Birds of Prey (83 page)

‘Oh, do it swiftly,’ she pleaded as another spasm gripped her. ‘The blue flask. Two measures in a mug of hot water. No more than that, for it is powerful.’

Her hand shook violently as she tried to take the mug from him. She had only the use of the one hand now: her wounded arm was swollen and purpled, the once dainty fingers so bloated that the
skin threatened to burst open. She had difficulty holding the mug and Hal lifted it to her lips while she gulped down the potion with pathetic urgency.

She fell back with the effort and writhed on the bunk, drenching the bedclothes with the sweat of agony. Hal lay beside her and held her to his chest, trying to comfort her but knowing too well
how futile were his efforts.

After a while the poppy flower seemed to have its effect. She clung to him and pressed her face into his neck. ‘I am dying, Gundwane.’

‘Do not say so,’ he begged her.

‘I have known it these many months. I saw it in the stars. That was why I could not answer your question.’

‘Sukeena, my love, I will die with you.’

‘No.’ Her voice was a little stronger. ‘You will go on. I have travelled with you as far as I am permitted. But for you the Fates have reserved a special destiny.’ She
rested a while, and he thought that she had fallen into a coma, but then she spoke again. ‘You will live on. You will have many strong sons and their descendants will flourish in this land of
Africa, and make it their own.’

‘I want no son but yours,’ he said. ‘You promised me a son.’

‘Hush, my love, for the son I give you will break your heart.’ Another terrible convulsion took her, and she screamed in the agony of it. At last, when it seemed she could bear no
more, she fell back trembling and wept. He held her and could find no words to tell her of his grief.

The hours passed, and twice he heard the ship’s bell announce the watch changes. He felt her grow weaker and sink away from him. Then a series of powerful convulsions racked her body. When
she fell back in his arms, she whispered, ‘Your son, the son I promised you, has been born.’ Her eyes were tightly closed, tears squeezing out between the lids.

For a long minute he did not understand her words. Then, fearfully, he drew back the blanket.

Between her bloody thighs lay a tiny pink mannikin, glistening wet and bound to her still by a tangle of fleshy cord. The little head was only half formed, the eyes would never open and the
mouth would never take suck, nor cry, nor laugh. But he saw that it was, indeed, a boy.

He took her again in his arms and she opened her eyes and smiled softly. ‘I am sorry, my love. I have to go now. If you forget all else, remember only this, that I loved you as no other
woman will ever be able to love you.’

She closed her eyes and he felt the life go out of her, the great stillness descend.

He waited with them, his woman and his son, until midnight. Then Althuda brought down a bolt of canvas and sailmaker’s needle, thread and palm. Hal placed the stillborn child in
Sukeena’s arms and bound him there with a linen winding sheet. Then he and Althuda sewed them into a shroud of bright new canvas, a cannonball at Sukeena’s feet.

At midnight Hal carried the woman and child in his arms up onto the open deck. Under the bright African moon he gave them both up to the sea. They went below the dark surface and left barely a
ripple in the ship’s wake at their passing.

‘Goodbye, my love,’ he whispered. ‘Goodbye, my two darlings.’

Then he went down to the cabin in the stern. He opened Llewellyn’s Bible and looked for comfort and solace between its black-leather covers, but found none.

F
or six long days he sat alone by his cabin window. He ate none of the food that Aboli brought him. Sometimes he read from the Bible, but mostly
he stared back along the ship’s wake. He came up on deck at noon each day, gaunt and haggard, and sighted the sun. He made his calculations of the ship’s position and gave his orders to
the helm. Then he went back to be alone with his grief.

At dawn on the seventh day Aboli came to him. ‘Grief is natural, Gundwane, but this is indulgence. You forsake your duty and those of us who have placed our trust in you. It is
enough.’

‘It will never be enough.’ Hal looked at him. ‘I will mourn her all the days of my life.’ He stood up and the cabin swam around him, for he was weak with grief and lack
of food. He waited for his head to steady and clear. ‘You are right, Aboli. Bring me a bowl of food and a mug of small beer.’

After he had eaten, he felt stronger. He washed and shaved, changed his shirt and combed his hair back into a thick plait down his back. He saw that there were strands of pure white in the sable
locks. When he looked in the mirror, he barely recognized the darkly tanned face that stared back at him, the nose as beaky as that of an eagle, and there was no spare flesh to cover the
high-ridged cheek-bones or the unforgiving line of the jaw. His eyes were green as emeralds, and with that stone’s adamantine glitter.

I am barely twenty years of age, he thought, with amazement, and yet I look twice that already.

He picked up his sword from the desk top and slipped it into the scabbard. ‘Very well, Aboli. I am ready to take up my duty again,’ he said, and Aboli followed him up onto the
deck.

The boatswain at the helm knuckled his forehead, and the watch on deck nudged each other. Every man was intensely aware of his presence, but none looked in his direction. Hal stood for a while
at the rail, his eyes darting keenly about the deck and rigging.

‘Boatswain, hold your luff, damn your eyes!’ he snapped at the helmsman.

The leech of the main sail was barely trembling as it spilled the wind, but Hal had noticed it and the watch, squatting at the foot of the mainmast, grinned at each other surreptitiously. The
captain was in command again.

At first they did not understand what this presaged. However, they were soon to learn the breadth and extent of it. Hal started by speaking to every man of the crew alone in his cabin. After he
had asked their names and the village or town of their birth, he questioned them shrewdly as to their service. Meanwhile he was studying each and assessing his worth.

Three stood out above the others; they had all been watchkeepers under Llewellyn’s command. The boatswain, John Lovell, was the man who had served under Hal’s father.

‘You’ll keep your old rating, boatswain,’ Hal told him, and John grinned.

‘It will be a pleasure to serve under you, Captain.’

‘I hope you feel the same way in a month from now,’ Hal replied grimly.

The other two were William Stanley and Robert Moone, both coxswains. Hal liked the look of them: Llewellyn had a good eye for judging men, he thought, and shook their hands.

Big Daniel was his other boatswain, and Ned Tyler, who could both read and write, was mate. Althuda, one of the few other literates aboard, became the ship’s writer, in charge of all the
documents and keeping them up to date. He was Hal’s closest remaining link with Sukeena, and Hal felt the greatest affection for him and wished to keep him near at hand. They could share each
other’s grief.

John Lovell and Ned Tyler went through the ship’s roster with Hal and helped him draw up the watch-bill, the nominal list by which every man knew to which watch he was quartered and his
station for every purpose.

As soon as this was done Hal inspected the ship. He started on the main deck and then, with his two boatswains, opened every hatch. He climbed and sometimes crawled into every part of the hull,
from her bilges to her maintop. In her magazine he opened three kegs, chosen at random, and assessed the quality of her gunpowder and slow-match.

He checked off her cargo against the manifest, and was surprised and pleased to find the amount of muskets and lead shot she carried, together with great quantities of trade goods.

Then he ordered the ship hove to, and a longboat lowered. He had himself rowed around the ship so he could judge her trim. He moved some of the culverins to gunports further aft, and ordered the
cargo swung out on deck and repacked to establish the trim he favoured. Then he exercised the ship’s company in sail setting and altering, sailing the
Golden Bough
through every point
of the compass and at every attitude to the wind. This went on for almost a week, as he called out the watch below at noon or in the middle of the night to shorten or increase sail and push the
ship to the limits of her speed.

Soon he knew the
Golden Bough
as intimately as a lover. He found out how close he could take her to the wind, and how she loved to run before it with all her canvas spread. He had a
bucket crew wet down her sails so they would better hold the wind, and then, when she was in full flight, took her speed through the water with glass and log timed from bow to stern. He found out
how to coax the last yard of speed out of her, and how to have her respond to the helm like a fine hunter to the reins.

The crew worked without complaint, and Aboli heard them talking among themselves in the forecastle. Far from complaining, they seemed to be enjoying the change from Llewellyn’s more
complacent command.

‘The young ’un is a sailor. The ship loves him. He can drive the
Bough
to her limit, and make her fly through the water, he can.’

‘He’s happy to drive us to the limit, also,’ another opined.

‘Cheer up, all you lazy layabouts, I reckon there’ll be prize money galore at the end of this voyage.’

Then Hal worked them at the guns, running them out then in again, until the men sweated, strained and grinned as they cursed him for a tyrant. Then he had the guncrews fire at a floating keg,
and cheered with the best of them as the target shattered to the shot.

In between times, he exercised them with the cutlass and the pike, and he fought alongside them, stripped to the waist and matching himself against Aboli, Big Daniel or John Lovell, who was the
best swordsman of the new crew.

The
Golden Bough
sailed on around the bulge of the southern African continent and Hal headed her up into the north. Now with every league they sailed the sea changed its character. The
waters took on a vivid indigo hue that stained the sky the same colour. They were so clear that, leaning over the bows, Hal could see the pods of porpoises four fathoms down, racing ahead of the
bows and frolicking like a pack of boisterous spaniels until they arched up to the surface. As they broke through it he could see the nostril on top of their head open to breathe, and they looked
up at him with a merry eye and a knowing grin.

The flying fish were their outriders, sailing ahead of them on flashing silver wings, and the mountains of towering cumulus clouds were the beacons that beckoned them ever northwards.

When they sailed into the great calms he would not let his crew rest, but lowered the boats and raced watch against watch, the oars churning the water white. Then at the end of the course he had
them board the
Golden Bough
as though she were an enemy, while he and Aboli and Big Daniel opposed them and made them fight for a footing on the deck.

In the windless heat of the tropics, while the
Bough
rolled gently on the sluggish swells and the empty sails slatted and lolled, he raced the hands in relay teams to the top of the
mainmast and down, with an extra tot of rum as the prize.

Within weeks the men were fit and lean and bursting with high spirits, spoiling for a fight. Hal, however, was plagued by a nagging worry that he shared with nobody, not even Aboli. Night after
night he sat at his desk in the main cabin, not daring to sleep, for he knew that the grief and the memories of the woman and the child he had lost would haunt his dreams, and he studied the charts
and tried to puzzle out a solution.

He had barely forty men under his command, only just sufficient to work the ship, but too few by far to fight her. If they met again, the Buzzard would be able to send a hundred men onto the
Golden Bough
’s deck. If they were to be able to defend themselves, let alone seek employment in the service of the Prester, then Hal must find seamen.

When he perused the charts he could find few ports where he might enlist trained seamen. Most were under the control of the Portuguese and the Dutch, and they would not welcome an English
frigate, especially one whose captain was intent on seducing their sailors into his service.

The English had not penetrated this far ocean in any force. A few traders had factories on the Indian continent, but they were under the thrall of the Great Mogul, and, besides, to reach them
would mean a voyage of several thousand miles out of his intended course.

Hal knew that on the south-east shore of the long island of St Lawrence, which was also called Madagascar, the French Knights of the Order of the Holy Grail had a safe harbour which they called
Fort Dauphin. If he called in there, as an English Knight of the Order he could expect a welcome but little else for his comfort, unless some rare circumstance such as a cyclone had caused a wreck
and left sailors in the port without ship. However, he decided that he must take that chance and make Fort Dauphin his first call, and laid his course for the island.

As he sailed on northwards, with Madagascar as his goal, Africa was always there off the larboard beam. At times the land dreamed in the blue distance, and at other times it was so close that
they could smell its peculiar aroma. It was the peppery scent of spice and the rich dark odour of the earth, like new-baked biscuit hot from the oven.

Often Jiri, Matesi and Kimatti clustered at the rail, pointing at the green hills and the lacy lines of surf, and talking together quietly in the language of the forests. When there was a quiet
hour, Aboli would climb to the masthead and stare across at the land. When he descended his expression was sad and lonely.

Day after day they saw no sign of other men. There were no towns or ports along the shore that they could spy out, and no sail upon the sea, not even a canoe or coasting dhow.

It was not until they were less than a hundred leagues south of Cap St Marie, the southernmost point of the island, that they raised another sail. Hal stood the ship to quarters and had the
culverin loaded with grape and the slow-match lit, for out here beyond the Line he dared take no ship on trust.