Birds of Prey c-1

by Wilbur Smith

  "No doubt the Prester will be in need of military as well as naval assistance?" Schreuder asked abruptly. He was trying to disguise the excitement he felt. This was a direct answer to his prayers, "Would you look kindly upon my request for passage aboard your fine ship to the theatre of war? I, also, am determined to offer my services."

  Llewellyn looked startled. "A sudden decision, sir. Do you not have duties and obligations ashore? Would it be possible for you to sail with me at such short notice?" indeed, Captain, your presence here in Table Bay seems like a stroke of destiny. I have this very day freed myself from the obligations of which you speak. It is almost as though I had divine premonition of this call to duty. I stand ready to answer the call. I would be pleased to pay for my passage, and that of the lady who is to be my wife, in gold coin."

  Llewellyn looked doubtful, scratched his beard and studied Schreuder shrewdly. "I have only one small cabin unoccupied, hardly fit accommodation for persons of quality."

  "I would pay ten English guineas for the privilege of sailing with you," Schreuder said, and the captain's expression cleared.

  "I should be honoured by your company, and that of your lady. However, I cannot delay my departure by a single hour. I must sail with the tide. I will have a boat take you ashore and wait for you on the beach."

  As Schreuder was rowed away he was seething with excitement. The service of an oriental potentate in a religious war would surely offer opportunities for martial glory and enrichment far beyond what he could ever have expected in the service of the Dutch East India Company. He had been offered an escape from the threat of disgrace and ignominy. After this war, he might still return to Holland laden with gold and glory. This was the tide of fortune he had waited for all his life and, with the woman he loved beyond everything else at his side, he would take that tide at the full.

  As soon as the boat beached he sprang out and tossed a small silver coin to the boatswain, "Wait for me!" and strode off towards the castle. His servant was waiting in his quarters, and Schreuder gave him instructions to pack all his possessions, have them carried down to the foreshore and placed upon the Golden Bough's longboat. It seemed that the entire garrison must know already of his dismissal. Even his servant was not surprised by his orders, so none would think it odd that he was moving out.

  He shouted for his groom and ordered him to saddle his single remaining horse. While he waited for the horse to be brought round from the stables, he stood before the small mirror in his dressing room and rearranged his uniform, brushed out his wig and reshaped his moustaches. He felt a glow of excitement and a sense of release. By the time that the Governor realized that he and Katinka were gone, the Golden Bough would be well out to sea and on course for the Orient.

  He hurried down the stairs, out into the yard where the groom now held his horse, and sprang into the saddle. He was in great haste, anxious to be away, and he pushed his mount to a gallop along the avenues towards the Governor's residence. His haste was not so great, however, as to deprive him of all caution. He did not ride up the front drive through the lawns in front of the mansion, but took the side road through the oak grove which was used by slaves and the suppliers of firewood and provisions from the village. He reined his horse in as soon as he was close enough for its hoofbeats to be heard in the residence, and walked the animal sedately into the stableyard behind the kitchens. As he dismounted a startled groom hurried out to take the horse, and Schreuder skirted the kitchen wall, entering the gardens through the small gate in the corner.

  He looked about carefully for the gardeners were often working in this part of the estate, but he saw no sign of them. He walked across the lawns, neither dawdling nor hurrying, and entered the residence through the double doors that led into the library. The long, book-lined room was deserted.

  Schreuder was well acquainted with the layout of the residence. He had visited Katinka often enough while her husband was about his duties in the castle. He went first to her reading room, which overlooked the lawns and a distant vista of the bay and the blue Atlantic. It was Katinka's favourite retreat, but this noon she was not there. A female slave was on her knees in front of the bookshelves, taking down each volume one at a time and polishing the leather bindings with a soft cloth. She looked up, startled, as Schreuder burst in upon her.

  "Where is your mistress?" he demanded, and when she gawked dumbly at him he repeated, "Where is Mevrouw van de Velde?"

  The slave girl scrambled to her feet in confusion. "The mistress is in her bedroom. But she is not to be disturbed. She is unwell. She left strict instructions."

  Schreuder spun on his heel and went down the corridor. Gently he tried the handle of the door at the end of the passage, but it was locked from within. He exclaimed with impatience. Time was wasting away, and he knew Llewellyn would not hesitate to make good his threat to sail without him when the tide turned. He hurried back along the corridor and stepped through the glazed doors out onto the long veranda. He went down to the windows that opened into the principal bedroom suite. The windows to Katinka's closet were shuttered, and he raised his fist to knock upon them but restrained himself. He did not want to alert the house slaves. Instead he drew his sword, slipped the blade through the gap in the shutters and lifted the latch on the inside. He eased open the shutter and stepped inside over the sill.

  Katinka's perfume assailed his senses and, for an instant, he felt giddy with his love and longing for her. Then with a surge of joy, he remembered that she would soon be his alone, the two of them voyaging out, hand in hand, to make a new life and fortune together. He crossed the wooden floor, stepping lightly so as not to frighten her, and gently drew aside the curtains from the door into the main bedroom. Here, also, the shutters were closed and latched and the room was in semi-darkness. He paused to allow his eyes to adjust to the dim light and saw that the bed was in disarray.

  Then, in the gloom, he made out the pearly sheen of her flawless white skin among the tumbled bed linen She was nude, her back turned to him, her silver-gold hair cascading down to the cleft of her perfect buttocks. He felt a surge of lust, his loins engorged, and he was so overcome with wanting her that for a moment he could not move, could not even breathe.

  Then she turned her head and looked straight at him. Her eyes flew wide and all the colour drained from her face.

  "You despicable swine!" she said softly. "How dare you spy upon me?" Her voice was low but filled with scorn and fury. He recoiled in astonishment. She was his lover, and he could not understand that she would speak to him thus, nor that she should look upon him with such contempt and fury. Then he saw that her naked breasts shone with the soft dew of her own sweat, and that she was seated astride a supine masculine form. The man beneath her lay upon his back, and she was impaled upon him, in the act of passion, riding him like a steed.

  The man's body was muscular, white and hard, the body of a gladiator. With one explosive movement Katinka sprang off him and spun to face Schreuder. As she stood beside the bed trembling with outrage her inner thighs glistened with the overflow of her venery.

  "What are you doing in my bedroom?" she hissed at Schreuder.

  Stupidly he answered, "I came to take you away with me." But his eyes went down to the man's body. His pubic hair was wet and matted and his sex thrust up towards the ceiling, thick and swollen and glistening, with a shiny, viscous coating. The man sat upright and looked straight at Schreuder, with a flat yellow gaze.

  A wave of unspeakable horror and revulsion swept over Schreuder. Katinka, his love, had been rutting with Slow John, the executioner.

  Katinka was speaking, but her words barely made sense to him. "You came to take me away? What gave you the notion that I would go with you, the Company clown, the laughing stock of the colony? Get out of here, you fool. Go into obscurity and shame where you belong."

  Slow John stood up from the bed. "You heard her. Get out or I shall throw you out." It was not the words but the fact that Slow John's penis was still full
y tumescent that turned Schreuder into a maniac. His temper which, until now, he had been able to keep under restraint boiled over and took control of him. To the humiliation, insults and rejection that had been heaped upon him all that day was added the black rage of his jealousy.

  Slow John stooped to the pile of his discarded clothing, which lay upon the tiles beside the bed, and straightened up again with a pruning knife in his right hand. "I warn you," he said in that deep, melodious voice, "leave now, at once."

  With one fluid movement the Neptune sword sprang from its scabbard as though it were a living thing. Slow John was no warrior. His victims were always delivered to him trussed and chained. He had never been matched against a man like Schreuder. He jumped forward, the knife held low in front of him, but Schreuder flicked his own blade across the inner side of Slow John's wrist, severing the sinews so that the man's fingers opened involuntarily and the knife dropped to the tiles.

  Then Schreuder thrust for the heart. Slow John had neither time nor chance to evade the stroke. The point took him in the centre of his broad, hairless chest and the blade buried itself right up to the jewelled pommel. The two men stood, locked together by the weapon. Gradually Slow John's sex wilted and hung white and flaccid. His eyes glazed over and turned opaque and sightless as yellow pebbles. As he sank to his knees, Katinka began to scream.

  Schreuder plucked the blade from the executioner's chest. Its burnished length was dulled by his blood. Katinka screamed again as a feather of bright heart-blood stood out of the wound in Slow John's chest, and he toppled headlong to the tiles.

  "Don't scream," Schreuder snarled, with the black rage still upon him, and advanced upon her with the sword in his hand. "You have played me false with this creature. You knew I loved you. I came to fetch you. I wanted you to come away with me." She backed away before him, both fists clenched upon her cheeks, and screamed in high, ringing hysteria.

  "Don't scream," he shouted. "Be quiet. I cannot bear it when you do that." The dreadful sound, echoed in his head and made it ache, but she retreated from him, her cries louder now, a terrible sound, and he had to make her stop.

  "Don't do that!" He tried to catch hold of her wrist, but she was too swift for him. She twisted out of his grip. Her screams grew even louder, and his rage broke its bounds as though it were some terrible black animal over which he had no control. The sword in his hand flew without his brain or his hand commanding it, and he stabbed her satiny white belly, just above the golden nest of her mons vener is

  Her screaru turned to a higher, agonized shriek and she clutched at the blade as he jerked it from her flesh. It cut her palms to the bone, and he thrust again to quieten her, twice more in the belly.

  "Quiet!" he roared at her and she turned away and tried to run for the doors of her closet, but he stabbed her in the back just above her kidneys, pulled out the blade and thrust between her shoulders. She fell and rolled on her back, and he stood over her and stabbed and hacked and thrust at her. Each time the blade passed clean through her body and struck the tiles on which she squirmed.

  "Keep quiet!" he yelled, and kept on stabbing until her screams and sobs died away. Even then he continued to thrust at her, standing in the spreading pool of her blood, his uniform drenched with gouts of scarlet, his face and arms splashed and speckled so that he looked like a plague victim covered with the rash of the disease.

  Then, slowly, the black rage drained from his brain, and he staggered back against the wall, leaving daubs of her blood across the whitewash.

  "Katinka!" he whispered. "I did not mean to hurt you. I love you so."

  She lay in the wide deep pool of her own blood. The wounds were like a choir of red mouths on her white skin. The blood still trickled from each of them. He had not dreamed there could be so much blood in that slim white body. Her head lay in a scarlet puddle, and her hair was soaked red. Her face was daubed thickly with it. Her features were twisted into a rictus of terror and agony that was no longer lovely to look upon.

  "Katinka, my darling. Please forgive me." He started across the floor towards her, stepping through the river of her blood that spread across the tiles. Then he stopped with the sword in his hand as, in the mirror across the room, he glimpsed a wild blood-smeared apparition staring back at him.

  "Oh, sweet Mary, what have I done?" He tore his eyes from the creature in the Mirror, and knelt beside the body of the woman he loved. He tried to lift her, but she was limp and boneless. She slid out of his embrace, and flopped into the puddle of her own blood.

  He stood again and backed away from her. "I did not mean you to die. You made me angry. I loved you, but you were unfaithful."

  Again he saw his own reflection in the mirror, "Oh sweet God, the blood. There is so much." He wiped, with sticky hands, at the mess of crimson that covered his jacket, then at his face, spreading the blood into a scarlet carnival mask.

  For the first time he thought of flight, of the boat waiting for him on the beach and the frigate lying out in the bay. "I cannot ride through the colony like this! I cannot go aboard like this!"

  He staggered across the room to the door of the Governor's dressing room. He stripped off his sodden jacket and threw it from him. A pitcher of water was standing in a basin on the cabinet and he plunged his gory hands into it and sloshed it over his face. He seized the washcloth from its hook and soaked it in the pink water, then scrubbed at his arms and the front of his breeches.

  "So much blood!" he kept repeating, as he wiped then rinsed the cloth and wiped again. He found a pile of clean white shirts on one of the shelves, and pulled one on over his damp chest. Van de Velde was a big man, and it fitted him well enough. He looked down and saw that the bloodstains were not so obvious on the dark serge of his breeches. His wig was stained so he pulled it off and flung it against the far wall. He chose another from the row set on blocks along the back wall.

  He found a woollen cloak that covered him from shoulders to calves. He spent a minute cleaning the blade and the sapphire of the Neptune sword, then thrust it back into its scabbard. When he looked again in the mirror he saw that his appearance would no longer shock or alarm. Then a thought struck him. He picked up his soiled jacket and ripped the stars and decorations from the lapels. He wrapped them in a clean neck cloth he found on one of the shelves and stuffed them into the inner pocket of the woollen cloak.

  He paused on the threshold of the Governor's dressing room and looked for the last time at the body of the woman he loved. Her blood was still moving softly across the tiles, like a fat, lazy adder. As he watched, it reached the edge of the smaller puddle in which Slow John lay. Their blood ran together, and Schreuder felt a deep sense of sacrilege that the pure should mingle thus with the base.

  "I did not want this to happen, "he said hopelessly. "I am so sorry, my darling. I wanted you to come with me." He trod carefully over the rill of blood, went to the shuttered window and stepped out onto the veranda. He gathered the cloak around his shoulders and strode through the gardens to the small door in the stableyard. where he shouted for the groom, who hurried up with his horse.

  Schreuder rode down the avenue and crossed the Parade, looking straight ahead. The longboat was still on the beach and as he rode up the boatswain called to him, "We was just about to give you up, Colonel. The Golden Bough is shortening her anchor cable and manning her yards."

  As he climbed to the deck of the frigate, Captain Llewellyn and his crew were so absorbed by the business of weighing anchor and getting the ship under sail that they paid him little heed. A midshipman showed him down to his small cabin, then hurried away leaving him alone. His travel chests had been brought aboard and were stowed under the narrow bunk. Schreuder stripped off all his soiled dress and found a clean uniform in one of his chests. Before donning it, he placed the stars and orders upon its lapels. His blood-smeared clothing he tied in a bundle, then looked around for something to weight it. Obviously the thin wooden bulkheads would be struck when the frigate was cleared for
action, and his cabin would form part of the ship's gundeck. A culverin filled most of the available deck space. Beside the weapon was heaped a pyramid of iron cannonballs. He stuffed one into the bundle of bloodsoaked clothing and waited until he felt the ship come on the wind and thrust out into the bay.

  Then he opened the gun port a crack, and dropped the bundle through it into fifty fathoms of green water. When he went up on deck they were already a league offshore and running out strongly on the sou'easter to make their offing before coming about to round the cape.