of the few men that manned her rigging. They were waving a greeting, and she could see that some were young and clad only in short petticoats.

  She leaned over the rail and stared across. Her husband had commanded that the crew of the galleon observe a strict dress code while she was aboard, so the figures on this strange ship fascinated her. She folded her arms over her bosom and squeezed her breasts together, feeling her nipples harden and engorge. She wanted a man. She burned for a man, any man, just as long as he was young and hard and raging for her. A man like those she had known in Amsterdam before her father had discovered her taste for strong game and sent her out to the Indies, to a safe old husband who had a high position in the Company and even higher prospects. His choice had been Petrus Jacobus van de Velde who, now that he was married to Katinka, was assured of the next vacancy on the Company’s board, where he would join the pantheon of the Zeventien.

  ‘Come inside, Lieveling.’ Zelda tugged at her sleeve. ‘Those ruffians over there are staring at you.’