Golden Lion (39 page)

‘I will prepare your meals and empty your night soil,’ the girl had stammered, trembling with fear because the Buzzard had been at her shoulder. ‘Whatever I can do to make you more comfortable, such as can be done aboard a ship, I will do.’

‘Thank you,’ Judith said and then addressed the Buzzard. ‘Where are you taking me?’

The solitary eye stared out from its hole and the smiling façade with its white teeth leered, and Judith had looked around the gloomy cabin for anything which she might use as a weapon, just for the satisfaction of lashing out at the foul mask and the even more repellent human being who lurked behind it. She could almost smell the violence coming off him and, unarmed and vulnerable as she was, she realized that she feared him as she had never feared a man before. Judith hated that fear and despised herself for feeling it and yet she could not help herself flinching a little and shielding her unborn child with her hands, as if she feared the Buzzard would take his knife, open her belly and pull the child from her womb.

‘Hold your tongue, woman,’ he rasped in a voice as rough as old rope. ‘Be glad I have given you the wench. There are plenty aboard who would have her, plain as she is.’ And then he had left them, locking the door behind him.

A while passed before the girl spoke again. ‘They told me you’re with child. I had a babe of my own, not so long ago.’ There were tears springing in her eyes with those words, and that was all she said.

Now Judith ate and invited the girl to join her. Once she started she did not stop until the plate was empty, though she let the girl take her share too. Her name was Ann Missen and she had been aboard an East Indiaman bound for Bombay when the topmastman had spied the
Pelican
seemingly adrift off the southern tip of Madagascar, her mainsail in tatters on the yard as though she had come through a canvas-ripping squall. Assuming the caravel was a merchantman in trouble, the Indiaman’s captain had laid his ship alongside and assured Captain Benbury that he was at the man’s service and would do whatever he could to assist, namely by giving Benbury the spare sail in his hold. That was when men had poured from the
Pelican
’s hatches and stormed aboard the Indiaman with pistols and steel and slaughter. Ann’s husband, a company clerk out to take up a prestigious post in the Bombay office, fought bravely, killing a man with his pistol before he was hacked to pieces before his young wife’s eyes.

‘I never knew he had such courage in him,’ Ann had said, recounting the tale and Judith had suspected she was still numb from the shock of it, that she had not yet accepted that her husband was gone from her for ever. Judith had not dared ask the girl about her own child, preferring to hope that it had died before the couple had left England for their new life.

Now as they leaned back in their chairs, their stomachs feeling as full as if they’d had a five-course feast, Ann said, ‘Tell me more about your life.’

Ever since the Buzzard had sneeringly addressed Judith as General Nazet on one of his visits to the cabin, Ann had developed an insatiable appetite for stories about Judith’s past: her childhood in the hills of Ethiopia, her travels around Europe and then her military campaigns. ‘What I don’t yet comprehend is how you got to be this general. I mean, why did all those men let a woman lead them?’

‘Perhaps because I was not really raised to be a woman,’ Judith said. ‘I was my father’s only child and so, since he had no son, he taught me everything that he would have taught a boy. I learned to ride and fight with swords and guns. When I had bedtime stories, they were not about princesses and handsome princes, but about the great military leaders like Alexander, Julius Caesar and Hannibal, the greatest of all African generals.’

‘Until you,’ Ann said, for Judith had become her heroine.

Judith laughed. ‘I was no Hannibal! But I did learn about how battles are fought and won, and because my father was a tribal chief, I rode with the men of the tribe and they came to accept me as my father’s heir, as if I were his son. So when the call came for troops to go north to fight for the emperor against the Arab invaders it was I who led my people, for my father was too old and sick to command them. Before we even reached the main army, we encountered some of El Grang’s forces and defeated them. News spread of the victory, so when we arrived at the army’s main encampment all the soldiers were cheering us as we rode in and the women who followed the army were throwing flowers. So the soldiers adopted me. I became their leader, but also their mascot, almost their good luck charm and suddenly I found myself at the head of the entire army, for they would follow nobody else.’

‘I bet all the old men who were generals really hated you for that,’ Ann said. But before Judith could reply a key turned in the lock, the cabin door opened and the Buzzard came in, bringing with him the stench of unwashed bodies and fouler things from the sailors’ quarters adjacent in the forecastle.

‘There’s a storm coming,’ the Buzzard said as the door swung shut behind him. He glanced at the empty plates on the table then stood staring at Judith as he did each evening when he came to check on her. Ann edged away from him, like a hand recoiling from a flame, but the man was not interested in her.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Judith repeated, as she did whenever the Buzzard appeared in their midst.

‘Nowhere you will enjoy,’ he replied, that eye fixed on her, assessing her the way a man appraises a slave at the block before deciding whether or not to bid.

‘Hal Courtney will kill you,’ Judith said. ‘He will find you and he will gut you like the feeble creature you are.’

The man moved, though not towards Judith. He grabbed Ann by the throat and threw her back, pinning her against the cabin’s damp bulkhead. She tried to scream but the sound was pitiful and then the man drove a gloved fist into her stomach and stepped back so that she crumpled to the floor.

The masked man came over to Judith who protected her belly but otherwise faced up to him, her chin raised, inviting him to strike her face.

He was so close that it was all she could do not to close her eyes for fear that his wicked beak might peck them out.

‘See what happens to the girl when you disobey me,’ the Buzzard’s voice rasped through the mask’s mouth slit. Behind him Ann lay in the dark corner, curled in on herself and gasping for breath. ‘I have an interest in keeping you bright-eyed and hale as a prize hog. But her …’ he jerked his head back. ‘She is nothing. Mine to do with as I please.’

‘You are a coward,’ Judith spat.

The Buzzard turned and walked over to the girl, who whimpered, one arm raised in a feeble defence. He bent and knocked the arm aside then slapped her across the face with enough force to drive her head back against the timbers. He straightened and turned back to Judith.

‘You see what’s happening here?’

Judith would have given anything to fly at him now and tear at his flesh with her bare hands. No, not anything. Not the child.

She nodded.

‘Good. When the storm hits us you will be safe enough if you sit on the floor and hold on to the leg of the cot,’ he said, nodding towards Judith’s bed. Ann had no bed, just a few blankets on the bare boards. ‘Or you could hold on to each other,’ he said, tilting his head on one side while he thought about that. In three strides he reached the cabin door and opened it, then stopped at the threshold.

‘Don’t waste your strength praying for your gallant young hero to rescue you and have his vengeance on the rest of us,’ he said. ‘Courtney is dead. He was taken to his execution like a bullock to the slaughterhouse.’

And with that he was gone.

he
Madre de Deus
was hell afloat. A Portuguese three-masted merchantman, she plied the seas on the endless circuit by which gimcrack trade goods were exchanged for African human beings who were then transported in her holds to the slave markets of the New World, or the East Indies, or the Ottoman Empire. It mattered not to her owner and captain João Barros whom he carried, where they went, or who bought them in the end. So long as he was paid that was all he cared about.

The Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan had not paid him to carry this Englishman who claimed to be Courtney, the famed ‘Tazar’, to Quelimane. He had simply sent an official along with the soldiers who escorted the Englishman to the docks who said to Barros in Arabic, ‘His Highness has been informed that you have a shipment bound for Quelimane.’

‘That is correct,’ Barros replied, in the same tongue as he rubbed the vivid pink scar line that ran from the corner of his mouth up into his hairline. It was a nervous habit he could not break himself of.

‘They have been bought by Senhor Lobo, to work in his mines.’

‘Again, correct.’

‘Very well, please add this one to the shipment,’ the official said as Hal was pushed forward to stand next to him, opposite Barros. ‘He is an Englishman. If he survives the journey, His Highness wishes him to be presented as a gift to Senhor Lobo.’

‘A fine gift,’ Barros remarked. ‘Not only is he a white man but he looks strong and healthy. Good teeth. Senhor Lobo will breed from him, I dare say.’

‘Very possibly,’ the official agreed and then went on, ‘His Highness recognizes, however, that voyages at sea are fraught with danger and will not hold it against you if this journey should prove fatal to this individual.’

‘You are saying that I am free to do with him as I will?’

‘Exactly so. His Highness has decreed that the fate of this man shall be in the hands of Allah, the all-knowing and merciful.’

‘What an interesting decree,’ Barros said. ‘I will be sure to consider it at all times.’

And so, for the second time in his short life, Hal Courtney found himself in the heat, the confinement, the darkness and the overpowering stench of a slave deck, shackled to a ringbolt and soaked in other men’s liquid excrement.

Hal estimated that they were six days out of Zanzibar when one of Barros’s crew – a man who’d swiftly made himself known to the terrified, half-starved, seasick and dying slaves by the eagerness with which he laid into them with the cat o’ nine tails that never seemed to leave his right hand – came down to the hold with two other sailors and, by the light of a horn lantern, poked and prodded the slaves with his whip’s knot-end.

‘What is that bastard looking for now?’ Hal asked himself, squinting against the sudden, uncomfortable brightness from the ship’s lantern.

The Portuguese sailors had buried their noses in the crooks of their elbows and one was cursing the stench. The man with the cat thrust it between the shoulder blades of an emaciated African who sat slumped over so that his forehead was almost touching the slime-smeared boards. When the slave did not respond, the man bent and hauled his head back at which the African groaned and opened his eyes. The slaver let go, mumbled a curse and moved on.

‘That one looks strong,’ one of the whip man’s companions said in Portuguese, pointing his cutlass at another African.

‘And I have one here,’ the other sailor said, ‘a proud young cock too by the looks of him,’ and Hal knew enough Portuguese to wish he had not sat so straight-backed nor glared at the slavers with such defiance. The man looked at him more closely and added, ‘Wait! I think he is white.’

‘All the better. Bring them up,’ the whip man said.

Hal and the African followed the Portuguese sailors up the ladder that had been widened to allow pairs of slaves to go up and down it without their ankle chains having to be removed.

‘Ah, the Englishman,’ Captain Barros said, then turned to the taller, more muscular of the other two slaves. ‘And this other one also looks strong. Good. An excellent choice. Black against white. There is a certain … art to it.’

Barros stood with his officers and his cabin boy by the mainmast, all of them, even the boy, wearing broad hats to keep the sun off. The boy looked so like Barros, even down to the arrogant tilt of his head, that Hal was certain he was the captain’s son.

‘Get a move on, Fernandes, you timber-toed old goat!’ Barros yelled at a grey-haired crump-back who was clumping across the deck on a peg leg. ‘I swear you would be no slower if we took off the other leg too.’

‘I will tell the surgeon to bring his saw,’ a long-faced officer put in, ‘and we can place wagers on that also while we’re about it.’ This raised a laugh from the others, especially the boy.

The crump-back was carrying the six-stringed instrument the Portuguese and the Spanish called a
viola da mano
,
meaning
‘violin of the hand’
for it was played with the fingers rather than a bow. Now he thrust it in the air angrily. ‘I am coming as fast as I can, Barros, you mean bastard!’ he growled, arriving at the mainmast with a muttered tirade of foul curses.

Captain Barros gave Hal a tired look and, apparently ignoring the fact that he was talking to a man who looked like an unshaven, unkempt beggar and was stained with his own and other men’s excrement, said, ‘I only allow him to speak like that to me because he was a friend of my father, and because he is a halfway decent musician.’ Barros nodded at the instrument in the old man’s grasp with its long, ornately carved neck and its strings in six paired courses. ‘He might as well be married to that
viola da mano
of his. It belonged to his grandfather, I believe.’