Golden Lion (16 page)

Now though, the Buzzard could do nothing but stand in silence as the tension built and built within him. Aleena looked up at him with something close to professional curiosity and mused aloud, ‘I wonder if I could make it feel the pleasure that a real man or woman experiences?’ She gave Jahan her most sultry pout and pleaded, ‘Please may I play with it, sire?’

The maharajah laughed indulgently and said, ‘No, you may not. I want you playing with me. Come here and remind yourself what a real man looks like.’ He glanced over to the guards and said, ‘Take it away.’ And the Buzzard was led, mortified and belittled, back to his chambers. Since then, the Buzzard had not seen Jahan, still less been allowed back into the harem, but now the sound of Aleena’s voice reawakened all the sensations that she had aroused in him and he felt himself exposed again, as though his dismemberment was visible for all the world to see and anger mixed with shame at the degradation he had suffered.

‘Turn around, Ugly One!’ Aleena called out. ‘I have something for you!’

The Buzzard did as he was told and looked up to search for the source of the voice. Above him an open gallery ran at first-floor level, too high for any man to reach from down here in the yard. Its function, he presumed, was to provide a vantage point from which guards could look down on the prisoners below. Now though, its only occupants were Jahan and Aleena, whose face was entirely concealed behind a veil, for no true man aside from her master could ever be allowed to see her. Indeed, it was an extraordinary sign of favour that she had been allowed out of the harem at all.

‘Look!’ she called out. She held out both her hands in front of her and the Buzzard saw that she was holding a long, slender sword that curved at its tip: a scimitar. ‘Use it well, Ugly One, and we may meet again.’

Aleena leaned forward so that her hands were beyond the low wall of the gallery and dropped the sword onto the dusty earth in front of him. The Buzzard picked it up and now it was Jahan who addressed him.

‘Step back into the centre of the courtyard. Look back at the gate through which you entered. Soon that gate will open again and another man will step through it. He is a murderer. He has been condemned to death. So kill him.’

‘Kill him!’ Aleena echoed, sounding like a woman who lusted after blood as much as she did for love.

The Buzzard stood on the balls of his feet, legs wide enough apart to give him balance, but not too far to hamper his mobility. For the first time in months he felt strong, capable – filled with a desperate desire to prove himself in front of the beautiful woman up in the gallery, to show her that despite everything he was still a man.

A few seconds later the gate opened a little and unseen hands pushed the condemned prisoner out into the yard. He was small and scrawny, wearing no more than a cloth tied around his waist and between his legs to cover his modesty, and with only a thin covering of wiry grey hair on his head. Yet the eyes that looked across the yard at the Buzzard were not filled with the fear that he had become accustomed to seeing, but with the undiluted malice of a man who was bad to the bone.

The Buzzard could see his quarry sizing him up and searching for his weaknesses. They weren’t hard to find. With no left eye or arm and his beak blocking half his field of vision he was desperately vulnerable on one entire side of his body. Sure enough, the old man darted with surprising speed to the Buzzard’s left. The Buzzard tried to turn to follow the man’s movement, but he was too slow and lost sight of him as he dashed past.

‘Behind you!’ shrieked Aleena, excitedly.

‘Turn round,’ Jahan called down.

The Buzzard spun round as nimbly as he could, turning to his left, and caught a fleeting glimpse of the old man dashing past him again. There were more shouts from up in the gallery. But now the Buzzard’s own fighting instincts were returning to him. He had turned the wrong way. He should have spun round to the right, leading with his sword-arm and his good eye. And he should have turned with his arm extended, cutting as he went.

He spun again, using the slashing of his arm to give himself momentum and this time he felt the tip of his blade striking something, encountering resistance and then continuing, followed by a cry of pain. The Buzzard came to a standstill and saw the old man standing, hunched over, clutching his right hand. Then something caught his eye, something on the ground. He lowered his masked head and saw two severed fingers lying on the parched earth. As he raised his head again, the old man was backing away, but the pain he was in had knocked the fight out of him.

Unaware of how far he had gone, the man bumped his back against the wall of the yard. Now he was trapped. He looked up at the Buzzard and begged for mercy. For a moment the Buzzard hesitated and then he heard Jahan’s voice repeat, ‘This one is a murderer. Kill him,’ in a flat, unemotional tone of command, followed by Aleena, much more excitedly: ‘Kill him, Ugly One!’

The Buzzard did not hesitate. It was an act of butchery, a punch in his guts to make the man bend forward and then a chopping blow straight down onto the back of his exposed neck. The killing felt good. His shaming in front of the women of the harem had made him very angry and the bile had been swilling around inside him for the past few days with nowhere to go. Now it had a focus, but there was no time to take pleasure in that fact for Jahan was already calling to him, ‘The gate! Turn towards the gate!’

The Buzzard turned, his head darted as he found his bearings and another man emerged into the yard. He was younger and much more strongly built than the first victim, but he had some kind of impairment of the leg that gave him a shambling, half-hobbled gait. The Buzzard realized now that he had to keep his head moving, so that his eye was always locked on his target, and at the same time his feet had to be in motion too. It wasn’t a matter of being in one position, then turning to another, for that involved moments of stillness, and if he were fighting someone with a weapon in his hand then stillness would mean death.

It took a little while for the Buzzard to adapt his tactics, but in the end he cornered the second man and left him lying with his stomach wide open and his guts strewn around him in a red, steaming stew of viscera, blood and sand.

By the time the third hapless wretch set foot in the yard, the Buzzard was into his rhythm and despatched him in a matter of seconds.

‘I’ve had enough,’ Aleena said with a tone of spoiled, pampered boredom.

‘Good,’ Jahan replied, ‘we have much better things to do than this.’

They departed without the slightest nod to the Buzzard, making it perfectly plain that he was of utter insignificance to their lives. He was shocked to find that he was hurt by Aleena’s indifference, like a schoolboy who has just seen the girl after whom he pines walk off to the woods with the village bully. But then he was snapped out of his reverie by a new, much harsher voice calling down from the gallery.

‘Hey, masked man!’ The Buzzard looked up to see a massive tree-trunk of a man. He was shaven-headed and bare-chested, with upper arms that were thicker than any normal man’s thighs. ‘My name is Ali! I am your trainer, and you have work to do. His Highness wants me to turn you into a fighter and so that is what I am going to do. So stay alert, keep moving. And do not stop until I tell you. This is both an order, and my sincere advice. Do you hear me?’

The Buzzard nodded.

‘Good,’ Ali continued. ‘For the men you will meet now are younger and stronger, and you must believe me, masked man. If you do not kill them, they will certainly kill you.’

The trainer was as good as his word. The next two condemned men stretched the Buzzard to the limit as he struggled to manoeuvre them into a spot where he could have them at his mercy. The sixth man carried a stave that the Buzzard had to fight past before he could kill him. The seventh landed several good blows on the Buzzard, who was now shattered and so short of speed and strength that it was only the very real fear of joining the other dead men scattered about the yard that gave him the energy to prevail in the end. One final, weak, exhausted stab finished off his final opponent and then the Buzzard slumped to his knees feeling gorged on death and sick of killing. He was so tired he hardly felt the fingers that prised the sword from his hands. So tired that the first time he knew that he was about to leave this hellish place was when he felt the tug of the chain and was almost dragged up onto his feet and out of the yard.

The Buzzard was shattered, starving and parched. When he got back to his quarters, an African house-slave lifted the spout of the watering can to the mouth hole of his mask and he gulped the cool water down with desperate, helpless eagerness. His
djellaba
was removed and he was led to a hot bath, filled with soothing oils that helped relax his tortured muscles. When he had been dried and given a clean garment to wear he was fed the large bowl of sloppy, mashed up chickpeas, vegetables and minced meat that was his meal for the day.

Later, after the Buzzard had slept for a while, Jahan came to him. ‘You did well today,’ he said. ‘Ali will train you every day from now on. Sometimes you and he will work alone. On other occasions you will be taken to the prison to test what you have learned. There are many men there who can be killed without anyone missing them.’

Jahan stepped up to the Buzzard, placed a hand on his shoulder and looked intently into his eye. ‘Aleena is an extraordinary woman, isn’t she?’ he said, almost as a friend, one man to another.

‘Yes,’ the Buzzard said, for he was allowed to speak to Jahan in private.

‘Sometimes I cannot decide if she is a witch, a whore, or a goddess … or maybe she is all three. It was astonishing to witness, the way that she could give pleasure, even to something like you.’ He paused and then added, ‘She aroused you, didn’t she? As much as you can be aroused.’

‘Yes,’ the Buzzard repeated, and there was a throaty huskiness to his voice now.

‘And you would like her to pleasure you properly, I am sure.’

‘Oh God yes … please … yes.’

Jahan gave the Buzzard a rueful smile. ‘I thought as much. But you will have to wait a while yet for that trip to paradise, for neither Aleena, nor any of my concubines, will so much as touch you until you have fulfilled the purpose of your existence and killed Captain Henry Courtney.’

‘But then …?’ the Buzzard asked.

Jahan smiled. ‘If you kill Courtney, and you make him pay for all the indignities he has forced upon both of us, and upon my people, and upon our cause, then you can have one of the jewels of my harem – perhaps even Aleena if I have tired of her by then – as my gift. You may keep her and do with her whatever you please. Think on that, why don’t you, tonight, as you try to bring yourself even some of the pleasure with your fingers that she would surely give you with hers.’

illiam Pett was a fastidious man: unusually so, some might say. Hal had lent him the use of his olive oil and barilla ashes soap and he had sluiced himself down with buckets of sea water, ridding his skin of the coating of filth, sweat and other excretions that had accumulated upon it during his time locked away in that fetid cockpit on the
Delft
. His concern for bodily hygiene was not, however, the only factor that made him more conspicuous than ever amongst the company that gathered every night at the captain’s table.

Unlike the other men around that table, whose faces were weathered by wind and salt water and brown as the
Bough
’s timbers from years beneath the African sun, Pett’s face was the ashen white of a high-born European. He had somehow travelled to Bombay and then spent a number of weeks on the
Earl of Cumberland
without acquiring so much as a faint glow of colour in his cheeks, and captivity had only made his pallor even more pronounced. This somewhat deathly aspect was emphasized by his gaunt face and thin, wiry-limbed physique. Hal and his crew were still consuming the last of the fresh food taken aboard before they left, and Judith had passed on tactful words of advice to the ship’s cook about the use of spices to add heat and flavoursome seasoning to food that was half rotten.

Two more nights had passed since Hal told his story. In the interim he had sent a skeleton crew of his own sailors to man the
Delft
, under the command of boatswain John Lovell, and the two ships were now sailing in line astern, though their progress was slow as the wind still refused to pick up. The captured Dutch sailors continued to be held in confinement while Hal decided what to do with them, but they were not shackled, they received the same food and drink as the rest of the ship’s company and they were given time on deck twice a day to stretch their legs, feel the sun on their backs and breathe some fresh free air. As for Tromp, Hal had thought back to the courtesies his father extended to those he defeated and decided that, even if the Dutch captain’s cargo of newly minted relics suggested he did not behave like a gentleman, he would still be treated like one and be invited to dine every night at the captain’s table.