Wilbur Smith - C09 Birds Of Prey

by C09 Birds Of Prey(Lit)

  "There weren't much of anything, Captain. Once we left the horses we had just about enough strength left to get ourselves up the mountains."

  "Powder?" Hal demanded.

  "Only what we had in our flasks."

  "When you went on ahead, you had two full kegs on the horses."

  "Those kegs weighed fifty pounds apiece." Daniel looked ashamed. "Too much cargo for us to haul."

  "I have seen you carry twice that weight." Hal was angry and disappointed. Without a store of powder they were at the mercy of this wild terrain, and the beasts and tribes that infested it.

  "Daniel carried my saddle-bags up Dark Gorge." Sukeena intervened softly. "No one else could do it."

  "I'm sorry, Captain," Daniel muttered.

  But Sukeena supported him fiercely. "There is not a thing in my bags that we could do without. That includes the medicines that saved your leg and will save every one of us from the hurts and pestilences that we will meet here in the wilderness."

  "Thank you, Princess," Daniel murmured, and looked at her like an affectionate hound. If he had possessed a tail Hal knew he would have wagged it.

  Hal smiled and clapped Daniel's shoulder. "I find no fault with what you did, Big Danny. There is no man alive who could have done better."

  They all relaxed and smiled. Then Ned asked, "Were you serious when you promised us a ship, Captain?" Sukeena stood up from the fire.

  "That's enough for tonight. He must regain his strength before you plague him further. You must go now. You may come again tomorrow." One at a time they came to Hal, shook his hand and mumbled something incoherent, then wandered off through the darkness towards the other huts spread out along the valley floor. When the last had gone Sukeena threw another cedar log on the fire then came and sat close beside him.

  In a natural, possessive manner, Hal placed his arm around her shoulders. She leaned her slim body against him and fitted her head into the notch of his shoulder. She sighed, a sweet, contented sound, and neither spoke for a while.

  "I want to stay here at your side like this for ever, but the stars may not allow it," she whispered. "The season of our love may be short as a winter day."

  "Don't say that," Hal commanded. "Never say that."

  They both looked up at the stars, and here, in the high thin air, they were so brilliant that they lit the heavens with the luminescence of the mother-of pearl that lines the inside of an abalone shell taken fresh from the sea. Hal looked upon them with awe and considered what she had said. He felt a sense of hopelessness and sadness come upon him. He shivered.

  Immediately she sat up straight and said softly, "You grow cold. Come, Gundwane!"

  She helped him to his feet and led him into the hut, to the mattress against the far wall. She laid him upon it and then lit the wick of the small clay oil lamp and placed it on a shelf in the rock wall. She went to the fire and lifted off the clay pot of water that stood on the edge of the coals. She poured steaming water into an empty dish and mixed in cold water from the pot beside the door until the temperature suited her.

  Her movements were unhurried and calm. Propped on one elbow, Hal watched her. She placed the dish of warm water in the centre of the floor then poured a few drops from a glass vial into it and stirred it again with her hand. He smelt its light, subtle perfume on the waft of steam.

  She rose, went to the doorway and closed the animals king curtain over the opening, then came back and stood beside the dish of scented water. She removed the wild flowers from her hair and tossed them onto the fur blanket at Hal's feet. Without looking at him, she let down the coils of her hair and combed them out until they shimmered like a wave of obsidian. She began to sing in her own language as she combed, a lullaby or a love song, Hal could not be certain. Her voice was mellifluous, it soothed and delighted him.

  She laid aside her comb, and let the shift slip from her shoulders. Her skin gleamed in the yellow lamplight and her breasts were pert as small golden pears. When she turned her back to him Hal felt deprived that they were hidden from his sight. Her song changed now it had a lilt of joy and excitement in it.

  "What is it you sing?" Hal asked.

  Sukeena smiled at him over her bare shoulder. "It is the wedding song of my mother's people," she answered. "The bride is saying that she is happy and that she loves her husband with the eternal strength of the ocean, and the patience of the shining stars."

  "I have never heard anything so pleasing," Hal whispered.

  With slow voluptuous movements, she unwrapped the sarong from around her waist and threw it aside. Her buttocks were small and neat, the deep cleft dividing them into perfect ovals. She squatted down beside the dish to soak a small cloth in the scented water and began to bathe herself. She started at her shoulders and washed each arm down to her long tapered fingertips. There were silky clusters of black curls in her armpits.

  Hal realized that it was a ritual bath she was performing, part of some ceremony she was enacting before him. He watched avidly each move she made, and every now and then she looked up and smiled at him shyly.

  The soft hairs behind her ears were damp from the cloth, and water droplets gleamed on her cheeks and upper lip.

  She stood at last and turned slowly to face him. Once he had thought her body boyish, but now he saw that it was so feminine that his heart swelled hard with desire for her. Her belly was flat but smooth as butter, and at its base was a triangle of dark fur, soft as a sleeping kitten.

  She stepped away from the dish and dried herself on the cotton shift she had discarded. Then she went to the oil lamp, cupped one hand around the wick and leaned towards it as if to snuff out the flame.

  "No!" said Hal. "Leave the light. I want to look at you." At last she came to him, gliding across the stone floor on small bare feet, crept onto the bed beside him, into his arms, and folded her body against his. She held her lips to his mouth. Hers were soft and wet and warm, and her breath mingled with his, and smelled of the wild flowers she had worn in her hair.

  "I have waited all my life for you, " she whispered into his mouth.

  He whispered back, "It was too long to wait, but I am here at last."

  In the morning she proudly displayed the treasures she had brought for him in her saddle-bags. She had somehow procured everything he had asked for in the notes he had left for Aboli in the wall of the castle.

  He snatched up the charts. "Where did you get these from, Sukeena?"he demanded, and she was delighted to see how much value he placed upon them.

  "I have many friends in the colony," she explained. "Even some of the whores from the taverns came to me to treat their ailments. Doctor Soar kills more of his patients than he saves. Some of the tavern ladies go aboard the ships in the bay to do their business, and come back with divers things, not all of them gifts from the seamen." She laughed merrily. "If something is not bolted to the deck of the galleon they think it belongs to them. When I asked for charts these are what they brought me. Are they what you wanted, Gundwane?"

  "These are more than I ever hoped for, Sukeena This one is valuable and so is this." The charts were obviously some navigator's treasures, highly detailed and covered with notations and observations in a well-formed, educated hand. They showed the coasts of southern Africa in wondrous detail, and from his own knowledge he could see how accurate they were. To his amazement the location of Elephant Lagoon was marked on one, the first time he had ever seen it shown on any chart other than his father's. The position was accurate to within a few minutes of angle, and in the margin there was a sketch of the landfall and seaward elevation of the heads, which he recognized instantly as having been drawn from observation.

  Although the coast and the immediate littoral were accurately recorded, the interior, as usual, had been left blank or filled with conjecture, apocryphal lakes and mountains that no eye had ever beheld.

  The outline of the mountains in which they were now sequestered was sketched in, as though the cartographer had observed them from the
colony of Good Hope or from sailing into False Bay and had guessed their shape and extent. Somewhere, somehow, Sukeena had found him a Dutch mariners" almanac to go with the charts. It had been published in Amsterdam and listed the movements of the heaVenly bodies until the end of the decade.

  Hal laid aside these precious documents and took up the backstaff Sukeena had found. It was a collapsible model whose separate parts fitted into a small leather case, the interior of which was lined with blue velvet. The instrument itself was of extraordinarily fine workmanship. the bronze quadrant, decorated with embodiments of the four winds, needles and screws were all engraved and worked in pleasing artistic shapes and classical figures. A tiny bronze plaque inside the lid of the case was engraved "Cellini. Venezia'.

  The compass she had brought was contained in a sturdy leather case, the body was brass and the magnetic needle was tipped with gold and ivory, so finely. balanced that it swung unerringly into. the north as he rotated the case slowly in his hand.

  "These are worth twenty pounds at least!" Hal marvelled. "You're a magician to have conjured them up." He took her hand and led her outside, not limping as awkwardly as he had on the previous day. Seated side by side on the mountain slope he showed her how to observe the noon passage of the sun and to mark their position on one of the charts. She delighted in the pleasure she had given him, and impressed him with her immediate grasp of the esoteric arts of navigation. Then he remembered that she was an astrologer, and that she understood the heavens.

  With these instruments in his hands, he could move with authority through this savage wilderness, and his dream of finding a ship began to seem less forlorn than it had only a day before. He drew her to his chest, kissed her, and she merged herself tenderly to him. "That kiss is better reward than the twenty pounds of which you spoke, my captain."

  "If one kiss is worth twenty pounds, then I have aught for you that must be worth five hundred," he said, laid her back in the grass and made love to her. A long time later she smiled up at him and whispered, "That was worth all the gold in this world."

  When they returned to the encampment they found that Daniel had assembled all the weapons, and that Aboli was polishing the sword blades and sharpening the edges with a fine-grained stone he had picked from the stream bed.

  Hal went carefully over the collection. There were cutlasses enough to arm every man, and pistols too. However, there were only five muskets, all standard Dutch military models, heavy and robust. Their lack was in powder, slow-match and lead ball. They could always use pebbles as missiles, but there was no substitute for black powder They had less than five pounds weight of this precious substance in the flasks, not enough for twenty discharges.

  "Without powder, we can no longer kill the larger game," Sabah told Hal. "We eat partridges and dassies." He used the diminutive of the Dutch name for badger, dasc, to describe the fluffy, rabbity creatures that swarmed in the caves and crevices of every cliff. Hal thought he recognized them as the coneys of the Bible.

  The urine from the dassie colonies poured down the cliff face so copiously that as it dried it covered the rock with a thick coating that shone in the sunlight like toffee but smelt less sweet. With care and skill, these rock-rabbits could be killed and trapped in such numbers as to provide the little band with a staple of survival. Their flesh was succulent and delicious as suckling pig.

  Now that Sukeena was with them their diet was much expanded by her knowledge of edible roots and plants. Each day Hal went out with her to carry her basket as she foraged along the slopes. As his leg grew stronger they ventured further and stayed out in the wilderness a little longer each day.

  The mountains seemed to enfold them in their grandeur and to provide the perfect setting for the bright jewel of their love. When Sukeena's foraging basket was filled to overflowing, they found hidden pools in the numerous streams in which to bathe naked together. Afterwards they lay side by side on the smooth, water-polished rocks and dried themselves in the sun. With tantalizing slowness they toyed with each other's bodies and at last made love. Then they talked and explored each other's minds as intimately as they had explored their bodies, and afterwards made love yet again. Their appetites for each other seemed insatiable.

  "Oh! Where did you learn to please a girl so?" Sukeena asked breathlessly. "Who taught you all these special things that you do to me?"

  It was not a question he cared to answer, and he said, "Tis simply that we fit together so perfectly. My special places were made to touch your special places. I seek pleasure in your pleasure. My pleasure is increased a hundredfold by yours."

  In the evenings when all the fugitives gathered around the cooking fire, they pressed Hal with questions about his plans for them, but he avoided these with an easy laugh or a shake of his head. A plan of action was indeed germinating in his mind but it was not yet ready to be disclosed, for there were still many obstacles he had to circumvent.

  Instead he questioned Sabah and the five escaped slaves, who with him had survived the mountain winter.

  "How far to the east have you travelled across the range, Sabah?"

  "In midwinter we travelled six days in that direction.

  We were trying to find food and a place where the cold was not so fierce."

  "What land lies to the east?"

  "It is mountains such as these for many leagues, and then suddenly they fall away into plains of forest and rolling grassland, with glimpses of the sea on the right hand." Sabah took up a twig and began to draw in the dust beside the fire. Hal memorized his descriptions, questioning him assiduously, urging him to recall every detail of what he had seen.

  "Did you descend into these plains?"

  "We went down a little way. We found strange creatures never before seen by the eyes of man grey and enormous with long horns set upon their noses. One rushed upon us with terrible snorts and whistles. Though we fired our muskets at it, it came on and impaled the wife of Johannes upon its nose horn and killed her."

  They all looked at little one-eyed Johannes, one of Sabah's band of escaped slaves, who wept at the memory of his dead woman. It was strange to see tears squeezing out of his empty eye socket. They were all silent for a while, then Zwaantie took up the story. "My little Bobby was only a month old, and I could not place him in such danger. Without powder for the muskets we could not go on. I prevailed on Sabah to turn back, and we returned to this place."

  "Why do you ask these questions? What is your plan, Captain?" Big Daniel wanted to know, but Hal shook his head.

  "I'm not ready to explain it to you, but don't lose heart, lads. I have promised to find you a ship, have I not?" he said, with more confidence than he felt. In the morning, on the pretence of fishing, he led Aboli and Big Daniel up the stream to the next pool. When they were out of sight of the camp, they sat close together on the rocky bank. "It is clear that unless we can better arm ourselves, we are trapped in these mountains. We will perish as slowly and despondently as most of Sabah's men already have. We must have powder for the muskets."

  "Where will we get that?" Daniel asked. "What do you propose?"

  "I have been thinking about the colony, "Hal told them. Both men stared at him in disbelief. Aboli broke the silence. "You plan to go back to Good Hope? Even there you will not be able to lay your hands on powder. Oh, perhaps you might steal a pound or two from the green jackets at the bridge, or from a Company hunter, but that is not enough to see us on our journey."

  "I planned to break into the castle again," Hal said.

  Both men laughed bitterly. "You lack not in enterprise or in heart, Captain," Big Daniel said, "but that is madness." Aboli agreed with him, and said, in his deep, thoughtful voice, "If I thought there were even the poorest chance of success, I would gladly go alone. But think on it, Gundwane, I do not mean merely the impossibility of winning our way into the castle armoury. Say, even, that we succeeded in that, and that the store of powder we destroyed has since been replenished by shipments from Holland. Say that we
were able to escape with some of it. How would we carry even a single keg back across the plains with Schreuder and his men pursuing us? This time we would not have the horses."

  In his heart Hal had known that it was madness, but he had hoped that even such a desperate and forlorn proposal might fire them to think of another plan.

  At last, Aboli broke the silence. "You spoke of a plan to find a ship. If you tell us that plan, Gundwane, then perhaps we can help you to bring it to pass." Both men looked at him expectantly.

  "Where do you suppose the Buzzard is at this very moment?" Hal asked..

  Aboli and Big Daniel looked startled. "If my prayers have prevailed he is roasting in hell," Daniel replied bitterly.

  Hal looked at Aboli. "What do you think, Aboli? Where would you look for the Buzzard?"

  "Somewhere out on the seven seas. Wherever he smells gold or the promise of easy pickings, like the carrion bird for which he is named."