Birds of Prey (98 page)

As they approached the
Golden Bough
her crew were in the rigging and they cheered him as the longboat latched onto her chains. Aboli offered Hal a hand to help him climb the ladder to the
deck but Hal ignored it and went up alone. He paused as he saw the long line of canvas-shrouded corpses laid out in the waist, and the terrible damage that the
Gull
’s gunfire had
wrought to his ship. But this was not the time to brood on that, he thought. They would send the dead men overside and mourn them later, but now was the hour of victory. Instead he looked around
the grinning faces of his crew. ‘Well, you ruffians paid out the Buzzard and his cutthroats in a heavier coin than they bargained for. Mr Tyler, break out the rum barrel and give a double
ration to every hand aboard to toast the Buzzard on his way to hell. Then set a course back to Mitsiwa roads.’

He took the child from Judith Nazet’s arms and carried him down to the stern cabin. He laid him on the bunk, and turned to Judith who stood close beside him. ‘He is a sturdy lad, and
has come to little harm. We should let him sleep.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly, looking up at him with that same inscrutably dark gaze. Then she took his hand and led him to the curtained alcove where the Tabernacle of Mary stood.

‘Will you pray with me, El Tazar?’ she asked, and they knelt together.

‘We thank you, Lord, for sparing the life of our Emperor, your tiny servant, Iyasu. We thank you for delivering him from the wicked hands of the blasphemer. We ask your blessing upon his
arms in the conflict that lies ahead. When the victory is won, we beseech you, Lord, to grant him a long and peaceful reign. Make him a wise and gentle monarch. For thy name’s sake,
Amen!’

‘Amen!’ Hal echoed, and made to rise, but she restrained him with a hand on his arm.

‘We thank you also, Lord God, for sending to us your good and faithful Henry Courtney, without whose valour and selfless service the godless would have triumphed. May he be fully rewarded
by the gratitude of all the people of Ethiopia, and by the love and admiration that your servant, Judith Nazet, has conceived towards him.’

Hal felt the shock of her words reverberate through his whole body and turned to look at her, but her eyes were closed. He thought that he had misheard her, but then her grip on his arm
tightened. She stood and drew him up with her.

Still without looking at him she led him out of the main cabin to the small adjoining one, closed the door and bolted it.

‘Your clothes are wet,’ she said, and, like a handmaiden, began to undress him. Her movements were calm and slow. She touched his chest when it was bared and ran her long brown
fingers down his flanks. She knelt before him to loosen his belt and peel down his breeches. When he was completely naked she stared at his manhood with a dark profound gaze, but without touching
him there. She rose to her feet, took his hand and led him to the hard wooden bunk. He tried to pull her down beside him, but she pushed away his hands.

Standing before him she began to undress. She unlaced the chain-mail shirt, which fell to the deck around her feet. Beneath the heavy, masculine, warlike garb, her body was a paradox of
femininity. Her skin was a translucent amber. Her breasts were small, but the nipples were hard, round and dark red as ripe berries. Her lean hips were sculpted into the sweet sweep of her waist.
The bush of curls that covered her mount of Venus was crisp and a lustrous black.

At last she came to where he lay, and stooped over and kissed deeply into his mouth. Then she gave an urgent little cry and with a lithe movement fell upon him. He was astonished by the strength
and suppleness of her body as he reached up and cleaved to her.

In the late afternoon of that hot, dreamlike day, they were aroused by the crying of the child in the cabin next door. Judith sighed but rose immediately. While she dressed she watched him as
though she wished to remember every detail of his face and body. Then, as she laced her armour she came to stand over him, ‘Yes, I do love you. But, in the same fashion as he chose you, God
has singled me out for a special task. I must see the boy Emperor safely installed upon the throne of Prester John in Aksum.’ She was silent a while longer, then said softly, ‘If I kiss
you again, I may lose my resolve. Goodbye, Henry Courtney. I wish with all my heart that I were a common maid and that it could have been otherwise.’ She strode to the door and went to wait
upon her King.

H
al anchored off the beach in Mitsiwa roads and lowered the longboat. Reverently Daniel Fisher placed the Tabernacle of Mary on its floorboards.
Judith Nazet, in full armour and war helmet, stood in the bows holding the hand of the little boy beside her. Hal took the tiller and ten seamen rowed them in through the low surf towards the
beach.

Bishop Fasilides and fifty war captains waited for them on the red sands. Ten thousand warriors lined the cliffs above. As they recognized their general and their monarch, they began to cheer
and the cheering swept away across the plain, until it was carried by fifty thousand voices to echo along the desert hills.

Those regiments that had lost heart and were already on the road back to the mountains and the far interior, believing themselves deserted by their General and their Emperor, heard the sound and
turned back. Rank upon rank, column upon column, a mighty confluence, the hoofs of their horses raising a tall cloud of red dust, their weapons sparkling in the sunlight and their voices swelling
the triumphant chorus, they came pouring back out of the hills.

Fasilides came forward to greet Iyasu, as he stepped ashore, hand in hand with Judith. The fifty captains knelt in the sand, raised their swords and called down God’s blessings upon him.
Then they crowded forward and competed fiercely for the honour of bearing the Tabernacle of Mary upon their shoulders. Singing a battle hymn, they wound in procession up the cliff path.

Judith Nazet mounted her black stallion with its golden chest armour and its crest of ostrich feathers. She wheeled the horse and urged him, rearing and prancing, to where Hal stood at the
water’s edge.

‘If the battle goes with us, the pagan will try to escape by sea. Visit the wrath and the vengeance of Almighty God upon him with your fair ship,’ she ordered. ‘If the battle
goes against us, have the
Golden Bough
waiting here at this place to take the Emperor to safety.’

‘I will be here waiting for you, General Nazet.’ Hal looked up at her and tried to give the words a special emphasis.

She leaned down from the saddle and her eyes were dark and bright behind the steel nose-piece of her helmet, but he could not be sure whether the brightness was warrior ferocity or the tears of
the lost lover.

‘I will wish all the days of my life that it could have been otherwise, El Tazar.’ She straightened up, wheeled the stallion away and went up the cliff path. The Emperor Iyasu turned
in Bishop Fasilides’ arms and waved back at Hal. He called something in Geez, and his high, piping voice carried down faintly to where Hal stood at the water’s edge, but he understood
not a word of it.

He waved back and shouted, ‘You too, lad! You too!’

T
he
Golden Bough
put out to sea and, beyond the fifty-fathom line with their heads bared in the stark African sunlight, they committed
their dead to the sea. There were forty-three in those canvas shrouds, men of Wales and Devon and the mysterious lands along the Zambere River, all comrades now for ever.

Then Hal ran the ship back into the shallow protected waters where he put every man to work repairing the battle damage and recharging the powder magazine with the munitions that General Nazet
sent out from the shore.

On the third morning he woke in the darkness to the sound of the guns. He went on deck immediately. Aboli was standing by the lee rail. ‘It has begun, Gundwane. The General has pitted her
army against El Grang in the final battle.’

They stood together at the rail and looked towards the dark shore, where the far hills were lit by the hellish flashes of the battlefield and a vast pall of dust and smoke climbed slowly into
the windless sky and billowed out into the anvil shape of a tall tropical thunderhead.

‘If El Grang is beaten, he will try to escape with all his army across the sea to Arabia,’ Hal told Ned Tyler and Aboli, as they listened to the ceaseless pandemonium of the cannon.
‘Weigh anchor and put the ship on a southerly course. We will go down to meet the fugitives as they try to escape from Adulis Bay.’

It was past noon when the
Golden Bough
took up her station off the mouth of the bay and shortened sail. The sound of the guns never ceased and Hal climbed to the masthead and focused his
telescope on the wide plain beyond Zulla where the two great hosts were locked in the death struggle.

Through the curtains of dust and smoke he could make out the tiny shapes of the horsemen as they charged and counter-charged, wraithlike in the dust of their own hoofs. He saw the long flashes
of the great guns, pale red in the sunlight, and the snaking regiments of foot-soldiers winding through the red fog like dying serpents, their spearheads glistening like the reptiles’
scales.

Slowly the battle rolled towards the shoreline and Hal saw a charge of cavalry sweep along the top of the cliffs and tear into a loose, untidy formation of infantry. The sabres rose and fell and
the foot-soldiers scattered before them. Men began to hurl themselves from the cliffs into the sea below.

‘Who are they?’ Hal fretted. ‘Whose horses are those?’ And then through the lens he made out the white cross of Ethiopia at the head of the mass of horsemen as they raced
on towards Zulla.

‘Nazet has beaten them,’ said Aboli. ‘El Grang’s army is in rout!’

‘Put a leadsman to take soundings, Mr Tyler. Take us in closer.’

The
Golden Bough
glided silently into the mouth of the bay, cruising only a cable’s length offshore. From the masthead Hal watched the dun clouds of war roll ponderously towards the
beach, and the rabble of El Grang’s defeated army streaming back before the Ethiopian cavalry squadrons.

They threw down their weapons and stumbled down to the water’s edge to find any vessel to take them off. A motley armada of dhows of every size and condition, packed with fugitives, set
out from the beaches around the blazing port of Zulla towards the opening of the bay.

‘Sweet heavens!’ laughed Big Daniel. ‘They are so thick upon the water that a man might cross from one side of the bay to the other over their crowded hulls without wetting his
feet.’

‘Run out your guns, please, Master Daniel, and let us see if we can wet more than their feet for them,’ Hal ordered.

The
Golden Bough
ploughed into this vast fleet and the little boats tried to flee, but she overhauled them effortlessly and her guns began to thunder. One after the other they were
shattered and capsized, and their cargoes of exhausted, defeated troops hurled into the water. Their armour bore them down swiftly.

It was such a terrible massacre that the gunners no longer cheered as they ran out the guns, but served them in grim silence. Hal walked along the batteries, and spoke to them sternly. ‘I
know how you feel, lads, but if you spare them now, you may have to fight them again tomorrow, and who can say that they will give you quarter if you ask for it then?’

He, also, was sickened by the slaughter, and longed for the setting of the sun, or any other chance to cease the carnage. That opportunity came from an unlooked-for direction.

Aboli left his station at the starboard battery of cannon and ran back to where Hal paced his quarterdeck. Hal looked up at him sharply, but before he could snap a reprimand, Aboli pointed out
over the starboard bow.

‘That ship with the red sail. The man in the stern. Do you see him, Gundwane?’

Hal felt the prickle of apprehension on his arms and the cold sweat sliding down his back as he recognized the tall figure standing and leaning back against the tiller arm. He was clean-shaven
now, the spiked moustaches were gone. He wore a turban of yellow, and the heavily embroidered dolman of an Islamic grandee over baggy white breeches and soft knee-high boots, but his pale face
stood out like a mirror among the dark-bearded men around him. There may have been others with the same wide set of shoulders and tall athletic figure, but none with the same sword upon the hip, in
its scabbard of embossed gold.

‘Bring the ship about, Mr Tyler. Heave to alongside that dhow with the red sail,’ Hal ordered.

Ned looked where he pointed then swore. ‘Son of a bawd, that’s Schreuder! May the devil damn him to hell.’

The Arab crew ran to the side of the dhow as the tall frigate bore down upon them. They jumped overboard and tried to swim back towards the beach, choosing the sabres of the Ethiopian cavalry
rather than the gaping culverins of the
Golden Bough
’s broadside. Schreuder stood alone in the stern and looked up at the frigate with his cold, unrelenting expression. As they drew
closer, Hal saw that his face was streaked with dust and powder soot, and that his clothing was torn and soiled with the muck of the battlefield.

Hal strode to the rail and returned his stare. They were so close that Hal had hardly to raise his voice to make himself heard. ‘Colonel Schreuder, sir, you have my sword.’

‘Then, sir, would you care to come down and take it from me?’ Schreuder asked.

‘Mr Tyler, you have the con in my absence. Take me closer to the dhow so that I may board her.’

‘This is madness, Gundwane,’ Aboli said softly.

‘Make sure neither you nor any man intervenes, Aboli,’ Hal said, and went to the entryport. As the little dhow bobbed close alongside, he slid down the ladder and jumped across the
narrow gap of water, landing lightly on her single deck.

He drew his sword and looked to the stern. Schreuder stepped away from the tiller bar and shrugged out of the stiff dolman tunic.

‘You are a romantic fool, Henry Courtney,’ he murmured, and the blade of the Neptune sword whispered softly from its scabbard.