Storm Tide Read online

  Praise for

  ‘A thundering good read is virtually the only way of describing Wilbur Smith’s books’

  IRISH TIMES

  ‘Wilbur Smith . . . writes as forcefully as his tough characters act’

  EVENING STANDARD

  ‘Wilbur Smith has arguably the best sense of place of any adventure writer since John Buchan’

  GUARDIAN

  ‘Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared’

  THE TIMES

  ‘Best Historical Novelist – I say Wilbur Smith, with his swashbuckling novels of Africa. The bodices rip and the blood flows. You can get lost in Wilbur Smith and misplace all of August’

  STEPHEN KING

  ‘Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he is the master’

  WASHINGTON POST

  ‘A master storyteller’

  SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘Smith will take you on an exciting, taut and thrilling journey you will never forget’

  SUN

  ‘No one does adventure quite like Smith’

  DAILY MIRROR

  ‘With Wilbur Smith the action is never further than the turn of a page’

  INDEPENDENT

  ‘When it comes to writing the adventure novel, Wilbur Smith is the master; a 21st century H. Rider Haggard’

  VANITY FAIR

  This book is for my wife

  MOKHINISO

  who is the best thing that has ever happened to me

  Contents

  The Courtney Family in Storm Tide

  East Coast of Africa, 1774

  About the Author

  Also by Wilbur Smith

  Copyright

  Find out more about the Courtneys and see the

  Courtney family tree in full at

  www.wilbursmithbooks.com/courtney-family-tree

  EAST COAST OF AFRICA, 1774

  R

  obert Courtney stalked his prey.

  He hardly made a ripple as he waded through the crystal waters of the lagoon. At seventeen years old, he was already over six feet tall and still growing. His skin was tanned deep brown from a life spent under the African sun, his muscles strongly defined by work in the fields and long swims in the ocean. The fishing spear he held over his shoulder was as light as an arrow in his hands.

  Above him, a great promontory rose steeply over Nativity Bay, while to his left the water disappeared in a tangle of mangrove swamps. A balmy breeze blew in from the sea, so soft it barely tickled the hairs on the back of his neck.

  He stared into the water, tensing the arm that gripped the fishing spear. He ignored the small fish darting between his legs. He was after larger prey. Big kob and rock cod sometimes found their way into the bay to bask in the warm shallows. To spear them as they shimmered like mirages took speed and skill, but Rob had been playing in this bay since before he could walk. He could whip the spear down without a splash, instinctively adjusting his angle for the water’s distortion.

  Even so, it needed an element of luck to make the kill.

  He had seen a movement by the rocks on the south side of the bay. He approached slowly, gliding through the water so as not to alert his quarry. The water grew deeper. Now he could no longer wade, but floated on his stomach, pushing forwards with little kicks that barely broke the surface.

  A shadow caught his eye, dark against the white sandy bottom. It was too big to be a crab, too perfectly round to be a stone. He was intrigued. Forgetting the fish for a moment, he dropped his spear, letting it float on its wooden shaft. He duck-dived down. Tiny fish scurried out of his path as two strong kicks propelled him to the seabed. He reached for the object one-handed and was surprised when it didn’t come away. Even with both arms, it took all his strength to lift it from the sand.

  He broke the surface again and held his prize aloft, treading water. The moment he cupped it in his hands, he knew what it must be. Far heavier than you would expect for its size, with traces of its smooth iron surface still visible under the barnacles that encrusted it.

  It was a cannonball.

  He knew there had once been a battle in this bay. His grandfather, Jim, and his great-grandfather Tom had fought in it almost forty years ago. Rob had heard the stories so often he could recite them by heart. How the Caliph of Oman had brought his fleet to punish the Courtneys, and how Tom had lured those ships into the bay only to burn them to the waterline with heated shot. For years the skeletons of the sunken fleet had lurked in the bay like ancient monsters. But storms and tides had done their work, and the timbers had slipped out to sea or been washed ashore to be burned as firewood. The battle was disappearing from memory. When his grandparents died, it would be no more than a legend.

  Rob wondered at the shifting currents and tides that had revealed the cannonball now. It was a long time since any gun had been fired in anger in Nativity Bay.

  He was so busy staring at the relic he almost missed the movement in the water. The powerful thrust, the ripple of a fin piercing the surface. He looked up to see an enormous fish surging towards him.

  Not a fish. A shark. A tiger shark.

  It was so close, he could see every detail. The dark stripes down its flank, the open jaws, the yellow teeth pointing sideways like the blade of a saw. From a boat, Rob had once seen a tiger shark bite clean through a turtle’s shell. This one was a juvenile, but it was already bigger than Rob. It must have swum in to hunt in the shallow waters of the bay.

  Rob had no time to escape. The shark was the hunter, and the ocean was its element. His spear had drifted out of reach.

  The jaws stretched wider. Rob could see its two eyes, dark and malevolent, homing in on him. He had one chance.

  He lifted the cannonball with both arms and brought it down with all his force. It struck the shark a glancing blow on the nose, inches from Rob’s exposed stomach. The shark recoiled madly, slapping Rob viciously with its tail as it whipped around.

  The impact knocked the cannonball from Rob’s hands. The shark turned again to make another attack.

  Rob lunged for his spear, kicking out with all his strength. His splashing drew the shark towards him. It pressed forwards with great thrusts of its tail, as keen as a bullet through the water. Its jaws opened to swallow his leg.

  Desperately, Rob threw out his arm and grabbed the shaft of the spear. He jackknifed his body, snatching his legs from the shark’s mouth as it snapped shut, teeth grazing his flesh. Blood clouded the water, driving the shark into a frenzy. It collided into him – a whirling mass of abrasive skin and fins – with such fury that Rob almost lost his hold on the spear.

  His feet touched firm sand. Only for a second, but it gave Rob enough balance to hurl the spear around in a savage arc, just as the shark attacked again. The tip punctured its rubbery flesh and sank deep into its body.

  The beast convulsed and writhed, churning the water red as its blood spilled out. A killer to the last, even in its dying moments the taste of its own blood drove it mad with hunger. Rob swam a distance away, watching and breathing hard. He felt no sympathy for the beast. His little sister often came to swim in this bay. Rob shuddered to think of her delicate body caught in those jaws.

  Eventually the shark stopped moving. It rose to the surface and floated belly-up in the sea. Rob thrust the spear deeper into its flesh, then looped the rope over his shoulder to drag it to the beach. They would eat shark meat that night.

  At that moment, the thunderous explosion of a cannon echoed across the water. Rob looked up and saw the prow of a ship sailing around the cape into the channel at the mouth of the bay. Quickly, he let go of the shark and kicked towards the sheltering rocks at the edge of the lagoon. Few captains knew the hidden entrance, and fewer still would risk their vessels throu
gh the treacherous passage without a pilot. But there was always the worry that one day a pirate or a slaver might chance upon it.

  This ship was none of those. Rob gave a whoop of delight as he recognised the bare-breasted figurehead arcing forwards under the bowsprit. He clambered onto the rocks to watch her pass, shouting and waving at the crew.

  She was a handsome vessel, a trim schooner with gunports picked out in black on white-painted planking. Her patched canvas told of the rigours of her ocean voyage, but her heavy-laden hull said she had done good business. Any deeper, and she would have grounded herself on the bar that guarded the mouth of the channel, but her captain steered her expertly past the hazards. Her topmen reefed the sails, while a gun crew on her foredeck secured the bow chaser which had fired the salute. As her stern swung around, Rob saw the name ‘Dunstanburgh Castle’ across her transom.

  Rob loved ships. They had fascinated him all his life. How many times had he climbed to the top of the bluffs with his father’s spyglass to watch a distant sail scudding past? He had made his father tell him all the names until he knew them in his sleep: proud Indiamen and stout brigantines, Arab dhows from Zanzibar, and Bermuda sloops with their triangular sails. Most of all, he loved the men of war, the frigates and line-of-battle ships he occasionally saw beating up the coast from Cape Town, the red ensigns streaming from their sterns. Once – the most thrilling moment of his life – he had witnessed two frigates trade broadsides for nearly three hours, just a few miles off the coast. He had never forgotten the sight of the guns running out like rows of teeth, or the wall of flame as they fired in perfect unison.

  The Dunstanburgh Castle was smaller than those warships, with only four guns on either side to discourage pirates. But even before her anchor touched the sandy bottom, Rob had swum over to the vessel, swarmed up her ladder and was peering through the gangway.

  ‘Permission to come aboard,’ he said.

  ‘Who on God’s earth are you?’ A balding man with a flushed red face strode towards him across the deck. He had drawn a long, vicious knife. ‘Damn me!’ he swore. ‘Is there no corner of this coast that is safe from pirates and savages?’

  He stared at Rob, ready to gut him in an instant. With his skin tanned as brown as a walnut, dripping wet, smeared with shark’s blood and naked as Adam, Rob looked like some kind of hideous sea sprite.

  The man’s anger slowly dissipated as memory came into focus. He returned his knife to its sheath, clapped his arms around the boy and embraced him.

  ‘Robert Courtney. You have grown so big I barely recognised you. It is good to see you.’

  ‘And you too, Captain Cornish.’

  ‘Call me Tawny. Your grandfather always does.’ He stepped back to get a better look at Rob. ‘What is that blood on your leg?’

  Rob looked down. The shark’s teeth had left a row of red cuts from his knee to his ankle. If he had hesitated for a split second longer he would have lost the leg.

  He gestured over the side, where the shark was floating towards shore.

  ‘I caught us some dinner.’

  He said it casually, but Tawny could see the effort it had taken.

  ‘You have become a man,’ he said gruffly. Then: ‘You look a true pirate.’

  ‘All I need is a ship.’

  Rob hadn’t stopped grinning since he came aboard. Even at anchor, he loved to feel the rhythm of the ship. The creak of the rigging; the gentle sway of the deck beneath his feet; the boatswain’s shouts; the smell of tar and rum: the sensations were intoxicating.

  Cornish studied him. He could read the look on the boy’s face, the same yearning he had felt himself at that age.

  ‘I could use some extra hands. Perhaps I will speak to your father.’

  Rob’s grin spread into a beaming smile. ‘Would you?’

  ‘I will. Now get your drawers on, and let us go ashore to see your family.’

  B

  y the time the pinnace reached the beach, a party had gathered to meet them. Robert’s father and grandmother had turned up, with his little sister Susan running between them, her golden braids flapping. Servants and workers crowded around them, for the Courtneys employed many of the local tribespeople on their estate. Most had served the family for decades and were treated more like family than staff.

  Rob’s father, George, gave Cornish a stiff handshake. His grandmother, Louisa, was less formal: she flung her arms around him and gave him a great kiss on the cheek.

  ‘It is so good to see you,’ she exclaimed. She brushed a strand of grey hair from his temple. ‘What is this? It seems like only yesterday it was your father standing on this beach, after we had defeated that monster Zayn al-Din.’

  Cornish doffed his hat. ‘We are all older, ma’am. But you look as beautiful as ever.’

  Louisa tutted and brushed the flattery aside. But there was truth in the captain’s compliment. Though nearly sixty, she had lost none of her looks. Her creamy skin was supple, with only the faintest lines betraying her age. Her long blond hair had faded to white, but was still as fine as Chinese silk. And the blue eyes that smiled at Cornish were flawless, the colour of the deep ocean on a summer’s day.

  They narrowed with concern when she looked at Rob.

  ‘What has happened to you?’

  Cornish had had his surgeon salve and bandage the shark bite on Rob’s leg, and given Rob a pair of canvas trousers to cover it.

  ‘Do not tell my father,’ Rob had begged him. But now when he looked down, he saw a dribble of blood had escaped and was trickling down his ankle onto his foot.

  ‘It is only a graze,’ he muttered.

  In fact, there was a throbbing ache in his leg, and he felt light-headed. It took considerable effort to stay upright. But he gritted his teeth, and tried to stay on his feet.

  Louisa’s eyes missed nothing. She glanced at the shark, which the servants had pulled in and begun to butcher on the beach, then back at Rob. Three dark spots were spreading across the leg of his trousers like an outbreak of measles, where blood had seeped through the bandages into the cloth.

  ‘Did you fight that shark?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rob admitted, unable to keep the pride from his voice.

  His father scowled. Though twenty years younger than Louisa, he seemed older. His face was grey, his hair white. His back was bent forwards from years leaning on his stick, which he needed because his left leg was made of wood below the knee. He seldom smiled.

  ‘You were supposed to be seeing to the cattle herd out at Dutchman’s Creek, not playing at the seaside.’

  Rob felt a flash of anger. A ship had arrived, and all his father cared about was farm chores. Rob bit his tongue. He knew if he tried to defend himself, it would provoke another quarrel. In his father’s eyes he was still a boy to be ordered about, not a youth on the cusp of manhood.

  ‘The boy is growing up,’ said Cornish. George’s scowl deepened; Cornish hastily changed the subject. ‘Where is Jim?’

  A shadow crossed Louisa’s face. ‘He is waiting for you at the house. He is not as strong as he was. But it will do him a world of good to see you.’

  Cornish gave her his arm, and walked her up the beach. Rob’s father fell in behind them, struggling to keep up as his wooden leg sank into the sand. Rob followed, wincing with every step but too proud to show it.

  At the top of the beach, the shore opened out into flatland between hills and jungle. A river wound through it towards the sea, and on its bend stood the Courtney family compound. It had been built by Rob’s great-grandfather, Tom. He had been running for his life when he reached Nativity Bay, and the home he built reflected his needs. It had been constructed like a fort, with the river for a moat and gun emplacements covering every approach. A glacis and a stockade wall completed the defences, and they had been enough to repel his enemies.

  But that was forty years ago. The wooden stockade still ran around the perimeter, but now it was more to keep the cattle and goats from eating the flowers in the gardens L
ouisa had planted. The raised earth gun platforms at the corners had been turned into vegetable patches, while the only cannons to be seen were sunk upright into the ground to form gateposts. The buildings were white and unsullied, sparkling with the seashells that had been crushed into the lime.

  It was a peaceful place, now: the only home that Rob had ever known.

  His grandfather, Jim, was waiting for them on the veranda of the big house. His broad frame was stooped from a lifetime of working the land. His hair had turned white and he leaned on a cane. But the strength in his green eyes was undimmed, and it was an ageless smile that lit up his face when he saw Louisa approaching with Cornish.

  He kissed Louisa and clapped his arms around Cornish.

  ‘It seems a long time since our fathers fought Zayn al-Din and Uncle Guy in this bay,’ he said.

  ‘It is a long time,’ Cornish agreed. ‘God rest their souls.’

  Tom Courtney had died ten years before, at the great age of ninety-one. His wife, Sarah, had survived him by a day and then she, too, had passed away. They were buried together on the headland at the top of the bluffs, in the red earth of the continent they had made their home.

  ‘I will pay my respects before I go,’ said Cornish. ‘But life is for the living, and we are not done yet. Let me show you what I have profited on my latest voyage.’

  Cornish told them tales of his travels, while they dined on the shark that Rob had killed. He was returning from India, and he had brought gifts for everyone: a bolt of fine silk for Susan, a jewelled box for Louisa, a painted miniature for George and a curved dagger for Rob. As he spoke of the great trading cities he had visited – Calcutta, Madras and Bombay – the pictures he conjured made Rob’s eyes go wide with excitement. Jim leaned forwards, tapping his cane with delight to hear of Cornish’s adventures.

  ‘Did you ever go to India, grandfather?’ Rob asked.

  Jim shook his head. ‘My father went often on his trading voyages, as did my cousin Mansur. But I have always preferred the plains of Africa to the open ocean.’