by Wilbur Smith
‘You sure it’s a good idea you going back up there, Cap’n?’ Ned asked. ‘Been a while.’
‘Are you suggesting I can’t still get up there faster than any man on this ship?’
‘No sir, wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘Well, watch me and I’ll show you.’
And with that, Hal ran to the mast, grabbed a rope and started clambering up the rigging, past the limp, windless sails towards the inky sky above.
ett was hungry. Of course, everyone aboard was hungry. The ship’s decks and even the bilges had been scoured for rats to eat. Any gulls that were foolish enough to land on deck or perch in the rigging were greeted with volleys of stones, small pieces of shot, or anything else anyone could grab and throw that might kill or stun a bird. Playful dolphins that swam alongside the boat found themselves attacked by the ship’s smaller guns and any shots that managed to hit their targets were swiftly followed by splashes as the crew’s best swimmers dived into the water to retrieve the corpses before the sea of nearby sharks could take them.
Pett’s hunger, however, was of a different kind. He’d spent the past week locked in a dark, stinking, rat-infested cockpit on the orlop deck. He had assured the ship’s captain that he was a senior official of the British East India Company and demanded to be treated as a gentleman, but the man had refused to listen, insisting that this imprisonment was for Pett’s own safety.
‘You must understand that it is not long since my men were fighting the British, so they have no great love for your people,’ the captain had said, with a regretful shrug of the shoulders. ‘They are also starving and so desperate for food that they might resort to – how shall I say? – inhuman methods to find it. You should count yourself lucky, sir, that I gave the order to have you rescued. Many of my men were very displeased by that decision. They did not like the idea of adding another mouth to feed. Forgive me; I made a foolish jest: I said that if they did not like you, they could eat you. It is my honest fear that some of them might have taken me at my word.’
Since then, Pett had survived on what amounted to barely starvation rations. His body, already thin, was becoming close to skeletal. But he was never a man who possessed the slightest interest in or appreciation for the pleasures of the dinner table, so a lack of decent meals was no loss to him. No, he suffered from another hunger, that which clawed at his guts when the voices called him, the Saint’s voice above all, imploring him to do God’s will by scouring the world of sin and the impure souls who perpetrated it. Pett could never be sure when the voices would come. Sometimes, months would pass without a single visit, but there were also times like this when the clamour in his head would barely die down at all from one day or even week to the next: always the voices, shouting at him, imploring him, repeating again and again the same implacable commandment: thou shalt kill.
Yet there could be no candidates for his deliverance as long as he was locked away in this solitary confinement. And then the Saint, as he always did, provided the means of Pett’s salvation. He was an emaciated, thirst-ravaged member of the crew. His crime, so far as Pett could gather, was that he stole one of the very last crusts of stale bread from the locked chest in the captain’s quarters. The man was delirious. He must have been, Pett thought, to have thought he could possibly succeed in his theft when the only way of opening the chest in which the precious crumbs were located was to blow the lock off with a pistol shot that could be heard from one end of the ship to the other.
Or perhaps the man just didn’t care. For twelve hours he had sat opposite Pett, occasionally breaking into rambling, slurred, incomprehensible speeches before falling into an uneasy slumber, during which he still cried out in tones of rage and alarm, though he remained asleep all the while. Pett would long since have despatched him into a silent, eternal slumber were not both men chained to iron rings set in the ship’s hull with a good ten-foot span of filth-encrusted planks between them.
Pett’s chain, attached to another ring round his ankle, was just five feet long, making it almost impossible for him to reach the other man and strike a fatal blow. But he felt entirely confident that the Saint would not have brought him the man without providing the means with which to send him from this world to the next. Sure enough, events were moving in Pett’s direction for the ship’s company – or at least a goodly portion of it – appeared to be setting off on an expedition. The ship’s walls made it hard to work out exactly what was being said, but one message came through above all others: this was a do-or-die attempt to seize more supplies. Orders were barked and passed on. There was much bustle, movement and all the noise that one would associate with a group of men preparing for an important endeavour.
Eventually Pett heard boats being lowered, along with muffled demands for silence. Wherever they were going, clearly they did not wish to alert anyone to their movements. But no sooner had the boats set off from the ship than those who had been left behind settled down to what sounded like heated debates, presumably about the likely outcome of the expedition. No matter: the key point was that they were not paying the slightest attention to William Pett, or his cell companion.
He thus had the perfect opportunity to take action without being interrupted in his labours. That was why he was already on the move. Slowly for the first few inches, silent as a leopard in the dark, ignoring the cramping pain in his limbs from long confinement.
Pett made every effort to remain completely silent as he moved, so it could only have been pure chance that his intended victim chose this precise moment to awaken. He stared at Pett for a second or two, evidently trying to make sense of his sudden appearance in the middle of the floor, realized he was in danger and scrambled away in the gloom, extending his chain as far away from Pett as possible. The man’s irons rattled and terror made the whites of his eyes glow against the blackness as he shouted for help, throwing himself back against the damp plank walls, somehow knowing that the other man meant to kill him.
Pett kept moving. He had almost reached his fear-stricken target, but then his leg chain pulled taut. He cursed and threw himself forward, stretched like a striking mamba, and managed to grab hold of the other man’s foot. The man kicked and convulsed but Pett clung on, taking blows to the face which he did not feel, and hauled the man towards him, inch by inch. The man tried to seize hold of the deck itself, to dig his fingers into it like grappling hooks, but the boards were slick with rodent faeces and slime and he could get no purchase.
The man shrieked again, his voice breaking with terror. He cried out to God, but the Almighty was not interested – He had other plans – and the Saint and all the angels were crying out to Pett to execute them on His behalf. Now Pett’s face was level with the man’s stinking crotch and still he hauled as though his own life depended on it.
‘Keep still and I’ll make it quick,’ Pett said, knowing he was wasting his breath. Frenzied, slime-fouled fingers clawed at his head and face as the man tried to push him back whence he had come. But there was no going back. Pett thrust his hands up and they found the man’s throat, thumbs crushing the bony cartilage of the larynx, fingers binding at the back of his emaciated neck like the lacing on a lady’s corset.
For all his lack of nourishment the jailed sailor was surprisingly strong. Years at sea, hauling on the sheets and climbing the shrouds had seen to that, and now he clawed at Pett’s hands, trying to tear them away from his own neck. But William Pett was a man of experience. He had done this many, many times before and knew that he only needed to hold on a little longer. Just a little longer.
Pett was also a connoisseur, a collector of other men’s deaths. In his mind he ordered them: the peaceful and the violent; the many who met their ends with terror and the very few who were composed and tranquil at the last. A less elevated distinction divided those whose bowels loosened at the moment of passing and those who remained unsullied. Had Pett given the matter the slightest thought in advance, he would have wagered that the lack of any material in a starving
man’s digestive system would tend to suggest a clean death. But no, though the sailor’s defecation was only modest in quantity, it wanted for nothing in stench. At the very same moment, the hands on Pett’s hands relaxed. The man beneath him shuddered like a spent lover and went still.
Pett held on still, gasping for breath in that dank, airless place. The dead man convulsed one last time, his heels tapping out a ragged beat against the deck, and then it was over. You did well, the Saint whispered in his mind. But you are on a ship. Next time, thrust a sharp sliver of wood, or a metal pin through the ear canal into the brain. You will achieve a quick kill and no telltale signs left behind to arouse suspicion.
The Saint was right, Pett thought, as he often was. No matter now. It was time to prepare for the moment of discovery.
He would have preferred to put the dead man up against the side and make it look as though he had died in his sleep, but Pett’s chain would not let him push the body up against the far wall of the cockpit. So he rolled the body over and it lay face down in the filth, the dead man’s befouled petticoat breeches the first thing anyone would see when they brought a light into the place.
Then Pett scrambled back to his own corner by the cable tier and waited.
al ascended the mainmast with lithe assurance. As he dropped into the bucket of the crow’s nest just below the top of the mast he looked up at the thin cloud skating across the moon. His breath was a little shorter than it had been when he was a lad and making the climb to the masthead several times a day. But it was still just as much of a pleasure to drink in the cool clean air up where the breeze was an elixir, cut only with the scent of the tarred lines, the musty smell of the sail canvas and, now and then when the wind was right, the sweet, spicy aroma of the soil of Africa itself wafting across the ocean from the coast.
He peered north into the gloom for a sign of the Dutchman that had last been seen three leagues off the Bough’s stern. A glimpse of white caught his eye, where the cloud had torn to let the last glimmer of moonlight through. Hal knew his eyes were as good as those of any man aboard – that was one reason he had chosen to look for himself, rather than rely on another to do it – but as he searched the ocean the clouds closed ranks once more, the darkness returned and then there was nothing to be seen.
‘Where are you then?’ he murmured.
Dawn came, a bloodstain on the hem of night’s gown as the last of the northerly played out across the canvas and the Bough slowed to a crawl, then drifted without purpose as she lost steerage, eventually refusing to go another yard into the south. As the sea mist settled over the surface, shrouding the ship and the waters around her in a soft blanket that muffled sound as much as it hampered vision, the Bough rolled gently in the swells. Hal might have been lulled to sleep like a baby in its cot had he not been startled by Ned Tyler calling up to him. The helmsman was asking permission to let go the anchor, for it was better to stay where they were than risk drifting blindly at the whim of the tides until they found themselves high and dry on a sand bar.
Hal felt a little guilty then, being up there like a young ensign instead of on the quarterdeck or the poop like the captain he was. But he refused to abandon the search just yet, not when every instinct told him it must be the Dutchman out there. She was a small caravel: three-masted and square rather than lateen-rigged. A captured prize most likely, taken from the Spanish or Portuguese Hal guessed, for it was rare to see such a ship flying Dutch colours. She would still be getting enough out of the breeze to keep her moving for she was only half the size of the Bough. Hal knew he had nothing to fear from such a ship, and not just because his culverins could blast her out of the water if it came to a fight.
‘Damn this truce,’ he whispered, narrowing his eyes as if they could somehow penetrate the mist and catch another glimpse of canvas. Peace now prevailed between the English and the Dutch, though Hal wished it did not. It had been a Dutch governor of the Cape Colony who had ordered the torture and murder of his father and Dutchmen who had followed his instructions to the brutal, gory letter. Hal longed for the legitimacy that war provided. For then he would be able to spill Dutch blood by the gallon in retribution for his father’s suffering.
Suddenly he fancied he caught the Dutchman’s scent in the air, a waft of fresh tar and the stale sweat of her crew, but it was gone again in a heartbeat. Aboli was right to say that Sir Francis had prepared Hal well for the responsibilities of captaining a ship. And yet there was something else too, something that even his father could not have taught him, and that was the warrior’s instinct. Hal felt that coursing through him like the blood in his veins. He could, when it was called for, be a killer. That instinct had made him leave his soft bed and the beautiful woman sleeping in it to climb up there to the masthead. It was that same instinct that alerted him to the danger now.
He had not seen the first of the cloth-muffled grappling hooks that clumped onto the Golden Bough’s deck, but Hal saw the first dark shapes coming over the side in the mist.
‘To arms! To arms!’ He gave the alarm, as the first pistols spat flames which cut through the murk, briefly illuminating the faces of the men who had come to kill them. Hal was already out of the crow’s nest. Down he came into the chaos that was enveloping them.
He thanked Almighty God for inducing the Amadoda tribesmen to sleep beneath the stars, for now they were leaping to their feet, seizing their weapons and hurling themselves into the fight. Faced by the tribesmen’s ferocity, spears and axes, the attackers must be regretting their impertinence. But even from halfway down the mast, Hal could tell that those men clambering over the Bough’s gunnels were heavily armed. Each had a pistol in hand and another pair tied with cords around their necks. As Hal glanced down he saw one of the Amadoda thrown back by the force of a pistol ball that blew a hole in his naked chest. The man fell to the deck, with the whites of his eyes rolling up into his skull.
Hal jumped the last five feet to the deck. As his feet hit the planking he suddenly realized that he was unarmed. He had not thought to pick up his flintlock pistol or his sword when he left his cabin.
‘Here, Gundwane!’ Hal turned and caught the sabre by the hilt, nodding to Aboli who had thrown it. Then he launched himself into the chaos, slashing open a man’s face, then spinning away to stab the blade deeply into another’s guts.
‘Golden Bough on me!’ he shouted, and the Amadoda cheered, as they surged forward. Others of the Golden Bough’s crew were pouring up through the hatches.
Shoulder to shoulder Hal and Aboli hacked their way into the enemy. And yet the Dutchmen still had loaded pistols and these roared, spitting out death and disaster.
One huge Dutchman whose features were masked by a dense growth of dark beard, fired his pistol then reversed it and clubbed down the black man who opposed him. Three Amadoda went down before him but then Big Daniel was there. His sword had lodged in a dead man’s shoulder, but his own raw strength was weapon enough. Daniel threw up a brawny arm to block the Dutchman’s pistol, then clutched his beard in both hands and pulled its owner’s face towards him as he thrust his own head forward, smashing the big man’s nose with a splintering crack that Hal heard even above the din of battle.
The Dutchman staggered, blood cascading down his face and beard. Big Daniel glanced to one side, retrieved his sword from the dead man’s shoulder and went at the bearded man like a butcher at a side of beef.
Hal shouted with exultation. Any advantage the Dutch may have gained with the surprise of their attack had been nullified by the speed and ferocity with which the Bough’s men had responded. Victory was still not entirely his, but even in his young life Hal had fought enough ship-board battles to know when the balance was shifting. One last effort and that shift would be decisive. He was about to utter his rallying cry when he heard Aboli’s voice call out, ‘Gundwane!’
Hal glanced across the deck and saw that Aboli was pointing with his sword aft towards the mêlée around the foot of the mizzenmast.
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��No!’ he told himself in despair. ‘That cannot be!’
ecause she felt sick, Judith climbed out of her bunk, if only to find a bedpan to vomit into. That nausea saved her life. It meant that she saw the shadowy figures emerging out of the mist and clambering up the stern of the Golden Bough, climbing past the windows of the captain’s cabin. Then one of them braced his feet against the stern, pushed away to make the climbing rope swing out like a pendulum and smashed through the glass and into the cabin.
Judith was already waiting for him, dressed only in her nightgown but with her sword in hand. Her hesitation over what to wear to go aboard the Bough had saved her life, for instead of being packed in one of her trunks and stowed away in the hold, her kaskara sword had come with her in her travelling baggage and had been placed in her cabin.
The man who was first through the window had barely laid a toe on the cabin deck when he took the point of the kaskara through his throat. Judith pulled the blade away. Then as he went down she spun as nimbly as a dancer around the second boarder as he blundered past his wounded comrade. Then she aimed a savage, slashing blow across the small of his back that sliced through one of his kidneys and dropped her arm, with him writhing, screaming and bleeding at her feet.
More men were piling into the cabin now and Judith realized that she was in danger of boxing herself into a corner, for the men she’d downed had formed a barrier, partially blocking the way between her and the cabin door. She moved fast, fighting her way to the door, her sword flashing from side to side as she parried, stabbed and slashed, struggling to defend herself against the increasing number of men who now opposed her. She fended one thrust away above her left shoulder, then swung her curved sword down and across her body, backhanded, slicing deep into another man’s arm, almost chopping it in two. But amidst the mayhem Judith’s mind remained calm. Hard-fought experience had taught her that the key to survival was maintaining the ability to concentrate and calculate while others around were letting rage, fear or panic cloud their minds. Examine the enemy. Look him in the eyes. Read his mind.