Текст книги "Birds of Prey"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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"Father, do you not smell it?" He shook his father's arm urgently.

"What is it?" His father took the pipe stern from his mouth. "What is it that you smell?"

"Spice!" said Hal. "The air is full of the perfume of spice."

They moved swiftly down the deck, Ned Tyler, Aboli and Hal, shaking the off-duty watch awake, cautioning each man to silence as they shoved him towards his battle stations. There was no drum to beat to quarters. Their excitement was infectious. The waiting was over. The Dutchman was out there somewhere close, to windward in the darkness. They could all smell his fabulous cargo now.

Sir Francis extinguished the candle in the binnacle so that the ship showed no lights, then passed the keys of the arms chests to his boatswains. They were kept locked until the chase was in sight for the dread of mutiny was always in the back of every captain's mind. At other times only the petty officers carried cutlasses.

In haste the chests were opened and the weapons passed from hand to hand. The cutlasses were of good Sheffield steel, with plain wooden hilts and basket guards. The pikes had six-foot shafts of English oak and heavy hexagonal iron heads. Those of the crew who lacked skill with the sword chose either these robust spears or the boarding axes that could lop a man's head from his shoulders at a stroke.

The muskets were racked in the black powder magazine. They were brought up, and Hal helped the gunners load them with a handful of lead pellets on top of a handful of powder. They were clumsy, inaccurate weapons, with an effective range of only twenty or thirty yards. After the lock was triggered, and the burning match mechanically applied, the weapon fired in a cloud of smoke, but then had to be reloaded. This operation took two or three vital minutes, during which the musketeer was at the mercy of his foes.

Hal preferred the bow; the famous English longbow that had decimated the French knights at Agincourt. He could loose a dozen shafts in the time it took to reload a musket. The longbow carried fifty paces with the accuracy to strike a foe in the centre of the chest and with the power to spit him to the backbone, even though he wore a breastplate. He already had two bundles of arrows lashed to the sides of the crow's nest, ready to hand.

Sir Francis and some of his petty officers strapped on their half armour, light cavalry cuitasses and steel pot helmets. Sea salt had rusted them and they were dented and battered from other actions.

In short order the ship was readied for battle, and the crew armed and armoured. However, the gun ports were closed and the demi-culver ins were not run out. Most of the men were hustled below by Ned and the other boatswains, while the rest were ordered to lie flat on the deck concealed below the bulwarks. No slow-match was lit the glow and smoke might alert the chase to her danger. However, charcoal braziers smouldered at the foot of each mast, and the wedges were knocked out of the gun ports with muffled wooden mallets so that the sound of the blows would not carry.

Aboli pushed his way through the scurrying figures to where Hal stood at the foot of the mast. Around his bald head he wore a scarlet cloth whose tail hung down his back, and thrust into his sash was a cutlass. Under one arm he carried a rolled bundle of coloured silk. "From your father." He thrust the bundle into Hal's arms. "You know what to do with them!" He gave Hal's pigtail a tug. "Your father says that you are to remain at the masthead no matter which way the fight goes. Do you hear now?"

He turned and hurried back towards the bows. Hal grimaced rebelliously at his broad back, but climbed dutifully into the shrouds. When he reached the masthead he scanned the darkness swiftly, but as yet there was nothing to see. Even the aroma of spice had evaporated. He felt a stab of concern that he might only have imagined it, "It is only that the chase has come out of our wind," he reassured himself. "She is probably abeam of us by now."

He attached the banner Aboli had given him to the signal halyard, ready to fly it at his father's order. Then he removed the cover from the pan of the falconer. He checked the tension of the string before setting his longbow into the rack beside the bundles of yard-long arrows. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Below him the ship was unnaturally quiet, not even a bell to mark the passage of the hours, only the soft song of the sails and the muted accompaniment of the rigging.

The day came upon them with the suddenness that in these African seas he had come to know so well. Out of the dying night rose a tall bright tower, shining and translucent as an ice-covered alp. a great ship under a mass of gleaming canvas, her masts so tall they seemed to rake the last pale stars from the sky.

"Sail ho!" he pitched his voice so that it would carry to the deck below but not to the strange ship that lay, a full league away, across the dark waters. "Fine on the larboard beam!"

His father's voice floated back to him. "Masthead! Break out the colours!" Hal heaved on the signal halyard, and the silken bundle soared to the masthead. There it burst open and the tricolour of the Dutch Republic streamed out on the southeaster, orange and snowy white and blue, Within moments the other banners and long pennants burst out from the head of the mizzen and the foremast, one emblazoned with the cipher of the VOC, die Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United East India Company. The regalia was authentic, captured only four months previously from the Heerlycke Nacht. Even the standard of the Council of Seventeen was genuine. There would scarce have been time for the captain of the galleon to have learned of the capture of his sister ship and so to question the credentials of this strange caravel.

The two ships were on converging courses even in darkness Sir Francis had judged well his interception. There was no call for him to alter course and alarm the Dutch captain. But within minutes it was clear that the Lady Edwina, despite her worm-riddled hull, was faster through the water than the galleon. She must soon begin to overtake the other ship, which he must avoid at all costs.

Sir Francis watched her through the lens of his telescope, and at once he saw why the galleon was so slow and ungainly: her mainmast was jury-rigged, and there was much other evidence of damage to her other masts and rigging. He realized that she must have been caught in some terrible storm in the eastern oceans which would also account for her belated arrival off her landfall on the Agulhas Cape. He knew that he could not alter sail without alarming the Dutch captain, but he had to pass across her stern. He had prepared for this. he signed to the carpenter, at the rail, who with his mate lifted a huge canvas drogue and dropped it over the stern. Like the curb on a head, strong stallion it bit deep in the water and pulled up the Lady Edwina sharply. Again Sir Francis judged the disparate speeds of the two vessels, and nodded with satisfaction.

Then he looked down his own deck. The majority of the men were concealed below decks or lying under the bulwarks where they were invisible even to the lookouts at the galleon's masthead. There was no weapon in sight, all the guns hidden behind their ports. When Sir Francis had captured this caravel she had been a Dutch trader, operating off the west African coast. In converting her to a privateer, he had been at pains to preserve her innocent air and prosaic lines. Only a dozen or so men were visible on the decks and in the rigging, which would be normal for a sluggish merchantman.

As he looked up again the banners of the Republic and the Company broke out at the Dutchman's mastheads. Only a trifle tardily she was acknowledging his salute.

"She accepts us," Ned grunted, as he held the Lady Edwina stolidly on course. "She likes our sheep's clothing." "Perhaps!" Sir Francis replied. "And yet she cracks on more sail." As they watched, the galleon's royals and topgallants bloomed against the morning sky.

"There!" he exclaimed a moment later. "She is altering course, sheering away from us. The Dutchman is a cautious fellow."

"Satan's teeth! just sniff herV Ned whispered, almost to himself, as a trace of spices scented the air. "Sweet as a virgin, and twice as beautiful."

"It's the richest smell you'll ever have in your nostrils." Sir Francis spoke loudly enough for the men on the deck below to hear him. "There lies fifty pounds a head in prize money if you have the notion to fight for it." Fifty pounds was ten years of an English workman's wages, and the men stiffed and growled like hunting hounds on the leash.

Sir Francis went forward to the poop rail and lifted his chin to call softly up to the men in the rigging, "Make believe that those cheese-heads over there are your brothers. Give them a cheer and a brave welcome."

The men aloft howled with glee, and waved their bonnets at the tall ship as the Lady Edwina edged in under her stern. atinka van de Velde sat up and frowned at Zelda, her old nurse. "Why have you woken me so early?" she demanded petulantly, and tossed the tumble of golden curls back from her face. Even so freshly aroused from sleep, it was rosy and angelic. Her eyes were of a startling violet colour, like the lustrous wings of a tropical butterfly.

"There is another ship near us. Another Company ship. The first we have seen in all these terrible stormy weeks. I had begun to think there was not another Christian soul left in all the world," Zelda whined. "You are always complaining of boredom. It might divert you for a while."

Zelda was pale and wan. Her cheeks, once fat, smooth and greased with good living, were sunken. Her great belly was gone, and hung in folds of loose skin almost to her knees. Katinka could see it through the thin stuff of her nightgown.

She has puked away all her fat and half her flesh, Katinka thought, with a twinge of disgust. Zelda had been prostrated by the cyclones that had assailed the Standvastigheid and battered her mercilessly ever since they had left the Trincomalee coast.

Katinka threw back the satin bedclothes and swung her long legs over the edge of the gilded bunk. This cabin had been especially furnished and redecorated to accommodate her, a daughter of one of the omnipotent Zeventien, the seventeen directors of the Company. The decor was all gilt and velvet, silken cushions and silver vessels. A portrait of Katinka by the fashionable Amsterdam artist Pieter de Hoogh hung on the bulkhead opposite her bed, a wedding present from her doting father. The artist had captured her lascivious turn of head. He must have scoured his paint pots to reproduce so faithfully the wondrous colour of her eyes and their expression, which was at once both innocent and corrupt.

"Do not wake my husband," she cautioned the old woman as she flung a gold-brocade wrap over her shoulders and tied the jewelled belt around her hourglass waist. Zelda's eyelid drooped in conspiratorial agreement. At Katinka's insistence the Governor slept in the smaller, less grand cabin beyond the door that was locked from her side. Her excuse was that he snored abominably, and that she was indisposed by the mal-de-mer. In truth, caged in her quarters all these weeks, she was restless and bored, bursting with youthful energy and aflame with desires that the fat old man could never extinguish.

She took Zelda's hand and stepped out onto the narrow stern gallery. This was a private balcony, ornately carved with cherubs and angels, looking out over the ship's wake and hidden from the vulgar eyes of the crew.

It was a morning dazzling with sunlit magic, and as she filled her lungs with the salt tang of the sea she felt every nerve and muscle of her body quiver with the impetus of life. The wind kicked creamy feathers from the tops of the long blue swells, and played with her golden curls. It ruffled the silk over her breasts and belly with the caress of a lover's fingers. She stretched and arched her back sensuously like a sleek, golden cat.

Then she saw the other ship. It was much smaller than the galleon but with pleasing lines. The pretty flags and pennants that streamed from her masts contrasted with the pile of her white sails. She was close enough for Katinka to make out the figures of the few men that manned her rigging. They were waving a greeting, and she could see that some were young and clad only in short petticoats.

She leaned over the rail and stared across. Her husband had commanded that the crew of the galleon observe a strict dress code while she was aboard, so the figures on this strange ship fascinated her. She folded her arms over her bosom and squeezed her breasts together, feeling her nipples harden and engorge. She wanted a man. She burned for a man, any man, just as long as he was young and hard and raging for her. A man like those she had known in Amsterdam before her father had discovered her taste for strong game and sent her out to the Indies, to a safe old husband who had a high position in the Company and even higher prospects. His choice had been Petrus Jacobus van de Velde who, now that he was married to Katinka, was assured of the next vacancy on the Company's board, where he would join the pantheon of the Zeventien.

"Come inside, Lieveling." Zelda tugged at her sleeve. "Those ruffians over there are staring at you."

Katinka. shrugged off Zelda's hand, but it was true. They had recognized her as a female. Even at this distance their excitement was almost palpable. Their antics had become frenzied and one strapping figure in the bows took a double handful of his own crotch and thrust his hips towards her in a rhythmic and obscene gesture.

"Revolting! Come insideV Zelda insisted. "The Governor will be furious if he sees what that animal is doing."

"He should be furious that he cannot perform as nimbly," Katinka replied angelically. She pressed her thighs tightly together the better to savour the sudden moist warmth at their juncture. The caravel was much closer now, and she could see that what the seaman was offering her was bulky enough to overflow his cupped hands. The tip of her pink tongue dabbed at her pouting lips.

"Please, mistress."

"In a while," Katinka demurred. "You were right, Zelda.

This does amuse me. "She raised one white hand and waved back at the other ship. Instantly the men redoubled their efforts to hold her attention.

"This is so undignified," Zelda moaned.

"But it's fun. We'll never see those creatures again, and being always dignified is so dull." She leaned further out over the rail and let the front of her gown bulge open.

At that moment there was a heavy pounding on the door to her husband's cabin. Without further urging Katinka fled from the gallery, rushed to her bunk and threw herself upon it. She pulled the satin bedclothes up to her chin, before she nodded at Zelda, who lifted the cross bar and dropped into an ungainly curtsy as the Governor burst in.

He ignored her and, belting his robe around his protruding belly, waddled to the bunk where Katinka. lay. Without his wig his head was covered by sparse silver bristles.

"My dear, are you well enough to rise? The captain has sent a message. He wishes us to dress and stand to. There is a strange vessel in the offing, and it is behaving suspiciously."

Katinka stifled a smile as she thought of the suspicious behaviour of the strange seamen. Instead she made a brave but pitiful face. "My head is bursting, and my stomach, -" "My poor darling." Petrus van de Velde, Governor-elect of the Cape of Good Hope, bent over her. Even on this cool morning his jowls were basted with sweat, and he reeked of last evening's dinner, Javanese curried fish, garlic and sour rum.

This time her stomach truly churned, but Katinka. offered her cheek dutifully. "I may have the strength to rise," she whispered, "if the captain orders it."

Zelda rushed to the bedside and helped her sit up, and then lifted her to her feet, and with an arm around her waist, led her to the small Chinese screen in the corner of the cabin. Seated on the bench opposite, her husband was afforded only vague glimpses of shining white skin from behind the painted silk panels, even though he craned his head to see more.

"How much longer must this terrible journey last?" Katinka complained.

"The captain assures me that, with this wind holding fair, we should drop anchor in Table Bay within ten days."

"The Lord give me strength to survive that long."

"He has invited us to dine today with him and his officers," replied the Governor. "It is a pity, but I will send a message that you are indisposed."

Katinka's head and shoulders popped up over the screen. "You will do no such thing!" she snapped. Her breasts, round and white and smooth, quivered with agitation.

One of the officers interested her more than a little. He was Colonel Cornelius Schreuder, who, like her own husband, was en route to take up an appointment at the Cape of Good Hope. He had been appointed military commander of the settlement of which Pettus van de Velde would be Governor. He wore pointed moustaches and a fashionable van Dyck beard, and bowed to her most graciously each time she went on deck. His legs were well turned, and his dark eyes were eagle bright and gave her goose pimples when he looked at her. She read in them more than just respect for her position, and he had responded most gratifyingly to the sly appraisal she had given him from under her long eyelashes.

When they reached the Cape, he would be her husband's subordinate.

Hers also to command and she was sure that he could relieve the monotony of exile in the forsaken settlement at the end of the world that was to be her home for the next three years.

"I mean," she changed her tone swiftly, "it would be churlish of us to decline the captain's hospitality, would it not?"

"But your health is more important," he protested.

"I will find the strength." Zelda slipped petticoats over her head, one after another, five in all, each fluttering with ribbons.

Katinka came from behind the screen and raised her arms. Zelda lowered the blue silk dress over them and drew it down over the petticoats. Then she knelt and carefully tucked up the skirts on one side to reveal the petticoats beneath, and the slim ankles clad in white silk stockings. It was the very latest fashion. The Governor watched her, entranced. If only the other parts of your body were as big and busy as your eyeballs, Katinka thought derisively, as she turned to the long mirror and pirouetted before it.

Then she screamed wildly and clutched her bosom as, from the deck directly above them, there came the sudden deafening roar of gunfire. The Governor screamed as shrilly and flung himself from the bench onto the Oriental carpets that covered the deck.

"Through the lens of the telescope Sir Courtney read the name off her gilded transom. "The Standvastigheid. the Resolution." He lowered the glass and grunted, "A name which we will soon put to the test!"

As he spoke a long bright plume of smoke spurted from the ship's upper deck, and a few seconds later the boom of the cannon carried across the wind. Half a cable's length ahead of their bows, the heavy ball plunged into the sea, making a tall white fountain. They could hear drums beating urgently in the other ship, and the gun ports in her lower decks swung open. Long barrels prodded out.

"I marvel that he waited so long to give us a warning shot," Sir Francis drawled. He closed the telescope, and looked up at the sails. "Put up your helm, Master Ned, and lay us under his stern." The display of false colours had won them enough time to duck in under the menace of the galleon's crushing broadside.

Sir Francis turned to the carpenter, who stood ready at the stern rail with a boarding axe in his hands. "Cut her loose!" he ordered.

The man raised the axe above his head and swung it down. With a crunch the blade sliced into the timber of the stern rail, the drogue line parted with a whiplash crack and, free of her restraint, the Lady Edwina bounded forward, then heeled as Ned put up the helm.

Sir Francis's manservant, Oliver, came running with the red-quartered cloak and plumed cavalier hat. Sir Francis donned them swiftly and bellowed at the masthead, "Down with the colours of the Republic and let's see those of England!" The crew cheered wildly as the Union flag streamed out on the wind.

They came boiling up from below decks, like ants from a broken nest, and lined the bulwarks, roaring defiance at the huge vessel that towered over them. The Dutchman's decks and rigging swarmed with frantic activity.

The cannon in the galleon's ports were training around, but few could cover the caravel as she came flying down on the wind, screened by the Dutchman's own high counter.

A ragged broadside thundered out across the narrowing gap but most of the shot fell wide by hundreds of yards or howled harmlessly overhead. Hal ducked as the blast of a passing shot lifted the cap from his head and sent it sailing away on the wind. A neat round hole had appeared miraculously in the sail six feet above him. He flicked his long hair out of his face, and peered down at the galleon.

The small company of Dutch officers on the quarterdeck were in disarray. Some were in shirtsleeves, and one was stuffing his night-shirt into his breeches as he came up the companion-ladder.

One officer caught his eye in the throng: a tall man in a steel helmet with a van Dyck beard was rallying a company of musketeers on the foredeck. He wore the gold-embroidered sash of a colonel over his shoulder, and from the way he gave his orders and the alacrity with which his men responded seemed a man to watch, one who might prove a dangerous foe.

Now at his bidding the men ran aft, each carrying a murderer, one of the small guns especially used for repelling boarders. There were slots in the galleon's stern rail into which the iron pin of the murderer would fit, allowing the deadly little weapon to be traversed and aimed at the decks of an enemy ship as it came alongside. When they had boarded the Heerlycke Nacht Hal had seen the execution the murderer could wreak at close range. It was more of a threat than the rest of the galleon's battery.

He swivelled the falconet, and blew on the slow-match in his hand.

To reach the stern the file of Dutch musketeers must climb the ladder from the quarterdeck to the poop. He aimed at the head of the ladder as the gap between the two ships closed swiftly; The Dutch colonel was first up the ladder, sword in hand, his gilded helmet sparkling bravely in the sunlight. Hal let him cross the deck at a run, and waited for his men to follow him up.

The first musketeer tripped at the head of the ladder and sprawled on the deck, dropping his murderer as he fell. Those following were bunched up behind him, unable to pass for the moment that it took him to recover and regain his feet. Hal peered over the crude sights of the falconet at the little knot of men. He pressed the burning tip of the match to the pan, and held his aim deliberately as the powder flared. The falconet jumped and bellowed and, as the smoke cleared he saw that five of the musketeers were down, three torn to shreds by the blast, the others screaming and splashing their blood on the white deck.

Hal felt breathless with shock as he looked down at the carnage. He had never before killed a man, and his stomach heaved with sudden nausea. This was not the same as shattering a water cask. For a moment he thought he might vomit.

The Dutch colonel at the stern rail looked up at him. He lifted his sword and pointed it at Hal's face. He shouted something up at Hal, but the wind and the continuous roll of gunfire obliterated his words. But Hal knew that he had made a mortal enemy.

This knowledge steadied him. There was no time to reload the falconer, it had done its work. He knew that that single shot had saved the lives of many of his own men. He had caught the Dutch musketeers before they could set up their murderers to scythe down the boarders. He knew he should be proud, but he was not. He was afraid of the Dutch colonel.

Hal reached for the longbow. He had to stand tall to draw it. He aimed his first arrow down at the colonel. He drew to full reach, but the Dutchman was no longer looking at him: he was commanding the survivors of his company to their positions at the galleon's stern rail.

His back was turned to Hal.

Hal held off a fraction, allowing for the wind and the ship's movement. He loosed the arrow and watched it flash away, curling as the wind caught it. For a moment he thought it would find its mark in the colonel's broad back, but the wind thwarted it. It missed by a hand's breadth and thudded into the deck timbers where it stood quivering. The Dutchman glanced up at him, scorn curling his spiked moustaches. He made no attempt to seek cover, but turned back to his men.

Hal reached frantically for another arrow, but at that instant the two ships came together, and he was almost catapulted over the rim of the crow's nest.

There was a grinding, crackling uproar, timbers burst, and the windows in the galleon's stern galleries shattered at the collision. Hal looked down and saw Aboli in the bows, a black colossus as he swung a boarding grapnel around his head in long swooping revolutions then hurled it upwards, the line snaking out behind.

The iron hook skidded across the poop deck, but when Aboli jerked it back it lodged firmly in the galleon's stern rail. One of the Dutch crew ran across and lifted an axe to cut it free. Hal drew the fl etchings of another arrow to his lips and loosed. This time his judgement of the windage was perfect and the arrowhead buried itself in the man's throat. He dropped the axe and clutched at the shaft as he staggered backwards and collapsed.

Aboli had seized another grapnel and sent that up onto the galleon's stern. It was followed by a score of others, from the other boatswains. In moments the two vessels were bound to each other by a spider's web of manila lines, too numerous for the galleon's defenders to sever though they scampered along the gunwale with hatchets and cutlasses.

The Lady Edwina had not fired her culver ins Sir Francis had held his broadside for the time when it would be most needed. The shot could do little damage to the galleon's massive planking, and it was far from his plans to mortally injure the prize. But now, with the two ships locked together, the moment had come.

"Gunners!" Sir Francis brandished his sword over his head to attract their attention. They stood over their pieces, smoking slow-match in hand, watching him. "Now!" he roared, and slashed his blade downwards.

The line of culver ins thundered in a single hellish chorus. Their muzzles were pressed hard against the galleon's stern, and the carved, gilded woodwork disintegrated in a cloud of smoke, flying white splinters and shards of stained glass from the windows.

It was the signal. No command could be heard in the uproar, no gesture seen in the dense fog that billowed over the locked vessels, but a wild chorus of warlike yells rose from the smoke and the Lady Edwina's crew poured up into the galleon.

They boarded in a pack through the stern gallery, like ferrets into a rabbit warren, climbing with the nimbleness of apes and swarming over the gunwale, screened from the Dutch gunners by the rolling cloud of smoke. Others ran out along the Lady Edwina's yards and dropped onto the galleon's decks. " Franky and St. George!" Their war-cries came up to Hal at the masthead. He saw only three or four shot down by the murderers at the stern before the Dutch musketeers themselves were hacked down and overwhelmed. The men who followed climbed unopposed to the galleon's poop. He saw his father go across, moving with the speed and agility of a much younger man.

Aboli stooped to boost him over the galleon's rail and the two fell in side by side, the tall Negro with the scarlet turban and the cavalier in his plumed Hat, cloak swirling around the battered steel of his cuirass.

"Franky and St. George!" the men howled, as they saw their captain in the thick of the fight, and followed him, sweeping the poop deck with ringing, slashing steel.

The Dutch colonel tried to rally his few remaining men, but they were beaten back remorselessly and sent tumbling down the ladders to the quarterdeck. Aboli and Sir Francis went down after them, their men clamouring behind them like a pack of hounds with the scent of fox in their nostrils.

Here they were faced with sterner opposition. The galleon's captain had formed up his men on the deck below the mainmast, and now their musketeers fired a close-range volley and charged the Lady Edwina's men with bared steel. The galleon's decks were smothered with a struggling mass of fighting men.

Although Hal had reloaded the falconer, there was no target for him. Friend and foe were so intermingled that he could only watch helplessly as the fight surged back and forth across the open deck below him.

Within minutes it was apparent that the crew of the Lady Edwina were heavily outnumbered. There were no reserves Sir Francis had left no one but Hal aboard the caravel. He had committed every last man, gambling all on surprise and this first wild charge. Twenty-four of his men were leagues away across the water, manning the two pinnaces, and could take no part. They were sorely needed now, but when Hal looked for the tiny-scout vessels he saw that they were still miles out. Both had their gaff main sails set, but were making only snail's progress against the southeaster and the big curling swells. The fight would be decided before they could reach the two embattled ships and intervene.

He looked back at the deck of the galleon and to his consternation, realized that the fight had swung against them. His father and Aboli were being driven back towards the stern. The Dutch colonel was at the head of the counter-attack, roaring like a wounded bull and inspiring his men by his example.