A Falcon Flies

by Wilbur Smith

  The sight of the long-barrelled weapons reminded Robyn forcefully of that night aboard Huron, and she bit her lip and shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘Do not fret yourself, Miss Ballantyne.’ Clinton mistook her emotion, and whispered soothingly to comfort her while he unbuttoned his jacket and shrugged out of it. Beneath it he also wore a plain white shirt to give St John a fair aim. He handed her the jacket and would have spoken again but Zouga called.

  ‘Will the principals come forward.’

  And Clinton gave her another tightly strained smile before he strode out, his heels leaving deep prints in the damp yellow sand.

  He faced Mungo St John, holding his gaze steadily, both of them completely expressionless.

  ‘Gentlemen, I appeal to both of you to settle this affair without bloodshed.’ Zouga went through the ritual attempt at reconciliation. ‘Captain Codrington, as challenger, will you tender an apology?’

  Clinton shook his head once, curtly.

  ‘Mr St John, is there any other way in which we can avoid bloodshed?’

  ‘I think not, sir,’ St John drawled as he carefully tapped half an inch of grey ash from his cheroot.

  ‘Very well,’ Zouga nodded and went on immediately to set the conditions of the meeting. ‘At the command “Proceed” each of you gentlemen will take ten paces, which I will count aloud. Immediately after the count of ten I will give the command “Fire” upon which you will be at liberty to turn and discharge your weapon.’

  Zouga paused and glanced at Tippoo, there was a long-barrelled muzzle-loading pistol thrust into the waistband of his baggy breeches.

  ‘Both seconds are armed.’ Zouga laid his right hand on the butt of the Colt pistol in his own belt. ‘If either principal attempts to fire before the command to do so, then he will immediately be shot down by the seconds.’

  He paused again looking from one to the other. ‘Is that clearly understood, gentlemen?’ They both nodded. ‘Do either of you have a question?’ Zouga waited in silence for a few seconds then went on. ‘Very well, we will proceed. Mr St John you have first choice of weapon.’

  Mungo St John dropped the cheroot and ground it into the sand with his heel, before stepping forward. Tippoo offered him the rosewood case and after a momentary hesitation St John lifted out one of the beautifully inlaid weapons. He pointed at the sky and cocked the hammer with a sweep of his free hand.

  Clinton took the remaining pistol and weighed it experimentally in his hand, settling the butt deeply into the vee formed by thumb and forefinger, turning half away and lifting the pistol at full stretch of his arm to aim it at one of the black and bright yellow bishop birds that chattered in the reeds nearby.

  With relief Robyn watched the familiar ease with which her champion handled the weapon, and she felt completely certain of the outcome now. Good must triumph, and she started to pray again, silently, only her lips moving as she recited the twenty-third psalm.

  ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’

  ‘Take your positions, gentlemen.’ Zouga stepped back and gestured to Robyn. Still praying, she hurried to where Zouga stood, and fell in a few paces behind him, well out on the flank from the lines of fire of the two principals.

  Beside Zouga, Tippoo drew the long, clumsy-looking pistol from the sash around his waist and cocked the big ornate hammer, the bore of the barrel gaped like a cannon as he lifted it into the ‘present’ position. Zouga drew his own Colt revolver and stood quietly while the two principals walked the last few paces towards each other and then turned back to back.

  Beyond them the early sun was gilding the hilltops with bright gold, but leaving the lagoon still in shadow so the still dark waters steamed with wisps of mist. In the silence a ghostly grey heron croaked hoarsely and then launched into flight from the edge of the reedbank with slow wingbeats, its neck drawn back into a snakelike ‘S’ to balance the long beak.

  ‘Proceed!’ called Zouga, so loudly that Robyn started violently.

  The two men stepped out, away from each other, with deliberate strides, heeling heavily in the yielding sand, pacing to the count that Zouga called.

  ‘Five.’ Mungo St John was smiling softly, as though at some secret joke, and his white silk sleeve fluttered like a moth’s wing around the uplifted arm that held the slim steel-blue barrel pointed at the dawn sky.

  ‘Six.’ Clinton leaned forward, stepping out with long legs clad in white uniform breeches. His face was set, pale as a mask, his lips drawn into a thin determined line.

  ‘Seven.’ Robyn felt the beat of her heart crescendo, thumping painfully against the cage of her ribs so that she could not breathe.

  ‘Eight.’ She noticed for the first time the patches of sweat that had soaked through the armpits of Clinton’s white shirt, despite the chill of the dawn air.

  ‘Nine.’ Suddenly she was deadly afraid for him, all her faith dissolved in a sudden premonition of disaster rushing down upon her.

  ‘Ten!’ She wanted to scream to them to stop. She wanted to rush forward and throw herself into the space between the two men. She didn’t want them to die, either of them. She tried to fill her lungs but her throat was closed and dry, she tried to drive her legs forward but they were locked rigidly under her, beyond her control.

  ‘Fire!’ shouted Zouga, his voice cracking with the tension that gripped all the watchers and out on the damp darkyellow sand both men turned, like a pair of dancers in a meticulously rehearsed ballet of death.

  Their right arms out-flung towards each other in a gesture like that of parted lovers, the left hand on the hip to balance, the classic stance of the expert marksman.

  Time seemed suspended, the movements of the two men graceful but measured, without the urgency of onrushing death.

  The silence was complete, there was no wind to rustle the reeds, no bird nor animal called from the looming forest across the lagoon, the footfalls of the two men were deadened by the yielding sand – the world seemed to hold its breath.

  And then the crash of pistol fire awoke the echoes and sent them bounding and booming across the gorge, leaping from cliff to cliff, startling the birds into raucous flight.

  The two shots were within one hundredth of a second of each other, so that they blended into a single blurt of sound. From the levelling blue barrels the dead white powder smoke spurted, and then the barrels were flung upwards in unison with the shock of discharge.

  Both men reeled backwards, keeping their feet, but Robyn had seen the smoke fly from the muzzle of Mungo St John’s pistol a fraction of a second earlier, and then an instant later Mungo’s big dark head flinched as though he had been struck with an open hand across the cheek.

  After that one staggered pace backwards, he steadied, drawing himself to his full height, the pistol still smoking in his raised hand, staring at his adversary, and Robyn felt a rush of relief. Mungo St John was unscathed. She wanted to run to him, and then suddenly the joy withered, a dark red snake of blood slithered from the thick hair at his temple down the smoothly shaven olive skin of his cheek and dripped with slow sullen drops on to the white silk of his shirt.

  She lifted her hand to her mouth to cover the cry that rose within her, and then her attention was distracted by another movement in the corner of her vision and she swung her head with a jerky movement towards Clinton Codrington.

  He also had been standing erect, with almost military bearing, but now he began to bow slowly forward at the waist. The right hand holding the pistol hung at his side and now his fingers opened and the ornate weapon dropped into the sand at his feet.

  He lifted the empty hand and placed it across his chest with fingers outspread in a gesture that seemed reverential and slowly his body bent forward and now his legs gave way under him and he dropped to his knees, as though in prayer. Kneeling, he lifted his hand away from his chest and examined with an expression of mild surprise the small smear of blood that coated his fingers and then he pitched forward face down on to the sand.
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  At last Robyn could move. She raced forward and dropped to her knees beside Clinton’s fallen body, and with strength of panic rolled him on to his back. The front of the white linen shirt was damp with a little blood around the neat puncture in the cloth six inches to the left of the line of mother of pearl buttons.

  He had been half-turned to fire and the ball had taken him low and left, at the level of the lungs, she saw instantly. The lungs! She felt despair overwhelm her. It would mean death, no less certain because it was slow and agonizing. She would have to watch this man drown inexorably in his own blood.

  Sand crunched beside her and she looked up.

  Mungo St John stood over her, his shirt a mess of wet blood. He was holding a silk kerchief to his temple to staunch the copious flow where the pistol ball had stripped a long ribbon of scalp off his skull above the ear.

  His eyes were bleak, his expression forbidding and his voice cold and distant as he told her quietly.

  ‘I trust you will be satisfied at last, madam.’ Then he turned abruptly up the white dune towards the beach. She wanted to run after him, to restrain him, to explain – to explain she knew not what, but her duty was here, with the man more gravely stricken. Her fingers shook as she unbuttoned the front of Clinton’s shirt and saw the dark blue hole punched into the pale flesh from which a little thick slow blood oozed. So little blood at the mouth of the wound – it was the worst indication – the bleeding would be inside, deep inside the chest cavity.

  ‘Zouga, my bag,’ she called sharply.

  Zouga came to her, carrying the bag and went down on one knee beside her.

  ‘I am but lightly struck,’ murmured Clinton. ‘I have no pain. Just a feeling of numbness here.’

  Zouga did not reply. He had seen a multitude of gunshot wounds in India, pain was no indication of the severity. A ball through the hand or foot was unbearable agony, another through both lungs was only mildly discomforting.

  Only one thing puzzled him and that was why Mungo St John’s shot had been so wide. At twenty paces he would surely have taken the head shot, aiming between the eyes with an expectation of the ball deviating less than an inch from the point of aim, yet the shot had taken Clinton low in the chest.

  While Robyn pressed a dressing over the wicked little blue mouth of the wound, Zouga picked the pistol out of the sand. The barrel was still warm and there was the peppery whiff of burned powder as he examined it and saw instantly why Mungo’s shot had struck wide.

  There was a bluish smear of bright new lead on the steel trigger guard.

  Mungo St John had indeed aimed at the head, but Clinton had lifted the pistol to his eye at the same instant directly in the line of sight. St John’s ball had struck the metal guard and been deflected downwards.

  That would account for the fact that Clinton’s own ball had been high, for as a less expert marksman he would surely have aimed for St John’s chest. The strike of the ball had thrown his weapon upwards at the moment of discharge.

  Zouga looked up and handed the pistol to Tippoo who waited impassively close at hand. Without a word, Tippoo took the weapon, turned away and followed his master over the dunes.

  By the time four seamen from the gunboat could carry Clinton Codrington down the beach using his boat cloak as a hammock, St John was climbing up from the Huron’s whaler on to his main deck, and before they could rig a block and tackle to lift the prostrate form of her captain into Black Joke – Huron had broken out her anchor and was spreading sail before the south-westerly breeze and bearing away with the sunrise transforming her into a vessel etched in golden fire.

  For twenty-four hours Clinton Codrington surprised Robyn with the strength of his recovery. She looked to see blood on his lips, and she expected him to experience the agony of breathing as the damaged lung collapsed. Every few hours she listened with her sounding trumpet to his chest, stooping over the bunk in his cabin to catch the hiss and saw of his breathing, listening for the bubbling sound of blood, or for the dry rubbing of the lung against the rib cage, and was puzzled when none of these symptoms occurred.

  Indeed Clinton was unaccountably resilient for a patient with ball through the chest cavity. He complained only of stiffness reaching up into his left armpit and semi-paralysis of that arm – and he was vociferous in his advice to his surgeon.

  ‘You will bleed me, of course?’ he asked.

  ‘I will not,’ Robyn told him shortly as she cleaned the area around the wound and then lifted him into a sitting position to bandage his chest.

  ‘You should take at least a pint,’ Clinton insisted.

  ‘Have you not bled enough?’ Robyn asked witheringly, but he was undaunted.

  ‘There is black rotten blood that must be taken off.’ Clinton indicated the massive bruise that was spreading around his chest like some dark parasitic plant around the smooth pale trunk.

  ‘You must bleed me,’ Clinton insisted, for all his adult life he had been exposed to the ministrations of naval surgeons. ‘If you don’t, fever is sure to follow.’

  He offered Robyn the inner curve of his elbow where the thin white scars over the blue blood vessels marked where he had been bled before.

  ‘We no longer live in the dark ages,’ Robyn told him tartly. ‘This is 1860,’ and she pushed him down on the bolster and covered him with a grey ship’s blanket against the shivering and chilling nausea which she knew must soon accompany such a wound. It did not come, and for the next twenty hours he continued to manage the ship from his bunk, and he chafed at the restraint she placed on him. However, Robyn knew the pistol ball was still in there and that there must be drastic consequences. She wished that there was some technique that could enable a surgeon to locate the whereabouts of a foreign body accurately, and then allow him to enter the rib cage and remove it.

  That evening she fell asleep in the rope chair beside his bunk, awakening once to hold the enamel cup of water to his lips when he complained of thirst and noting the dryness and heat of his skin, and in the morning all her fears were confirmed.

  He was only semi-conscious, and the pain was fierce. He moaned and cried out at the smallest movement. His eyes were sunken into plum-coloured cavities, his tongue was thickly coated with white and his lips were dried and cracked. He pleaded for drink and his skin was hot, the heat increasing every hour until it seemed to be burning out the core of his being, and he was restless and flushed, tossing in the narrow bunk, fighting off the blankets with which she tried to keep him covered, and whimpering in his delirium at the agony of movement. His breath was sawing painfully in his swollen and bruised chest, his eyes were glittering bright, and when Robyn unwound the bandage to sponge his body with cool water there was only a little pale fluid staining the dressing, but her nostrils flared as she smelled it. It was so horribly familiar, she always thought of that stench as the fetid breath of death itself.

  The wound had shrunk, but the crust that had formed over it was so thin that it cracked at one of Clinton’s restless movements and through it rose a thick droplet of custard-oloured matter. Immediately the smell was stronger. This was not the benign pus of healing, but the malignant pus that she so dreaded to see in a wound.

  She swabbed it away carefully, and then with cold sea-ater sponged his chest and the hard hot swollen flesh below his armpit. The bruising was extensive and it had changed colour, dark blue as storm clouds, tinged with the yellow of sulphur and the virulent rose of some flower from the gardens of Hell itself.

  There was one area just below the point of his shoulder blade particularly sensitive for he screamed when she touched it, and a sparse prickle of sweat broke out across his forehead and amongst the fine golden bristles of his unshaven cheeks.

  She replaced the bandage with a fresh dressing and then forced between his dry lips four grams of laudanum mixed with a warm draught of calomel. She watched while he fell into a restless drug-induced sleep.

  ‘Another twenty-four hours,’ she whispered aloud, watching him toss and mu
tter. She had seen it so often. Soon the pus would suffuse his whole body, building up steadily around the ball deep in his chest. She was helpless. No surgeon could enter the rib cage, it had never been done before.

  She looked up as Zouga stooped into the cabin. He was grave and quiet, standing beside her chair for a moment and placing a hand on her shoulder comfortingly.

  ‘He improves?’ he asked softly.

  She shook her head, and he nodded as though he had expected the answer.

  ‘You must eat.’ He offered her the pannikin. ‘I brought you some pea soup. It has bacon in it, it’s very good.’

  She had not realized how hungry she was and she ate gratefully, breaking the hard ship’s bread into the broth and Zouga went on quietly,

  ‘I loaded the pistols with less than a full charge, as little as I dared.’ He shook his head irritably. ‘Damned bad luck. After Mungo’s ball hit the trigger guard, I’d not have expected it to have entered the chest – it must have lost most of its power.’

  She looked up quickly. ‘It struck the trigger guard – you did not tell me.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not important now. But the ball was deflected.’

  She sat very still in her chair for ten minutes after he was gone, and then purposefully she stood over the bunk and stripped back the blanket, unwound the bandage and examined the wound again.

  Very carefully she began to sound the ribs beneath it, pressing in with thumb gently to feel for the give of shattered bone. The ribs were all firm, yet that was no proof that the ball had not driven between two of them.

  She pressed her thumb into the swelling towards the outside of his chest, and although he thrashed around weakly, she thought she felt the rasp of bone against bone – as though the rib had been chipped or even as if a long splinter had been cracked off it.

  She felt a little flutter of excitement, and extended her examination gradually backwards, guided by his delirious cries of pain, until once again she reached the lower point of his shoulder and he came upright in the bunk with another wild yell of agony, breaking out once more into the burning sweat of high fever. But with the tip of her finger she thought she had felt something, something that was neither bone nor knotted muscle.