by Wilbur Smith
‘The storm will take him,’ Aboli said, peering up. The wind was on Hal’s face now as Ned Tyler brought the bows round to face into the teeth of the storm.
‘Brace yourselves!’ Hal bellowed, standing tall and defiant, gripping the windward rail as the storm enveloped the Golden Bough, lashing her with freezing, skin-flaying rain, and laying her over so that the sea poured over the lee rail, sweeping men off their feet and rolling waist deep across the deck. Men clung to the shrouds as though to life itself.
‘Aboli! Help Ned!’ Hal shouted. Obediently Aboli struggled over to the helm to lend his strength to the whipstaff. Just then the Bough’s buoyancy took over, rolling and rocking her right over in the opposite direction. Men slid back across the deck, crashing into the lee rail unless they had managed to grab a handhold. Hal was plunged underwater for a terrifying, lung-bursting moment. Then the lead-weighted keel levered the ship upright again, and he heard a keening cry even above the wind’s roar. The boy Awdy had been flung from the crow’s nest like a pebble from a slingshot. He hit the surface of the sea and in the same instant was gone as if he had never existed, swallowed by the raging ocean.
As yet Hal had heard no screams or wild shouts from between decks, which told him that the great culverins were still lashed down securely and the Bough’s timbers were holding. But then Hal caught the rhythmic creak of the pumps, as the teams below worked to expel the sea that was flooding the bilges.
Now came the waves, great walls of water driving up from the north, and when they struck Hal knew that no matter how thorough his preparations had been he would be lucky not to lose a mast or have the spars snapped like kindling.
‘Father, be with us now,’ he yelled, blinking salt water from his eyes, and calling upon his own father as much as the Lord God in heaven. The next wave coming for them seemed as tall as the mainmast, its crest rolling over itself along its length, breaking into cascading white foam. The Amadoda, none of whom had ever experienced anything remotely like this, were beside themselves with terror, shrieking and chanting invocations to their forest gods.
‘She can take it!’ Hal shouted reassurances to his crew. ‘She’s seen worse than this in her life. She can see this bastard off!’ But the world turned darker still and that wall of water bore down on them. He braced for the impact. The wave crashed down upon them.
In the darkness and the turbulence of wild waters, he thought he heard a familiar and beloved voice calling to him. ‘Hold hard, my darling. We need you. Both me and our baby need you. Please don’t leave us now. Please don’t leave us ever.’
He called back to her, ‘I shall survive. I will survive. Wait for me, Judith, my love! Wait for me!’
For another twelve hours the tempest raged over them. When at last it abated it left the Golden Bough battered but still afloat. They had lost only Sam Awdy, and the men were light-headed and grateful to God and Hal to have survived.
Only Hal was despondent. The storm had driven his two-boat flotilla far to the south, away from Zanzibar, and every mile carried him further away from Judith.
‘The wind has abated, Gundwane.’ Aboli tried to cheer him. ‘We can make our way back north again and we will surely reach Zanzibar before …’ Aboli was about to say ‘Judith is sold’ but managed to stop himself in time. ‘Before the day of the market,’ he concluded.
‘That we will be near Zanzibar I have no doubt,’ Hal replied. ‘But in Zanzibar? Jahan and all his men will be expecting us. Every harbour and customs official, every market trader, every porter … the whole population will have been told to watch for me – or for anyone suspicious who might want to rescue Judith Nazet.’
‘But you don’t want to rescue Judith Nazet,’ Tromp pointed out, as if that were a statement of the obvious, rather than the absurd.
‘What do you mean I don’t want to rescue her? Of course I bloody well want to rescue her!’ Hal snapped.
‘No, sir, you do not. You want to buy her. That way you can take her away without anyone getting hurt. She will be your property … although,’ he added with a characteristic smirk, ‘if you don’t mind me saying, that woman will never be anyone’s property.’
‘Buy her …?’ Hal mused. ‘Yes … yes … I can see what you’re getting at. That’s a good idea, Mr Tromp. But my original objection remains. We will be wanted men – certainly Aboli and I will be. How can we possibly bid for Judith if the moment either one of us opens our mouth we will be seized and most likely taken into slavery ourselves?’
‘What if it is not you who bids? What if it is one who is known in Zanzibar, whose presence will not cause any comment?’
Hal looked at Tromp appraisingly. ‘You sound as though you know who such a man might be.’
‘Yes. I know a man and we are not very far – two days’ sail at most – from where I expect him to be. But Captain, I must warn you that if you think me a rogue, this man is far worse. He is a pirate. He would sell his own mother in that very same slave market if he thought he would profit from the trade, and if you should ever cross him he would cut your throat without a second thought.’
Silence fell as Hal considered Tromp’s warning. ‘Let me ask you this, then,’ he spoke at last. ‘This man of yours, if we make a deal and I keep my side of the bargain, will he keep his?’
‘If you are a man of your word then, yes, he will certainly be the same. But you should rather stick your head into a shark’s jaws than give him any reason to think you have betrayed him.’
‘Then in that case, Mr Tromp, I will be sure to keep my word and, if you would be so good, pray tell me where I can find him.’
aptain Jebediah Rivers, master of the sixteen-gun brigantine the Achilles, leaned against the rough-skinned trunk of the palm, enjoying the shade provided by its fronds as they rattled and rustled in the warm breeze. The ocean was blinding to look at, glittering and dazzling under the fierce African sun, and the surf rolled in almost reaching the bare feet of the men who had gathered on the beach, many still rum-soaked from the night before.
But the shouting was beginning to irritate Jeb Rivers. John McCawley was stirring up trouble like a whore in a church meeting. Not that there was anything godly about Ilha Metundo, Rivers thought to himself with a sour grin. Still, the man had high aspirations. He wanted to be Captain John McCawley. Rivers had known it for some time but now McCawley was showing his hand.
‘When was the last time we took a decent prize, hey?’ McCawley hectored Jeb. ‘I never signed up to this crew so as I could break my back lugging timber and stone like a god-damned slave!’ This got a few ayes from the men at his back, some of them already with hands on their sword hilts and pistol stocks. This encouraged John McCawley. ‘We went on the account ’cause we were promised liberty, equality, and brotherhood. I dare any man here to tell me where these three things are right now. I for one don’t have any liberty, equality nor no bloody brotherhood either.’
He did not look directly at Rivers then but neither did he need to, for every man present appreciated precisely where that challenge was aimed. ‘We all know how this works. No prey, no pay. Well we ain’t going to get our hands on no prize stuck here like bleeding landlubbers.’ He pointed behind him at the shimmering blue ocean. ‘We should be out there hunting. Instead we toil like common labourers.’
‘You mean drink yourselves witless and drown in darling whores, Mr McCawley,’ Quartermaster George Dowling corrected him, then stopped up his right nostril with his thumb and blew a shining ribbon of snot out of the left one into the sand at his feet. Dowling was a fierce fighter and powerful as a bull buffalo. However, McCawley was himself a savage in a brawl and his blood was up now.
‘Why am I not surprised, George Dowling? I would have wagered my last brass farthing – though the devil knows I ain’t even got that – on you taking his side in this,’ McCawley spat at the quartermaster. ‘You’re meant to be representing us, Mister bloody Dowling. Not him!’
Dowling, who always led the attack when boardin
g a ship, swept the cap off his head and used it to fan his bald pate as though his only concern was trying to stay cool. ‘If there’s a vote, I’ll stand by it, whichever way it goes,’ he shrugged.
McCawley nodded, relieved to hear that, for as quartermaster Dowling acted as trustee for the whole crew, serving as a sort of civil magistrate aboard ship, so that having him onside, or at least not against the idea of a vote, was a bolster to McCawley’s cause.
The whole of Rivers’s crew had turned out by the looks of it: one hundred and five men, plus another sixty that comprised the crews of the three captured dhows that, along with the Achilles, made up the small predatory fleet. Those vessels lay at anchor in the lee of a headland on Ilha Metundo, hidden from the sight of passing shipping out in the open sea. The island swept south-west where it thinned to a tail of land which was only visible at low tide: this sweep of coralline, ship-disembowelling shallows emerging again after several cable lengths to become Ilha Quifuqui. Together these two islands were slung across the turquoise sea like a hammock, and Captain Rivers doubted there could be a finer base for a man in his line of business.
‘Spit it out then, McCawley. Brain’s boiling in me skull like stew in a pot,’ a white-haired old sea dog by the name of Arthur Crumwell called out. There were murmurs of ‘aye’ and ‘go on, tell us’ from the crowd of onlookers.
McCawley grimaced and nodded to assure them all that he was coming to the crux of the matter. Many of the women and children who lived on the island with their menfolk had also gathered to be a part of it all and learn whether McCawley’s challenge would see him sleeping in the captain’s cabin on the Achilles’s tomorrow morning.
‘We accept that he who is captain has absolute power when fighting, chasing or being chased,’ McCawley said. ‘Not a man of us has issue with that. But in all other matters the captain is ruled by the majority wishes of the crew.’
‘Aye, we’ve played our part,’ Crumwell nodded. ‘None can say as we ain’t. We got the holes to prove it, and all!’ He lifted his arms to exhibit scars under each, one from a pistol ball, the other probably from a cutlass.
Captain Rivers thumbed tobacco into his pipe and looked out to sea while his underlings prattled on. He pretended to be absorbed by the petrels and gulls which speckled the sky, and the parrots and lovebirds which squawked noisily amongst the mangrove trees like some strange echo of the men on the beach.
‘It is us as decides if a prize is worth risking our necks for,’ McCawley went on. ‘It is us as will be strung up and made to dance the hempen jig if one of the king’s admirals brings his frigates here to prise us from our nest.’ McCawley turned a glare on his captain now, his scarred face twisted with defiance. ‘It is us as decides who our captain will be.’ He drew a long deep breath, and then spat it out as viciously as a poisonous cobra. ‘I call a vote, and put myself forward as the next captain of this crew.’
‘Good!’ Rivers nodded as he knocked the tobacco ash from his pipe against the stem of the palm tree. ‘You took long enough to come to the point.’ Then he pointed the stem of his pipe at McCawley. ‘So you want my ship?’ These were the first words he had uttered since he had come from his hut beyond the tree line to hear the men’s grievances.
‘The Achilles be our ship,’ McCawley protested, although without conviction. His eyes grew shifty now, losing their grip on Rivers’s own.
‘The Achilles is mine,’ Rivers contradicted him with enough steel in his rebuttal to force even the most ardent of McCawley’s supporters to lower their eyes. For they all knew Black Jeb Rivers had earned that nickname by his proficiency with gun and sword during the Civil War. Some said that he’d killed more men than the pox and some even claimed that he’d come back from the dead, on the night when a thousand newly made corpses littered the field at Edgehill.
However, McCawley had gone too far to drop his anchor and halt what he had started. He knew it, too, judging by the incessant twitching of his right eye, and his right hand that was flexing, opening and closing as though preparing to grip the cutlass hilt in his belt. Rivers almost admired the man. No one else had ever dared challenge him to become leader of the crew. And yet with McCawley as their captain they would all be drowned, shot or hung before the year was out.
‘We’ll vote right here,’ McCawley said, ‘and Quartermaster Dowling will see that it is done fair and honest.’
Dowling nodded and Rivers saw McCawley’s major accomplices were murmuring to the men around them, warning them against voting the wrong way.
‘Your time is over, old man,’ McCawley told Rivers.
The man was half right. Rivers would give him that. At forty-six he was not a young man. His thinning hair, tied back in a long pigtail beneath his broad-brimmed hat, was silver now and his bones complained in the mornings when he climbed out of his bunk. But was his time over? No, McCawley was wrong about that.
Rivers touched his hat’s rim, which was the pre-arranged signal, and the loyalists in his crew went to work. Bendall tried to haul his cutlass from his belt but the dagger in his heart robbed him of strength and he fell to his knees in the sand. It was butchery, and when Rivers picked out Laney amongst the slaughtered he saw the man standing there staring right at him, the grim red smile cut across his throat spilling blood down his naked torso.
Then Rivers was moving and the men cleared a path for him, scuttling away from John McCawley too, the way woodlice flee when someone puts fire to the log in which they were hiding. McCawley saw him coming, and yet to his credit he drew his pistol, and cocked the hammer.
‘Damn you to hell and back!’ he yelled and he fired. Rivers felt the ball shred the air by his left ear; but so many had tried to kill him and much good it had done them. And now McCawley hurled his pistol into the sand and lifted his cutlass even as Rivers pulled his own blade from its scabbard. It was a broad-bladed, basket-hilted sword. Not an entirely practical weapon when boarding enemy ships; however, ashore it was a limb-lopping man-killer.
McCawley aimed a blow at Rivers’s head. Rivers blocked his blade with a dead hit. Then he slammed the basket hilt of his own sword into McCawley’s face. The man staggered backwards but Rivers followed up in the instant and led with the point. McCawley froze as the blade went full length into his armpit. Then slowly his fingers opened and the cutlass fell into the sand at his feet. Rivers leaned close to him and locked his free arm around McCawley’s neck like a lover. Then he worked the blade back and forth, enlarging the wound, splitting his heart so that the blood pumped out in a thick crimson stream.
When McCawley’s legs buckled under him, he plucked out the long blade and stepped back.
‘Anyone else?’ Rivers asked in a conversational tone.
His own supporters closed up around him. However, he knew which men McCawley had bought off, the ones who had been busy in the last week coercing others with threats and bribes, and those men were nothing more than meat for the crabs now.
‘Captain!’ one of his own men called, and for a heartbeat Rivers thought that perhaps the day’s killing wasn’t over after all.
‘Captain! Ships!’ the man called again, pointing out to sea. Rivers pushed his way through the crowd and shaded his eyes to get a better look at the approaching sails.
‘That leading frigate is a beauty!’ Dowling spoke in awe. ‘Fast, light and powerful. Proud as can be. And that’s a pretty little caravel following in her wake.’
The frigate was not moving as fast as she could have been, for she only had half her canvas spread to the wind. Evidently her captain had enough sense to be cautious, being this close to the island. He would be taking his soundings and watching his speed, his deep-keeled vessel being almost amongst the shoals and reefs. But why was he this close to the island? Rivers asked himself; most passing ships gave it a wide berth, sticking to the deeper parts of the channel or even holding not less than a half league’s distance from the mainland.
‘Be this yet another ambitious fellow come to snuff out the Pirate
Rivers and his cutthroat crew?’ Dowling pondered his own question, as he shot his captain a wry look.
‘Catch her in our net and we shall be rich as kings.’ Someone else voiced his opinion, and Rivers could almost feel the hackles rise all around him as his men steeled themselves to the hunt like the predators they were.
‘She has twice our guns,’ Dowling said. ‘Even with the dhows she’ll be a tough nut to crack.’ And yet the quartermaster’s eyes glinted hungrily at the sight of her. ‘We’ll lose men. Boats too, like as not.’
Rivers nodded because this was all true. But his crew wanted a prize and so he would give them one. ‘They will fly past and need never know that we are here.’ He gave a false opinion to stir them up. ‘Or …’
He left the alternative unstated. He knew that the frigate’s captain would soon spot Ilha Quifuqui due south of him and turn his bows west in order to skirt that island, which would give Rivers time to set his trap. ‘We’ll send the dhows through the channel to cut her off south of Quifuqui. Meantime, we’ll give her gunners something to think about. While she flirts with the Achilles, the dhow crews will creep up and board her, bow and stern.’
Dowling nodded. It had worked before and, God willing, it would work again today.
Rivers was about to give the order for the crews to get to their stations, when something else gave him pause. ‘She’s changing course, Mr Dowling,’ he said, frowning now not because of the sun’s brightness but because something did not feel right. For the frigate was swinging her bows round, not into the west to skirt the southern tip of Ilha Quifuqui, but rather into the east. Towards them.
‘Bugger me but she’s seen us!’ Dowling lamented.
Rivers shook his head. ‘She knew we were here,’ he said, somehow certain of it.