Текст книги "Birds of Prey"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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He sat up and pushed Hal away, but there was a new light in his eyes as he looked at the boy, who was a boy no longer. "Go now and do your father's bidding!"

Hal stood up shakily and looked again round the circle of faces, seeing an expression in them that he did not recognize: it was respect mingled with more than a little fear.

"What are you gawking at?" bellowed Ned Tyler. "The play is over. Do you have no work to do? Man those pumps. Those topgallants are luffing. I can find mastheads for all idle hands." There was the thump of bare feet across the deck as the crew rushed guiltily to their duties.

Hal stooped, picked up the cutlass, and handed it back to the boatswain, hilt first.

"Thank you, Ned. I had need of it."

"And you put it to good use. I have never seen that heathen bested, except by your father before you."

Hal tore a handful of rag from the tattered hem of his canvas pantaloons, held it to his ear to staunch the bleeding, and went down to the stern cabin.

Sir Francis looked up from his log-book, his goose quill poised over the page. "Do not look so smug, puppy," he grunted at Hal. "Aboli toyed with you, as he always does. He could have spitted you a dozen times before you turned it with that lucky coup at the end."

When Sir Francis stood up there was hardly room for them both in the tiny cabin. The bulkheads were lined from deck to deck with books, more were stacked about their feet and leather-bound volumes were crammed into the cubby-hole that served his father as a bunk. Hal wondered where he found place to sleep.

His father addressed him in Latin. When they were alone he insisted on speaking the language of the educated and cultivated man. "You will die before you ever make a swordsman, unless you find steel in your heart as well as in your hand. Some hulking Dutchman will cleave you to the teeth at your first encounter." Sir Francis scowled at his son, "Recite the law of the sword."

"An eye for his eyes," Hal mumbled in Latin.

"Speak up, boy!" Sir Francis's hearing had been dulled by the blast of culver ins over the years a thousand broadsides had burst around his head. At the end of an engagement, blood would be seen dripping from the ears of the seamen beside the guns and for days after even the officers on the poop heard heavenly bells ring in their heads.

"An eye for his eyes," Hal repeated roundly, and his father nodded.

"His eyes are the window to his mind. Learn to read in them his intentions before the act. See there the stroke before it is delivered. What else?"

"The other eye for his feet," Hal recited.

"Good." Sir Francis nodded. "His feet will move before his hand.

What else?"

"Keep the point high."

"The cardinal rule. Never lower the point. Keep it aimed at his eyes."

Sir Francis led Hal through the catechism, as he had countless times before. At the end, he said, "Here is one more rule for you. Fight from the first stroke, not just when you are hurt or angry, or you might not survive that first wound."

He glanced up at the hourglass hanging from the deck above his head. "There is yet time for your reading before ship's prayers." He spoke in Latin still. "Take up your Livy and translate from the top of page twenty-six."

For an hour Hal read aloud the history of Rome in the original, translating each verse into English as he went. Then, at last, Sir Francis closed his Livy with a snap. "There is improvement. Now, decline the verb dur are

That his father should choose this one was a mark of his approval.

Hal recited it in a breathless rush, slowing when he came to the future indicative. Vurabo. I shall endure."

That word formed the motto of the Courtney coat-of arms and Sir Francis smiled frostily as Hal voiced it.

"May the Lord grant you that grace." He stood up. "You may go now but do not be late for prayers."

Rejoicing to be free, Hal fled from the cabin and went bounding up the companionway.

Aboli was squatting in the lee of one of the hulking bronze culver ins near the bows. Hal knelt beside him. "I wounded you."

Aboli made an eloquent dismissive gesture. "A chicken scratching in the dust wounds the earth more gravely."

Hal pulled the tarpaulin cloak off Aboli's shoulders, seized the elbow and lifted the thickly muscled arm high to peer at the deep slash across the ribs. "None the less, this little chicken gave you a good pecking," he observed drily, and grinned as Aboli opened his hand and showed him the needle already threaded with sail maker yarn. He reached for it, but Aboli checked him.

"Wash the cut, as I taught you."

"With that long black python of yours you could reach it yourself," Hal suggested, and Aboli emitted his long, rolling laugh, soft and low as distant thunder.

"We will have to make do with a small white worm."

Hal stood and loosed the cord that held up his pantaloons. He let them drop to his knees, and with his right hand drew back his foreskin.

"I christen you Aboli, lord of the chickens!" He imitated his own father's preaching tone faithfully, and directed a stream of yellow urine into the open wound.

Although Hal knew how it stung, for Aboli had done the same many times for him, the black features remained impassive. Hal irrigated the wound with the very last drop and then hoisted his breeches. He knew how efficacious this tribal remedy of Aboli's was. The first time it had been used on him he had been repelled by it, but in all the years since then he had never seen a wound so treated mortify.

He took up the needle and twine, and while Aboli held the lips of the wound together with his left hand, Hal laid neat sail maker stitches across it, digging the needle point through the elastic skin and pulling his knots up tight. When he was done, he reached for the pot of hot tar that Aboli had ready. He smeared the sewn wound thickly and nodded with satisfaction at his handiwork.

Aboli stood up and lifted his canvas petticoats. "Now we will see to your ear," he told Hal, as his own fat penis overflowed his fist by half its length.

Hal recoiled swiftly. "It is but a little scratch, he protested, but Aboli seized his pigtail remorselessly and twisted his face upwards.

At the stroke of the bell the company crowded into the waist of the ship, and stood silent And bare-headed in the sunlight even the black tribesmen, who did not worship exclusively the crucified Lord but other gods also whose abode was the deep dark forests of their homes.

When Sir Francis, great leather-bound Bible in hand, intoned sonorously, "We pray you, Almighty God, deliver the enemy of Christ into our hands that he shall not triumph..." his eyes were the only ones still cast heavenward. Every other eye in the company turned towards the east from where that enemy would come, laden with silver and spices.

Half-way through the long service a line squall came boring up out of the east, wind driving the clouds in a tumbling dark mass over their heads and deluging the decks with silver sheets of rain. But the elements could not conspire to keep Sir Francis from his discourse with the Almighty, so while the crew huddled in their tar-daubed canvas jackets, with hats of the same material tied beneath their chins, and the water streamed off them as off the hides of a pack of beached walrus, Sir Francis missed not a beat of his sermon. "Lord of the storm and the wind," he prayed, "succour us. Lord of the battle4 me be our shield and buckler..."

The squall passed over them swiftly and the sun burst forth again, sparkling on the blue swells and steaming on the decks.

Sir Francis clapped his wide-brimmed cavalier hat back on his head, and the sodden white feathers that surmounted it nodded in approval. "Master Ned, run out the guns."

It was the proper course to take, Hal realized. The rain squall would have soaked the priming and wet the loaded powder. Rather than the lengthy business of drawing the shot and reloading, his father would give the crews some practice.

"Beat to quarters, if you please."

The drum-roll echoed through the hull, and the crew ran grinning and joking to their stations. Hal plunged the tip of a slow-match into the charcoal brazier at the foot of the mast. When it was smouldering evenly, he leapt into the shrouds and, carrying the burning match in his teeth, clambered up to his battle station at the masthead.

On the deck he saw four men sway an empty water cask up from the hold and stagger with it to the ship's side. At the order from the poop, they tossed it over and left it bobbing in the ship's wake. Meanwhile the gun crews knocked out the wedges and, heaving at the tackles, ran out the culver ins On either side of the lower deck there were eight, each loaded with a bucketful of powder and a ball. On the upper deck were ranged ten demi-culver ins five on each side, their long barrels crammed with grape.

The Lady Edwina was low on iron shot after her two year-long cruise, and some of the guns were loaded with water-rounded flint marbles hand-picked from the banks of the river mouths where the watering parties had gone ashore. Ponderously she came about, and settled on the new tack, beating back into the wind. The floating cask was still two cables" length ahead but the range narrowed slowly. The gunners strode from cannon to cannon, pushing in the elevation wedges and ordering the training tackles adjusted. This was a specialized task: only five men aboard had the skill to load and lay a gun.

In the crow's nest, Hal swung the long-barrelled falconer on its swivel and aimed down at a length of floating kelp that drifted past on the current. Then with the point of his dirk he scraped the damp, caked powder out of the pan of the weapon, and carefully repacked it with fresh powder from his flask. After ten years of instruction by his father, he was as skilled as Ned Tyler, the ship's master gunner, in the esoteric art. His rightful battle station should have been on the gundeck, and he had pleaded with his father to place him there but had been answered only with the stern retort, "You will go where I send you." Now he must sit up here, out of the hurly-burly, while his fierce young heart ached to be a part of it.

Suddenly he was startled by the crash of gunfire from the deck below, A long dense plume of smoke billowed out and the ship heeled slightly at the discharge. A moment later a tall fountain of foam rose dramatically from the surface of the sea fifty yards to the right and twenty beyond the floating cask. At that range it was not bad shooting, but the deck erupted in a chorus of jeers and whistles.

Ned Tyler hurried to the second culverin, and swiftly checked its lay. He gestured for the men on the tackle to train it a point left then stepped forward and held the burning match to the touch hole. A fizzling puff of smoke blew back and then, from the gaping muzzle, came a shower of sparks, half-burned powder and clods of damp, caked muck. The ball rolled down the bronze barrel and fell into the sea less than half-way to the target cask. The crew howled with derision.

The next two weapons misfired. Cursing furiously, Ned ordered the crews to draw the charges with the long iron corkscrews as he hurried on down the line.

"Great expense of powder and bullet!" Hal recited to himself the words of the great Sir Francis Drake for whom his own father had been christened spoken after the first day of the epic battle against the Armada of Philip 11, King of Spain, led by the Duke of Medina Sidonia. All that long day, under the dun fog of gunsmoke, the two great fleets had loosed their mighty broadsides at each other, but the barrage had sent not a single ship of either fleet to the bottom.

"Fright them with cannon," Hal's father had instructed him, "but sweep their decks with the cutlass," and he voiced his scorn for the rowdy but ineffectual art of naval gunnery. It was impossible to aim a ball from the plunging deck of one ship to a precise point on the hull of another– accuracy was in the hands of the Almighty rather than those of the master gunner.

As if to illustrate the point, after Ned had fired every one of the heavy guns on board six had misfired and the nearest he had come to striking the floating cask was twenty yards. Hal shook his head sadly, reflecting that each of those shots had been carefully laid and aimed. In the heat of a battle, with the range obscured by billowing smoke, the powder and shot stuffed in haste into the muzzles, the barrels heating unevenly and the match applied to pan by excited and terrified gunners, the results could not be even that satisfactory.

At last his father looked up at Hal. "Masthead!" he roared.

Hal had feared himself forgotten. Now, with a thrill of relief, he blew on the tip of the smouldering slow-match in his hand. It glowed bright and fierce.

From the deck Sir Francis watched him, his expression stern and forbidding. He must never let show the love he bore the boy. He must be hard and critical at all times, driving him on. For the boy's own sake nay, for his very life he must force him to learn, to strive, to endure, to run every step of the course ahead of him with all his strength and all his heart. Yet, without making it apparent, he must also help, encourage and assist him. He must shepherd him wisely, cunningly towards his destiny. He had delayed calling upon Hal until this moment, when the cask floated close alongside.

If the boy could shatter it with the small weapon where Ned had failed with the great cannon, then his reputation with the crew would be enhanced. The men were mostly boisterous ruffians, simple illiterates, but one day Hal would be called upon to lead them, or others like them. He had made a giant stride today by be sting Aboli before them all. Here was a chance to consolidate that gain. "Guide his hand, and the flight of the shot, oh God of the battle-line!" Sir Francis prayed silently, and the ship's company craned their necks to watch the lad high above them.

Hal hummed softly to himself as he concentrated on the task, conscious of the eyes upon him. Yet he did not sense the importance of this discharge and was oblivious of his father's prayers. It was a game to him, just another chance to excel. Hal liked to win, and each time he did so he liked it better. The young eagle was beginning to rejoice in the power of his wings.

Gripping the end of the long brass monkey tail, he swivelled the falconer downwards, peering over the yard long barrel, lining up the notch above the pan with the pip on the muzzle end.

He had learned that it was futile to aim directly at the target. There would be a delay of seconds from when he applied the slow-match, to the crash of the shot, and in the meantime ship and cask would be moving in opposite directions. There was also the moment when the discharged balls were in flight before they struck. He must gauge where the cask would be when the shot reached it and not aim for the spot where it had been when he pressed the match to the pan.

He swung the pip of the foresight smoothly over the target, and touched the glowing end of the match to the pan. He forced himself not to flinch away from the flare of burning powder nor to recoil in anticipation of the explosion but to keep the barrels swinging gently in the line he had chosen.

With a roar that stung his eardrums the falconer bucked heavily against its swivel, and everything disappeared in a cloud of grey smoke. Desperately he craned his head left and right, trying to see around the smoke, but it was the cheers from the decks below that made his heart leap, reaching him even through his singing ears. When the wind whisked away the smoke, he could see the ribs of the shattered cask swirling and tumbling astern in the ship's wake. He hooted with glee, and waved his cap at the faces on the deck far below. Aboli was at his place in the bows, coxswain and gun captain of the first watch. He returned Hal's beatific grin and beat his chest with one fist, while with the other he brandished the cutlass over his bald head.

The drum rolled to end the drill and stand down the crew from their battle stations. Before he dropped down the shrouds Hal reloaded the falconet carefully and bound a strip of tar-soaked canvas around the pan to protect it from dew, rain and spray.

As his feet hit the deck he looked to the poop, trying to catch his father's eye and glean his approbation. But Sir Francis was deep in conversation with one of his petty officers. A moment passed before he glanced coldly over his shoulder at Hal. "What are you gawking at, boy? There are guns to be reloaded."

As he turned away Hal felt the bite of disappointment, but the rowdy congratulations of the crew, the rough slaps across his back and shoulders as he passed down the gundeck, restored his smile.

When Ned Tyler saw him coming he stepped back from the breech of the culverin he was loading and handed the ramrod to Hal. "Any oaf can shoot it, but it takes a good man to load it," he grunted, and stood back critically to watch Hal measure a charge from the leather powder bucket. "What weight of powder?" he asked, and Hal gave the same reply he had a hundred times before.

"The same weight as that of the round shot."

The black powder comprised coarse granules. There had been a time when, shaken and agitated by the ship's way or some other repetitive movement, the three essential elements, sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre, might separate out and render it useless. Since then the process of "coming" had evolved, whereby the fine raw powder was treated with urine or alcohol to set it into a cake, which was then crushed in a ball mill to the required size of granules. Yet the process was not perfect and a gunner must always have an eye for the condition of his powder. Damp or age could degrade it. Hal tested the grains between his fingers and tasted a dab. Ned Tyler had taught him to differentiate between good and degenerate powder in this way. Then he poured the contents of the bucket into the muzzle, and followed it with the oakum wadding.

Then he tamped it down with the long wooden-handled ramrod. This was another crucial part of the process: tamped too firmly, the flame could not pass through the charge and a misfire was inevitable, but not tamped firmly enough, and the black powder would burn without the power to hurl the heavy projectile clear of the barrel. Correct tamping was an art that could only be learned from prolonged practice, but Ned nodded as he watched Hal at work.

It was much later when Hal scrambled up again into the sunlight. All the culver ins were loaded and secured behind their ports and Hal's bare upper body was glistening with sweat from the heat of the cramped gundeck and his labours with the ramrod. As he paused to wipe his streaming face, draw a breath and stretch his back, after crouching so long under the cramped head space of the lower deck, his father called to him with heavy irony, "Is the ship's position of no interest to you, Master Henry?"

With a start Hal glanced up at the sun. It was high in the heavens above them: the morning had sped away. He raced to the companionway, dropped down the ladder, burst into his father's cabin, and snatched the heavy backstaff from its case on the bulkhead. Then he turned and ran back to the poop deck.

"Pray God, I'm not too late," he whispered to himself, and glanced up at the position of the sun. It was over the starboard yard-arm. He positioned himself with his back to it and in such a way that the shadow cast by the main sail would not screen him, yet so that he had a clear view of the horizon to the south.

Now he concentrated all his attention on the quadrant of the backstaff. He had to keep the heavy instrument steady against the ship's motion. Then he must read the angle that the sun's rays over his shoulder subtended onto the quadrant, which gave him the sun's inclination to the horizon. It was a juggling act that required strength and dexterity.

At last he could observe noon passage, and read the sun's angle with the horizon at the precise moment it reached its zenith. He lowered the backstaff with aching arms and shoulders, and hastily scribbled the reading on the traverse slate.

Then he ran down the ladder to the stern cabin, but the table of celestial angles was not on its shelf. In distress he turned to see that his father had followed him down and was watching him intently. No word was exchanged, but Hal knew that he was being challenged to provide the value from memory. Hal sat at his father's sea-chest, which served as a desk, and closed his eyes as he reviewed the tables in his mind's eye. He must remember yesterday's figures and extrapolate from them. He massaged his swollen ear-lobe, and his lips moved soundlessly.

Suddenly his face lightened, he opened his eyes and scribbled another number on the slate. He worked for a nimite longer, translating the angle of the noon sun into degrees of latitude. Then he looked up triumphantly. "Thirty-four degrees forty-two minutes south latitude."

His father took the slate from his hand, checked his figures, then handed it back to him. He inclined his head slightly in agreement. "Close enough, if your sun sight was true. Now what of your longitude?"

The determination of exact longitude was a puzzle that no man had ever solved. There was no timepiece, hourglass or clock that could be carried aboard a ship and still be sufficiently accurate to keep track of the earth's majestic revolutions. Only the traverse board, which hung beside the compass binnacle, could guide Hal's calculation. Now he studied the pegs that the helmsman had placed in the holes about the rose of the compass each time he had altered his heading during the previous watch. Hal added and averaged these values, then plotted them on the chart in his father's cabin. It was only a crude approximation of longitude and, predictably, his father demurred. "I would have given it a touch more of east, for with the weed on her bottom and the water in her bilges she pays off heavily to leeward but mark her so in the log."

Hal looked up in astonishment. This was a momentous day indeed. No other hand but his father's had ever written in the leather-bound log that sat beside the Bible on the lid of the sea-chest.

While his father watched, he opened the log and, for a minute, stared at the pages filled with his father's elegant, flowing script, and the beautiful drawings of men, ships and landfalls that adorned the margins. His father was a gifted artist. With trepidation Hal dipped the quill in the gold inkwell that had once belonged to the captain of the Heerlycke Nacht, one of the Dutch East India Company's galleons that his father had seized. He wiped the superfluous drops from the nib, test they splatter the sacred page. Then he trapped the tip of his tongue between his teeth and wrote with infinite care: "One bell in the afternoon watch, this 3rd day of September in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 1667. Position 34 degrees 42 minutes South, 20 degrees 5 minutes East. African mainland in sight from the masthead bearing due North. "Not daring to add more, and relieved that he had not marred the page with scratchings; or splutterings, he set aside the quill and sanded his well formed letters with pride. He knew his hand was fair though perhaps not as fair as his father's, he conceded as he compared them.

Sir Francis took up the pen he had laid aside and leaning over his shoulder wrote: "This forenoon Ensign Henry Courtney severely wounded in an unseemly brawl." Then, beside the entry he swiftly sketched a telling caricature of Hal with his swollen ear sticking out lopsidedly and the knot of the stitch like a bow in a maiden's hair.

Hal gagged on his own suppressed laughter, but when he looked up he saw the twinkle in his father's green eyes. Sir Francis laid one hand on the boy's shoulder, which was as close as he would ever come to an embrace, and squeezed it as he said, "Ned Tyler will be waiting to instruct you in the lore of rigging and sail trimming. Do not keep him waiting." it was late when Hal made his way forward along the upper deck, it was still light enough for him to pick his way with ease over the sleeping bodies of the off-duty watch. The night sky was filled with stars, such an array as must dazzle the eyes of any northerner. This night Hal had no eyes for them. He was exhausted to the point where he reeled on his feet.

Aboli had kept a place for him in the bows, under the lee of the forward cannon where they were out of the wind. He had spread a straw-filled pallet on the deck and Hal tumbled gratefully onto it. There were no quarters set aside for the crew, and the men slept wherever they could find a space on the open deck. In these warm southern nights they all preferred the topsides to the stuffy lower deck. They lay in rows, shoulder to shoulder, but the proximity of so much stinking humanity was natural to Hal, and even their snoring and mutterings could not keep him long from sleep. He moved a little closer to Aboli. This was how he had slept each night for the last ten years and there was comfort in the huge figure beside him.

"Your father is a great chief among lesser chieftains, Aboli murmured. "He is a warrior and he knows the secrets of the sea and the heavens. The stars are his children."

"I know all this is true," Hal answered, in the same language.

"It was he who bade me take the sword to you this day," Aboli confessed.

Hal raised himself on one elbow, and stared at the dark figure beside him. "My father wanted you to cut me?" he asked incredulously.

"You are not as other lads. If your life is hard now, it will be harder still. You are chosen. One day you must take from his shoulders the great cloak of the red cross. You must be worthy of it."

Hal sank back on his pallet, and stared up at the stars. "What if I do not want this thing?" he asked.

"It is yours. You do not have a choice. The one Nautonnier Knight chooses the Knight to follow him. It has been so for almost four hundred years. Your only escape from it is death."

Hal was silent for so long that Aboli thought sleep had overcome him, but then he whispered, "How do you know these things?"

"From your father."

"Are you also a Knight of our Order?"

Aboli laughed softly. "My skin is too dark and my gods are alien.

I could never be chosen."

"Aboli, I am afraid."

"All men are afraid. It is for those of us of the warrior blood to subdue fear."

"You will never leave me, will you, Aboli?"

"I will stay at your side as long as you need me." "Then I am not so afraid."

Hours later Aboli woke him with a hand on his shoulder from a deep and dreamless sleep. "Eight bells in the middle watch, Gundwane." He used Hal's nickname: in his own language it meant "Bush Rat'. It was not meant pejoratively, but was the affectionate name he had bestowed on the four-year-old who had been placed in his care over a decade before.

Four o'clock in the morning. It would be light in an hour. Hal scrambled up and, rubbing his eyes, staggered to the stinking bucket in the heads and eased himself. Then, fully awake, he hurried down the heaving deck, avoiding the sleeping figures that cluttered it.

The cook had his fire going in the brick-lined galley and passed Hal a pewter mug of soup and a hard biscuit. Hal was ravenous and gulped the liquid, though it scalded his tongue. When he crunched the biscuit he felt the weevils in it pop between his teeth.

As he hurried to the foot of the mainmast he saw the glow of his father's pipe in the shadows of the poop and smelled a whiff of his tobacco, rank on the sweet night air. Hal did not pause but went up the shrouds noting the change of tack and the new setting of the sails that had taken place while he slept.

When he reached the masthead and had relieved the lookout there, he settled into his nest and looked about him. There was no moon and, but for the stars, all was dark. He knew every named star, from the mighty Sirius to tiny Mintaka in Orion's glittering belt, They were the ciphers of the navigator, the signposts of the sky, and he had learned their names with his alphabet. His eye went, unbidden, to pick out Regulus in the sign of the Lion. It was not the brightest star in the zodiac, but it was his own particular star and he felt a quiet pleasure at the thought that it sparkled for him alone. This was the happiest hour of his long day, the only time he could ever be alone in the crowded vessel, the only time he could let his mind dance among the stars and his imagination have full rein.

His every sense seemed heightened. Even above the whimper of the wind and the creak of the rigging he could hear his father's voice and recognize its tone if not the words, as he spoke quietly to the helmsman on the deck far below. He could see his father's beaked nose and the set of his brow in the ruddy glow from the pipe bowl as he drew in the tobacco smoke. It seemed to him that his father never slept.

He could smell the iodine of the sea, the fresh odour of kelp and salt. His nose was so keen, purged by months of sweet sea air, that he could even whiff the faint odour of the land, the warm, baked smell of Africa like biscuit hot from the oven.

Then there was another scent, so faint he thought his nostrils had played a trick on him. A minute later he caught it again, just a trace, honey-sweet on the wind. He did not recognize it and turned his head back and forth, questing for the next faint perfume, sniffing eagerly.

Suddenly it came again, so fragrant and heady that he reeled like a drunkard smelling the brandy pot, and had to stop himself crying aloud in his excitement. With an effort he kept his mouth closed and, with the aroma filling his head, tumbled from the crow's nest, and fled down the shrouds to the deck below. He ran on bare feet so silently that his father started when Hal touched his arm.

"Why have you left your post?"

"I could not hail you from the masthead they are too close. They might have heard me also."

"What are you babbling about, boy?" His father came angrily to his feet. "Speak plainly."