Текст книги "Birds of Prey"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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"As always you will have me to protect you, my darling husband" she said, and stood up in the carriage to have a better view. The escort stopped at the foot of the gallows and the litter with the still figure upon it was lifted high and placed at Slow John's feet. A low growl went up from the watchers as the executioner knelt beside it to begin his grisly task.

A little later when the crowd gave forth a lusty roar, made up of excitement and horror and obscene glee, the grey horses shied and fidgeted nervously in the traces at the sound and smell of fresh human blood. With an impassive face and gentle hands on the reins Aboli checked them and brought them back under control. Slowly he turned away his head from the dreadful spectacle taking place before his eyes and looked towards the unfinished walls of the castle.

He recognized the figure of Hal among the other convicts. He stood almost as tall as Big Daniel now, and he had the shape and set of a fully mature man. But he has a boy's heart still. He should not look upon this thing. No man or boy should ever have to watch his father die. Aboli's own great heart felt that it might burst in the barrel of his chest, but his face was still impassive beneath the cicatrice of tattoos. He looked back at the scaffold as Sir Francis Courtney's body rose slowly in the air and the crowd bellowed again. Slow John's pressure on the rope was gentle and sure as he lifted Sir Francis from the litter by his neck. It required a delicate touch not to snap the vertebrae, and end" it all too soon. It was a matter of pride to him that the last spark of life must not be snuffed out of that broken husk until after the drawing out of the viscera.

Firmly Aboli turned away his eyes and looked again to the bereft and tragic figure of Hal Courtney on the castle walls. We should not mourn for him, Gundwane. He was a man and he lived the life of a man. He sailed every ocean, and fought as a warrior must fight. He knew the stars and the ways of men. He called no man master, and turned aside from no enemy. No, Gundwane, we should not mourn him, you and I. He will never die while he lives on in our hearts.

For four days Sir Francis Courtney's dismembered body remained on public display. Every morning as the light strengthened, Hal looked down from the walls and saw it still hanging there. The gulls came from the beach in a shrieking cloud of black and white wings and squabbled raucously over the feast. When they had gorged, they perched on the railing of the gibbet and whitewashed the planks with their liquid dung.

For once Hal hated the clarity of his own eyesight, that spared him no detail of the terrible transformation that was taking place as he watched. By the third day the birds had picked the flesh from his father's skull so that it grinned at the sky with empty eye-sockets. The burghers crossing the open Parade on their way to the castle walked well downwind of the scaffold on which he hung, and the ladies held sachets of dried herbs to their faces as they passed.

However, on the dawning of the fifth day when Hal looked down upon it, the gibbet was empty. His father's pathetic remains no longer hung there, and the seagulls had gone back to the beach.

"Thank the merciful Lord," Ned Tyler whispered to Daniel. "Now young Hal can begin to heal."

"Yet it is passing strange that they have taken the corpse away so soon." Daniel was puzzled. "I would not have thought that van de Velde could be so compassionate."

Sukeena had shown him how to slip the grating on one of the small back windows of the slave'S quarters and squeeze his great body through. The night guard at the residence had become lax over the years, and Aboli had little difficulty in evading the watch. For three consecutive nights he escaped from the slave quarters. Sukeena had warned him that he must return at least two hours before dawn for at that hour the watch would rouse themselves and put on a show of vigilance to impress the awakening household.

Once he had escaped over the walls it took Aboli less than an hour to run through the darkness to the boundary of the colony, marked by a hedge of bitter almond bushes planted at the order of the Governor. Although the hedge was still scraggy and there were more gaps than barriers in its length, it was the line over which no burgher might pass without the Governor's permission. On the other hand, none of the scattered Hottentot tribes that inhabited the limitless wilderness of plain, mountain and forest beyond were allowed to cross the hedge and enter the colony. On the orders of the Company, they were to be shot or hanged if they transgressed the boundary. The VOC was no longer prepared to tolerate the savages" treachery, their sly thieving ways or their drunkenness when they were able to get their hands on spirits. The wanton whoring of their women, who would lift their short leather skirts for a handful of beads or a trifling trinket, was a threat to the morals of the God-fearing burghers of the colony. Selected tribesmen, who might be useful as soldiers and servants, were allowed to remain in the colony but the rest had been driven out into the wilderness where they belonged.

Each night Aboli crossed this makeshift boundary and ranged like a silent black ghost across the flat plain whose wide expanses cut off Table Mountain and its bastion of lesser hills from the main ranges of the African hinterland. The wild animals had not been driven off these plains, for few white hunters had been allowed to leave the confines of the colony to pursue them. Here, Aboli heard again the wild, heart-stopping chorus of a pride of hunting lions that he remembered from his childhood. The leopards sawed and coughed in the thickets, and often he startled unseen herds of antelope, whose hoofs drummed through the night.

Aboli needed a black bull. Twice he had been so close as to smell the buffalo herd in the thickets. The scent reminded him of his father's herds of cattle, which he had tended in his childhood, before his circumcision. He had heard the grunting of the great beasts and the lowing of the weaning calves, he had followed their deeply ploughed hoof marks and seen splashes of their wet dung still steaming in the moonlight. But each time as he closed with the herd, the wind had tricked him. They had sensed him and gone crashing away through the brush, galloping on until the sound of their flight dwindled into silence. Aboli could not pursue them further, for it was past midnight and he was still hours away from the bitter almond hedge and from his cell in the slave quarters.

On the third night he took the chance of creeping out of the window of the slave quarters an hour earlier than Sukeena had warned him was wise. One of the hounds rushed at him, but before it could alarm the watch, Aboli calmed it with a soft whistle. The hound recognized him and snuffled his hand. He stroked its head and whispered softly to it in the language of the forests and left it whining softly and wagging its tail as he slipped over the wall like a dark moon shadow.

During his previous hunts, he had discovered that each night the buffalo herd left the vastness of the dense forest to drink at a waterhole a mile or so beyond the boundary hedge. He knew that if he crossed it before midnight he might be able to catch them while they were still at the water. It was his best chance of being able to pick out a bull and make his stalk.

From the hollow tree at the edge of the forest he retrieved the bow that he had cut and carved from a branch of wild olive. Sukeena had stolen the single iron arrowhead from the collection of weapons that Governor Kleinhans had assembled during his service in the Indies, which now hung on the walls of the residence. It was unlikely that it would be missed from among the dozens of swords, shields and knives that made up the display.

"I will return it to you," he promised Sukeena "I would not have you suffer if it should be missed."

"Your need of it is great than my risk," she told him as she slipped the arrowhead, wrapped in a scrap of cloth, beneath the seat of the carriage. "I also had a father who was denied a decent burial."

Aboli had fitted the arrowhead to a reed shaft and bound it in place with twine and pitch. He had fl etched it with the moulted feathers from the hunting falcons housed in the mews behind the stables. However, he did not have time to search for the insect grubs from which to brew poison for the barbs, and so he must rely on this single shaft flying true to the mark.

Now as Aboli hunted in the shadows, himself another silent gliding shadow, he found old forgotten skills returning to him, and recalled the instruction that he had undergone as a young boy from the elders of his tribe. He felt the night wind softly caress his bare chest and flanks and was aware of its direction at all times as he circled the waterhole until it blew straight into his face. It brought down to him the rich bovine stench of the prey he sought.

The wind was strong enough to shake the tall reeds and cover any sound he might make so he could move in swiftly over the last hundred paces. Above the soughing of the north wind and the rustle of the reeds he heard a coughing grunt. He froze and nocked his single arrow.

Had the lions come to the water ahead of the herd, he wondered, for that had been a leonine sound. He stared ahead, and heard the sound of great hoofs plodding and sucking in the mud of the waterhole. Above the rippling heads of the reeds a dark shape moved, mountainous in the moonlight.

"A bull," he breathed. "A bull of a bull!"

The bull had finished drinking. The crafty old beast had come ahead of the cows and calves of the breeding herd. His back was coated with glistening wet mud from the wallow, and he plodded towards where Aboli crouched, his hoofs squelching in the mud.

Aboli lost sight of the prey as he sank down among the swaying stems and let him come on. But he could mark him by the sound of his heavy breathing, and by the rasping of the reeds dragging down his flanks. The bull was very close, but still out of Aboli's sight, when suddenly he shook his head as the reed stems tangled in his horns, and his ears flapped against his cheeks. If I reach out now I could touch his snout, Aboli thought. Every nerve in his body was drawn as tight as the bowstring in his fingers.

The reed bank parted in front of Aboli, and the massive head came through, the moonlight gleaming on the curved bosses of the horns. Abruptly the bull became aware of something amiss, of danger lurking close at hand, and he stopped and raised his huge black head. As he lifted his muzzle to test the air, his nose was wet and shining and water drooled from his mouth. He flared his nostrils into -dark pits and snuffled the air. Aboli could feel his breath hot upon his naked chest and his face.

The bull turned his head, questing for the scent of man or cat, for the hidden hunter. Aboli stayed still as a tree stump He was holding the heavy bow at full draw. The power of the olive branch and the gut bowstring were so fierce that even the granite muscles in his arms and shoulder bulged and trembled with the effort. As the bull turned his head he revealed the notch behind his ear where the neck fused with the bone of his skull and the massive boss of his horns. Aboli held his aim for one heartbeat longer, then loosed the arrow. It flashed and whirred in the moonlight, leaping from his hand and burying half its length in the massive black neck.

The bull reeled back. If the arrowhead had found the gap between the vertebrae of the spine, as Aboli had hoped, he would have dropped where he stood but the iron point struck the spine and was deflected by bone. It glanced aside but sliced through the great artery behind the jawbone. As the bull bucked and kicked to the stinging impact of the steel, the severed artery erupted and a spout of blood flew high in the air, black as an ostrich feather in the light of the moon..

The bull dashed past Aboli, hooking wildly with those wide curved horns. If Aboli had not dropped his bow and hurled himself aside, the burnished point that hissed by, a finger's width from his navel, would have skewered him and ripped open his bowels.

The bull charged on and reached the hard dry ground. On his knees Aboli strained his ears to follow his quarry's crashing rush through the scrub. Abruptly it came up short. There was a long, fraught pause, in which he could hear the animal's laboured breathing and the patter of streaming blood falling on the leaves of the low bushes around it. Then he heard the bull stagger and stumble backwards, trying to remain on his feet while the strength flowed out of his huge body on that tide of dark blood. The beast fell heavily so that the earth trembled under Aboli's bare feet.

A moment later came the rasping death bellow, and thereafter an aching quietness. Even the night birds and the bullfrogs of the swamp had been silenced by that dreadful sound. It was as though all the forest held its breath at the passing of such a mighty creature. Then) slowly, the night came alive once again, the frogs piped and croaked from the reed beds a nightjar screeched and from afar an eagle owl hooted mournfully.

Aboli skinned the bull with the knife that Sukeena had stolen for him from the residence kitchens. He folded the green skin and tied it with bark rope. It was heavy enough to tax even his strength. He staggered with the bundle until he could get under it and balance it on his head. He left the naked carcass for the packs of night-prowling hyena and the flocks of vultures, carnivorous storks, kites and crows that would find it with the first light of morning, and set off back towards the colony and the table-topped mountain, silhouetted against the stars. Even under his burden he moved at the ground-eating trot of the warriors of his tribe that was becoming so natural to him again after his confinement for two decades in a small ship upon the seas. He was remembering so much long-forgotten tribal lore and wisdom, relearning old skills, becoming once more a true son of this baked African earth.

He climbed to the lower slopes of the mountain and left the bundled skin in a narrow crevice in the rock cliff. He covered it with large boulders, for the hyenas roamed here also, attracted by the rubbish and wastes and sewage generated by the human settlement of the colony.

When he had placed the last boulder he looked up at the sky and saw that the curling scorpion was falling fast towards the dark horizon. Only then he realized how swiftly the night had sped, and went bounding back down the slope. He reached the edge of the Company gardens just as the first rooster crowed in the darkness.

Later that morning, as he waited on the bench with the other slaves outside the kitchens for his breakfast bowl of gruel and thick, curdled sour milk, Sukeena passed on her way to tend the affairs of the household. "I heard you return last night. You were out too late," she whispered, without turning her head on the orchid stem of her neck.

"If you are discovered, you will bring great hardship on all of us, and our plans will come to naught."

"My task is almost finished," he rumbled softly. "Tonight will be the last time I need to go out."

"Have a care, Aboli. There is much at risk," she said and glided away. Despite her warning she had given him any help he had asked for, and without watching her go Aboli whispered to himself, "That little one has the heart of a lioness."

That night, when the house had settled down for the night, he slipped through the grating. Again the dogs were stilled by his quiet whistle, and he had lumps of dried sausage for each of them. When he reached the wall below, the lawns, he looked to the stars and saw in the eastern sky the first soft luminescence of the moonrise. He vaulted over it and, keeping well clear of the road, guided himself by touch along the outside of the wall, towards the settlement.

No more than three or four dim lights were showing from the cottages and buildings of the village. The four ships at anchor in the bay were all burning lanterns at their mastheads. The castle was a dark brooding shape against the starlight.

He waited at the edge of the Parade and tuned his ears to the sounds of the night. Once, as he was about to set out across the open ground, he heard drunken laughter and snatches of singing as a party of soldiers from the castle returned from an evening of debauchery among the rude hovels on the waterfront, which passed as taverns in this remote station, selling the rough raw spirit the Hottentots called dop.

One of the revellers carried a tar-dipped torch.

The flames wove uncertainly as the man stopped before the gibbet in the middle of the Parade, and shouted an insult at the corpse that still hung upon it. His companions bellowed with drunken laughter at his humour, and then reeled on, supporting each other, towards the castle.

When they had disappeared through the gates, and when silence and darkness fell, Aboli moved out swiftly across the Parade. Though he could not see more than a few paces ahead, the smell of corruption guided him, only a dead lion smells as strongly as a rotting human corpse.

Sir Francis Courtney's body had been beheaded and neatly quartered. Slow John had used a butcher's cleaver to hack through the larger bones. Aboli brought down the head from the spike on which it had been impaled. He wrapped it in a clean white cloth and placed it in the saddle-bag he carried. Then he retrieved the other parts of the corpse. The dogs from the village had carried off some of the smaller bones, but even working in darkness Aboli was able to recover what remained. He closed and buckled the leather flap of the bag, slung it over his shoulder and set off again at a run towards the mountain.

Sukeena knew the mountain intimately, every ravine, cliff and crag. She had explained to him how to find the narrow concealed entrance to the cavern where, the previous night, he had left the raw buffalo skin. In the light of the rising moon, he returned unerringly to it. When he reached the entrance he stooped and swiftly removed the boulders that covered the buffalo skin. Then he crawled further into the crevice and drew aside the bushes that hung down from the cliff above to conceal the dark throat of the cavern.

He worked deftly, with flint and steel, to light one of the candles Sukeena had provided. Shielding the flame with cupped hands from any watcher below the mountain he went forward and crawled into the low natural tunnel on hands and knees, dragging the saddle-bag behind him.

As Sukeena had told him, the tunnel opened suddenly into a cavern high enough for him to stand. He held the candle above his head and saw that the cavern would make a fitting burial place for a great chief. There was even a natural rock shelf at the far end. He left the saddle bag upon it and crawled back to retrieve the buffalo skin. Before he entered the tunnel again he looked back over his shoulder and reoriented himself in the direction of the moonrise.

"I shall turn his face to greet ten thousand moons and all the sunrises of eternity!" he said softly, and dragged the heavy skin into the cavern and spread it on the rock floor.

He placed the candle on the rock shelf and began to unpack the bag. First he set aside those small offerings and ceremonial items he had brought with him. Then he lifted out Sir Francis's covered head and laid it in the centre of the buffalo hide. He unwrapped it reverently, and showed no repugnance for the thick cloying odour of decay that slowly filled the cavern. He assembled all the other dismembered parts of the body and arranged them in their natural order, binding them in place with slim strands of bark rope, until Sir Francis lay on his side, his knees drawn up beneath his chin and his arms hugging his legs, the foetal position of the womb and of sleep. Then he folded the wet buffalo hide tightly around him so that only his ravaged face was still exposed. He stitched the folds of the hide around him so they would dry into an iron-hard sarcophagus. It was a long and meticulous task, and when the candle burnt down and guttered in a pool of its own liquid wax he lit another from the stump and worked on.

When he had finished, he took up the turtle shell comb, another of Sukeena's gifts, and combed out the tangled tresses that still adhered to Sir Francis's skull, and braided them neatly. At last he lifted the seated body and placed it on the stone shelf. He turned it carefully to face the east, to gaze for ever towards the moonrise and the dawn.

For a long while he squatted below the ledge and looked upon the ravaged head, seeing it in his mind's eye as it once was. The face of the vigorous young mariner who had rescued him from the slavers" hold two decades before.

At last he rose and began to gather up the grave-goods he had brought with him. He laid them one at a time on the ledge before the body of Sir Francis. The tiny model of a ship he had carved with his own hands. There had not been time to lavish care upon its construction, and it was crude and childlike. However, the three masts had sails set upon them, and the name carved into the stern was Lady Edwina.

"May this ship carry you over the dark oceans to the landfall where the woman whose name she bears awaits you,"Aboli whispered.

Next he placed the knife and the bow of olive wood beside the ship. "I have no sword with which to arm you, but may these weapons be your defence in the dark places."

Then he offered the food bowl and the water bottle. "May you never again hunger or thirst."

Lastly, the cross of wood that Aboli had fashioned and decorated with green abalone shell, white-carved bone and small bright stones from the river-bed. "May the cross of your God which guided you in life, guide you still in death," he said as he placed the cross before Sir Francis's empty eyes.

Kneeling on the cavern floor he built a small fire and lit it from the candle. "May this fire warm you in the darkness of your long night. "Then, in his own language, he sang the funeral chant and the song of the traveller on a long journey, clapping his hands softly to keep the time, and to show respect. When the flames of the fire burned low he stood and moved to the entrance of the cavern.

"Farewell, my friend," he said. "Goodbye, MY father."

Governor van de Velde was a cautious man. At first, he had not allowed Aboli to drive him in the carriage. "This is a whim of yours that I will not deny, my dear," he told his wife, "but the fellow is a black savage. What does he know of horses?"

"He is really very good, better by far than old Fredricus." Katinka laughed. "And he looks so splendid in the new livery I have designed for him."

"His fancy maroon coat and breeches will be of little interest to me when he breaks my neck," van de Velde said, but despite his misgivings he watched the way Aboli handled the team of greys.

The first morning that Aboli drove the Governor down from the residence to his suite in the castle, there was a stir and a murmur among the convicts working on the walls as the carriage crossed the Parade and approached the castle gates. They had recognized Aboli sitting high on the coachman's seat with the long whip in his white-gloved hands.

Hal was on the point of shouting a greeting to him, but checked himself in time. It was not the sting of Barnard's whip that dissuaded him, but he realized that it would be unwise to remind his captors that Aboli had been his shipmate. The Dutch would expect him to regard a black man as a slave and not as a companion.

"Nobody to greet Aboli," he whispered urgently to Daniel, sweating beside him. "Ignore him. Pass it on." The order went swiftly down the ranks of men on the scaffold and then to those labouring in the courtyard. When the carriage came in through the gates to a turnout of the honour guard and the salutes of the garrison's officers, none of the convicts paid any attention. They devoted them, selves to the heavy work with block and tackle and iron bar.

Aboli sat like a carved figurehead on the coachman's seat, staring directly ahead. His dark eyes did not even flicker in Hal's direction. He drew the team of greys to a halt at the foot of the staircase and sprang down to lower the folding steps and hand out the Governor. Once van de Velde had waddled up the stairs and disappeared into his suite, Aboli returned to his seat and sat upon it, unmoving, facing straight ahead. In a short time the gaolers and guards forgot his silent presence, turned their attention to their duties and the castle fell into its routine.

An hour passed and one of the horses threw its head and fidgeted. From the corner of his eye Hal had noticed Aboli touch the reins to agitate the animal slightly. Now he climbed unhurriedly down and went to its head. He held its leather cheek-strap and stroked its head and murmured endearments to it. The grey quietened immediately under his touch, and Aboli went down on one knee and lifted first one front foot and then the other, examining the hoofs for any injury.

Still on one knee and screened by the horse's body from the view of any of the guards or overseers, he looked up for the first time at Hal. Their gaze touched for an instant. Aboli nodded almost imperceptibly and opened his right fist to give Hal a glimpse of the tiny curl of white paper he had in his palm, then closed his fist and stood up. He walked down the team of horses examining each animal and making minute adjustments to the harness. At last he turned aside and leaned against the stone wall beside him, stooping to wipe the fine flouring of dust from his boots, Hal watched him take the quill of paper and surreptitiously stuff it into a joint in the stonework of the wall. He straightened and returned to the coachman's seat to await the Governor's pleasure. Van de Velde never showed consideration for servant, slave or animal. All that morning the team of greys stood patiently in the traces with Aboli soothing them at intervals. A little before noon the Governor re-emerged from the Company offices and had himself driven back to the residence for the midday meal.

In the dusk, as the convicts wearily climbed down into the courtyard, Hal stumbled as he reached the ground and put out his hand to steady himself. Neatly he picked the scrap of folded paper from the joint in the stonework where Aboli had left it.

Once in the dungeon there was just sufficient light filtering down from the torch in its bracket at the top of the staircase for Hal to read the message. It was written in a fine neat hand that he did not recognize. Despite all his father's and Hal's own instruction, Aboli's handwriting had never been better than large, sprawling and malformed. It seemed that another scribe had framed these words. A tiny nub of charcoal was wrapped in the paper, placed there for Hal to write his reply on the reverse of the scrap.

"The Captain buried with honour." Hal's heart leapt as he read that. So it was Aboli who had taken down his father's mutilated corpse from the gibbet. I should have known he would give my father that respect.

There was only one more word. "Althuda?" Hal puzzled over this until he understood that Aboli, or the writer, must be asking after the welfare of the other prisoner.

"Althuda!" he called softly. "Are you awake?" "Greetings, Hal. What cheer?"

"Somebody outside asks after you."

There was a long silence as Althuda. considered this. "Who asks?"

"I know not." Hal could not explain for he was certain that the gaolers eavesdropped on these exchanges.

Another long silence. "I can guess," Althuda called. "And so can you. We have discussed her before. Can you send a reply? Tell her I am alive."

Hal rubbed the charcoal on the wall to sharpen a point on it and wrote, "Althuda well." Even though his letters were small and cramped, there was space for no more on the paper.

The following morning, as they were led out to begin the day's w "ark on the scaffold, Daniel screened Hal for the moment he needed to push the scrap of paper into the same crack from which he had retrieved it.

In the middle of the morning Aboli drove the Governor down from the residence and parked once more beneath the staircase. Long after van de Velde had disappeared into his sanctum, Aboli remained on the coachman's seat. At last he looked up casually at a flock of red-winged starlings that had come down from the cliffs to perch on the walls of the eastern bastion and give vent to their low, mournful whistles. From the birds his eye passed over Hal, who nodded. Once again Aboli dismounted and tended his horses, pausing beside the wall to adjust the straps on his boots and, with a magician's sleight-of hand to recover the message from the crack in the wall. Hal breathed easier when he saw it, for they had established their letterbox.

They did not make the mistake of trying to exchange messages every day. Sometimes a week or more might pass before Aboli nodded at Hal, and placed a note in the wall. If Hal had a message, he would give the same signal and Aboli would leave paper and charcoal for him.

The second message Hal received was in that artistic and delicate script. "A. is safe. Orchid sends her heart."

"Is the orchid the one we spoke of?" Hal called to Althuda that night. "She sends you her heart, and says you are safe."

"I do not know how she has achieved that, but I must believe it and be thankful to her in this as in so many things." There was a lift of relief in Althuda's tone. Hal held the scrap of paper to his nose, and fancied that he detected the faintest perfume upon it. He huddled on his damp straw in a corner of the cell. He thought about Sukeena until sleep overcame him. The memory of her beauty was like a candle flame in the winter darkness of the dungeon.

Governor van de Velde was passing drunk. He had swilled the Rhenish with the soup and t-GMadeira with the fish and the lobster. The red wines of Burgundy had accompanied the mutton stew and the pigeon pie. He had quaffed the claret with the beef, and interspersed each with draughts of good Dutch gin. When at last he rose from the board, he steadied himself as he wove to his seat by the fire with a hand on his wife's arm. She was not usually so attentive, but all this evening she had been in an affectionate and merry mood, laughing at his sallies which on other occasions she would have ignored, and refilling his glass with her own gracious hand before it was half emptied. Come to think of it, he could not remember when last they had dined alone, just the two of them, like a pair of lovers.