“Let them have the raft, sir, so that this nightmare be over.”
Michiel turned to du Trieux. “Would you trust this Christiaan van Sant, corporal?”
“If he were trussed, tied and gagged and his balls were in my purse.”
Michiel looked down the beach. Christiaan’s raft had drawn closer into the shallows and one of the Frenchmen was calling out to one of his own boys, in their own language.
He turned back to the pastor. “What if we don't want to trade?”
The pastor stepped closer. “I beg you sir, don’t send me back, in the name of the Lord, for I cannot stand another moment as their prisoner. Their treatment of me has been abominable. You cannot know how I have suffered.”
And he began to weep again.
***
Christiaan stood on the beach, one hand on his hip, and weaved his magic, Gilles Clement and Steenhower beside him. The French soldiers had gathered around, eager to hear what they had to say.
“Whatever you have been told,” he said, ‘there has been some misunderstanding. Yes, there has indeed been bloodshed on the island. There was mutiny and I had to suppress it for the good of all.”
He spared a glance down the beach. Michiel was still talking to the pastor. This was going to be all too easy.
“It is true that the jonkers tricked you into believing there was plentiful water here. They tricked all of us. I knew nothing of this until it was too late. They did this because they wished there to be more food and water for the rest of us. As it is, there have been fights over the rations, as there was that first day, and I have been powerless to stop the bloodshed. Krueger and the jonker, Lennart ten Broek, have overruled my authority, and it is as much as I can do now to keep the peace between those of us that survive.”
He reminded himself that he looked fine this morning, very fine. His chestnut hair was carefully brushed, and a gold medallion nestled in the ruff of his collar. He knew he made for a breath-taking vision on this drab morning, these poor fools looked as stunned as chickens goggling at the butcher's knife.
Really, Christiaan thought, it is so easy to get people to do whatever you wished. God Himself had blessed him with a golden tongue; wherever he went, people listened to him, did as he bade them do. And every day, his power was growing.
He weaved his golden spell around them. In the background, the malcontents who had escaped from the seal island stood glowering, helpless to stop this.
“That is not what Welten and the women say,” one of the Frenchies said.
Christiaan made a face, to show what he thought of listening to women. Somebody laughed. Christiaan warmed to the task now, playing to the crowd.
“You know what women are like. They all have many words and few thoughts. As for Welten, he is a butler. Do I need say more?”
More chuckles from the soldiers.
“It is clear that that drunkard Schellinger is not coming back for us, and that the commandeur too has abandoned us here to rot. The Houtman Rocks is too miserable to sustain us further, and Krueger and the jonkers want us to try our luck on the high island you see over there. For that we must have the raft stolen from us by various miserable persons. Why don’t you come with us? We have wine and plentiful food and blankets that you might keep yourselves warm through these cold nights.”
“The cloth belongs to the Company,” one of the Frenchies said.
“I think in the circumstances, the Company will not mind. They can have your old breeches in exchange.”
More laughter. Christiaan was delighted to have an audience appreciative of his oratory. He was really enjoying himself now.
He turned to Gilles who unwrapped the blanket he had brought with him from the raft. Inside was a roundel of Gouda cheese and he tossed it to one of the soldiers, who caught it with a look of stunned surprise. Then he held up the blanket for them all to see, they slavered over it as if it were woven silk and not poor quality wool. “Join us and there will be blankets enough for everyone.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Michiel Van Texel and the Flemish and English mercenaries further up the beach. “While you're freezing your balls off every night we have more wine than we can drink.”
The men looked at each other.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of silver rix dollars. “There's plenty of these for everyone who comes over to us!’
“Where are we going to spend it? Give it to the mutton birds?”
“That's the best part. As soon as the rescue ship comes, we will be taken aboard, no one will suspect that poor starving wretches as ourselves have teeth. Then we will take her as our own!’ He looked from face to face, watched their expressions change. “What do you think? How much will the Company reward you for your loyalty here, cooped up on this God forsaken island for months? Come with us and you can make your own fortunes, be your own men!’
He held one of the silver dollars in front of their eyes. The bright metal caught the sun, mesmerising them. He had never felt so eloquent, so masterful, so much in control. He jingled his purse. “What do you care for the Company? Our silver is better than theirs and you'll have a lot more of it. Let us be friends again!’
Damned garlic eaters. Sell their own mothers if there was profit in it. You'd never find anyone in the world as amoral as a Frenchman. Not even a Spaniard.
“Here,” he said, throwing more coins at their feet. They went tinkling among the rocks. “Take the money! It's yours! Isn't our money as good as the Company's?”
He looked around at Steenhower and Gilles Clement, they hand their hands on their swords, eager to be at their former comrades. He shook his head: give me a little more time, I’ll have them eating out of my hand, then we’ll deal with Michiel Van Texel and the rest and get our women back.
“Let’s talk about this,” one of the Frenchies said and they went back to the rocks and started whispering among themselves.
They came back with war cries. Where had they got those weapons from? They must have hidden them among the rocks. Christiaan felt a warm flood of urine down his leg. He had seen how men died; had seen enough of it to know what it would be like. He turned and ran back through the shallows to the raft, let Steenhower and Clement do the fighting--after all, that was their profession. He was their leader and too important to lose.
***
Steenhower stumbled in the mud and went under. When he came up again there was a gash running from his temple to his ear, watery blood streaming out of it.
“God's death,” Christiaan breathed.
The verediggers were rushing down the beach now armed with pikes. Where had they got those? Even those men who had stood their ground, Gerrit van Hoeck and Willem Groot, were falling back now. The soldiers pursued them into the shallows, jeering at them as they ran.
This could not be happening, he could not credit their perfidy. He had come under a white flag. Had these men no honour? They had betrayed his flag of truce!
He heard Gerrit van Hoeck screaming, he and Groot and Jensen were being cut to pieces. Steenhower launched himself at the raft, and then lay on the deck, his hair matted with blood, a stream of gore dripping steadily from his ugly beak of a nose onto the wet timber. He had lost his fine hat in the commotion.
The boat rocked and pitched dangerously as the other soldiers scrambled aboard, while Michiel Van Texel' soldiers catcalled and mocked them from the beach. Hermanus Schenck turned the raft around and let the current drag them back into the lagoon.
Chapter 89
The Zandaam
BARENTS and Messeker were grey from the long watches, the skipper's face haggard beneath his beard, the sailors bone-tired and freezing from struggling with ropes and fighting the sails aloft. Ambroise himself was on the point of collapse. It was only his will that kept him standing; his will and the ghost of Cornelia Noorstrandt.
Not a good night's sleep since the voyage had begun, the sleeplessness worse the closer they came. Now fifty-six days at sea, and they were still f
rittering around and no sight of the islands and no way through the reefs.
Ambroise was sure the skipper would have led them straight there.
I have made so many mistakes in this, he thought. Perhaps these constant fevers have robbed me of my power to reason. Have I done one good thing? It was my want of revenge that has the skipper in irons; I should have laid aside my personal enmity and given him a chance for his own redemption as well.
They ran into another squall. He hoped it would be raining for Cornelia also. He paced the quarterdeck, shivering in his wet clothes, his body racked with chills again.
He turned to Barents. “Why are we not seeing the islands?”
“We are at the correct latitudes, I'm sure of it,” Barents said. “But the wind is against us here.”
The wind against them; for weeks it had been the same story from the uppersteersmen, they blamed unfavourable currents, or the contrary breezes that had blown them off course. Every day the wind blew from the south east, so they carried the mainsail at half, losing latitude as they crept towards the Southland. Then at night they would sail back out to sea, for fear of striking the reef, and in the morning the quest would begin again. They were always either too far south or too far to the west. They had sailed back and forwards for weeks through this same latitude, looking for a passage through, and Ambroise was at his wit's end.
“This is ridiculous. We reached Batavia in a tiny sloop in just thirty days, yet here we are, in one of the finest yachts in the Company's fleet, we have sailed more than fifty days up and down the Southland coast and have not found the wreck or the people.”
“That is no fault of mine,” the captain, Evarts, protested. “It is notorious that the Utrecht was lost through her skipper's carelessness, but it cannot be allowed that the Zandaam founders through negligence as well. As for the bearings we have followed, it is hardly surprising to me that they are at fault, since it was bad navigation that lost her in the first place.”
Barents rounded on him in a fine temper. “It was no fault of the steersmen that the Utrecht foundered, God's death!’
The oath stunned them all to silence. A scourging offence, if they had a pastor on board, which thankfully they did not.
“My humblest apologies, Heer Commandeur,” Barents muttered, chastened.
Another long pacing silence on the deck as the Zandaam's officers tried to regain their tempers. “You should go below, sir,” Evarts said to Ambroise. “You seem unwell.”
“I am well enough!’ he snapped back.
He looked down into the swelling ocean, seaweed and cuttlefish bones floating in the wash. Where were the islands?
The long island
Four bodies to bury and Willem Groot trussed like a roasting hog and still screaming threats, so they put a gag in his mouth and one of the Frenchies pissed on his head. That shut him up.
But today's was a tainted victory for they had the preacher back with them.
He sat there by the fire, stuffing his face with haunches of roasted cat. He seemed to have a liking for them, kept raving about how delicious it was to eat meat again. The man's family had been slaughtered by those butchers and he seemed only to care about how they had deprived his stomach.
Hard to understand this man. Michiel didn't want to try.
He squatted down, snatched the roasted joint out of the pastor’s hand. The grease on his chin glistened in the firelight and the shadows threw up the hollows in his cheeks. His jowls hung loose like saddlebags.
“Is Hendrika still alive?” Michiel said to him.
“I did all I could.”
“And how much was that?”
“I tried to protect her, but they pinned me down. It took four of them to do it.”
He heard Willem Groot shrieking and protesting through the gag. Even he couldn't stomach that.
“Cornelia here says you married her off to one of the jonkers.”
He licked his lips, looked trapped. Oh, you churchman bastard.
“She consented to this?”
“Of course.”
“And this rogue here is telling me the truth?” he said to Groot. “She still lives?”
He nodded, wide-eyed.
The pastor nodded at Groot. “We should do that one to death. He murdered my Maria and my little Willemyntge...” His lower lip started to quiver. He wept.
Finally, some tears for someone else.
Michiel looked across the lagoon. Somehow that bastard Christiaan had got away from them. Du Trieux had told him what he had said on the beach. That silver tongued devil could persuade the angels themselves to a night in hell.
Now he understood why they wanted the raft. They were going to try and steal their rescue ship! They would just have to make sure they got there first.
The Zandaam
Ambroise prowled the poop deck, his fists white knuckled around the rail. For two days the storm had kept them here, all anchors out. He cursed into the wind, the foul words carried away on the tempest. It was as if God Himself conspired against him. Somewhere out there was the woman he loved, Rubens' priceless vase and three hundred people.
Evarts held out the eyeglass. “There are the reefs again,” he said.
Ambroise snatched it from him, stared at the foam of another breakwater. His nerves were at breaking point. The Utrecht must have somehow passed through this maze that night, the only way they would find her now would be to enter the same foul ground.
He told the captain what he wanted him to do.
Evarts shook his head. “It's too dangerous, Heer Commandeur.”
“We have been sixty days under sail, Sinjeur Evarts. For a month now we have sailed around these latitudes and seen no sign of the wreck. I say the Utrecht is inside these reefs and we should proceed from the landward side to pass inside. There is a broad channel here, if we proceed with circumspection.”
“If we lose the Zandaam...”
“We shall not lose the Zandaam if we approach from the landward side. The winds and currents are not as strong. But if we do not do this my way we shall be old men with grey beards and still find ourselves under sail.”
An argument ensued. But Ambroise stood his ground. After all, he thought: I have nothing left to lose.
The Houtman Rocks
Steenhower leaped off the first raft and ploughed through the shallows ahead of the others. Blood from a gash on his arm dripped from the end of his fingers.
Hendrika had run down to the beach to meet them. “Where’s my father?” she said
Steenhower walked straight up to her and sent her sprawling into the brush. “You can take that grin off your face, you little whore!’
The rest of the men stormed up the beach. They were shouting and cursing, blaming each other for what had happened. How could they be defeated by a rabble with pikes made out of flotsam?
Krueger and Lennart ten Broek stood there, gaping at him in disbelief.
“What happened, Captain-General?”
“We were betrayed,” he growled, but refused to answer more of their questions and marched up to his tent and went inside and reached for the ceramic bottle of fine French brandy he had left on his driftwood table. Damn Michiel Van Texel. Damn them all!
The Zandaam
An eerie silence on the ship as they made their passage. Even the sailors seemed to hold their breath; the only sound the leadsman shouting the depths as they inched through. In these waters, huge waves would sometimes rear up from nowhere, and if such a comber came at them now it would dash them on the reef and punch the mainmast through the hull.
But the weather held. For once Fortuna did not raise her hand against him.
They passed the claws of the reef and found thirty fathoms of good water. Evarts shouted orders to set the topmast sails and the sailors raced like monkeys up the ratlines as they tacked hard against the wind.
Chapter 90
The long island
CORNELIA held the rix-dollar up to the light, then placed it f
lat on a limestone rock. She picked up the adze that one of the carpenters had given her and weighed it in her hand. She held the coin loosely with her left hand and tapped it with the adze. Well, that was no good, hardly a dent in the silver.
She settled herself on her haunches and brought the adze back over her shoulder. She swung down as hard as she could, two-handed, and the coin split, not perfectly but enough. She chopped again, and again, until she had cut it in two. She smoothed the edges as best she could by rubbing the jagged ends on the rocks.
There. That should do it.
The Zandaam
“There it is,” Ambroise breathed, and passed the glass to Barents.
“I don't know, Heer Commandeur. I cannot be sure it is the place.”
“I am sure,” he said. “Those are the high islands we saw from the wreck.”
He knew what they were thinking: that he was being fanciful, seeing only what he wished to see. But Ambroise was certain.
The sun was sinking behind the distant storm clouds, throwing the islands into dark relief. Even now he would have to wait.
Tomorrow would tell everything.
Chapter 91
The Houtman Rocks
THEY all sat around the small fire, occasionally jumping to their feet to shout recriminations at each other. Their kingdom had crumbled away to a tiny cay of saltbush and coral slate.
Eyes already turned towards the sea in dread, looking for sails, a Company yacht with tough VOC soldiers aboard her. Nerves were frayed, murmurs of conscience pricking even men like Steenhower and David Krueger. This first reverse had shaken their confidence. They had thought they were invincible, now their swaggers and grins had been wiped off. Christiaan knew they needed a quick victory, must see blood on the sand again to get the spirits up again.
East India Page 29