Birds of Prey Page 10

  ‘Leave go!’ Sam howled as he was thrown around, the rope biting deep into his own wrist. Suddenly the cask flew to the surface, John Tate’s wrist still twisted into the bight of line. A dark roseate cloud spread to discolour the surface around them.

  Then John’s head broke out. He made a harsh, cawing sound, and his bloodstained spittle sprayed into Sam’s eyes. His face was icy white as his life’s blood drained from him. The shark came surging back and, beneath the surface, latched onto John’s lower body, worrying and shaking him so that the damaged cask was again pulled under. As it shot once more to the surface, Sam sucked in a breath, and tugged at John’s wrist. ‘Get away!’ he screamed at both man and shark. ‘Get away from me.’ With the strength of a madman, he pulled the loop free and he kicked at the other man’s chest, pushing him clear, screaming all the while, ‘Get away!’

  John Tate did not resist. His eyes were still wide open but although his lips writhed, no sound came from them. Below the surface his body had been bitten away below the waist, and his blood turned the waters dark red. The shark seized him once again, then swam off, gulping down lumps of John Tate’s flesh.

  The damaged cask had taken in water and now floated low, but this gave it a stability it had lacked when it rode high and lightly. At the third attempt Sam dragged himself up onto it. He draped both arms and legs over it, straddling it. The cask’s balance was precarious and he dared not lift even his head for fear of upsetting it and being rolled back into the sea. After a while he saw the great dorsal fin pass before his eyes as the creature came back once more to the cask. He dared not lift his head to follow the narrowing circles, so he closed his eyes and tried to shut his mind to the beast’s presence.

  Suddenly the cask lurched under him and his resolve was forgotten. His eyes flew wide and he shrieked. But after having bitten into the wood the shark was backing away. Twice more it returned, each time nudging the cask with its grotesque snout. However, each attempt was less determined, perhaps because it had assuaged its appetite on John Tate’s carcass and was now discouraged by the taste and smell of the splinters of wood. Eventually Sam saw it turn and move away, its tall fin wagging from side to side as it swam up-current.

  He lay unmoving, draped over the cask, riding the salty belly of the ocean, rising and falling to her thrusts like an exhausted lover. The night fell over him, and now he could not have moved even if he had wished to. He fell into delirium and bouts of oblivion.

  He dreamed that it was morning again, that he had survived the night. He dreamed that he heard human voices near at hand. He dreamed that when he opened his eyes he saw a tall ship, hove to close alongside. He knew it was fantasy for, in a twelve-month span, fewer than two dozen ships rounded this remote cape at the end of the world. Yet, as he watched, a boat was lowered from the ship’s side and rowed towards him. Only when he felt rough hands seize his legs did he realize dully that this was no dream.

  The Resolution edged in towards the land with only a feather of canvas set and the crew standing ready for the order to whip it off and furl it on her masts.

  Sir Francis’s eyes darted from the sails to the land close ahead. He listened intently to the chant of the leadsman as he swung the line and let the weight drop ahead of their bows. As the ship passed over it, and the line came straight up and down, he read the sounding. ‘By the deep twenty!’

  ‘Top of the tide in an hour.’ Hal looked up from the slate. ‘And full moon in three days. She’ll be making springs.’

  ‘Thank you, pilot,’ Sir Francis said, with a touch of sarcasm. Hal was only performing his duty, but the lad was not the only one aboard who had pored for hours over the almanac and the tables. Then Sir Francis relented. ‘Get up to the masthead, lad. Keep your eyes wide open.’

  He watched Hal race up the shrouds, then glanced at the helm and said quietly, ‘Larboard a point, Master Ned.’

  ‘A point to larboard it is, Captain.’ With his teeth Ned moved the stem of his empty clay pipe from one corner of his mouth to the other. He, too, had seen the white surge of reef at the entrance to the channel.

  The land was so close now that they could make out the individual branches of the trees that grew tall on the rocky heads that guarded the entrance. ‘Steady as she goes,’ Sir Francis said, as the Resolution crept forward between these towering cliffs of rock. He had never seen this entrance marked on any chart that he had either captured or purchased. This coast was depicted always as forbidding and dangerous, with few safe anchorages for a thousand miles north from Table Bay at Good Hope. Yet as the Resolution thrust deeper into the green water channel, a lovely broad lagoon opened ahead of her, surrounded on all sides by high hills, densely forested.

  ‘Elephant Lagoon!’ Hal exulted at the masthead. It was over two months since last they had sailed from this secret sallyport. As if to justify the name that Sir Francis had given this harbour, there came a clarion blast from the beach below the forest.

  Hal laughed with pleasure as he picked out on the beach four huge grey shapes. They stood shoulder to shoulder in a solid rank, facing the ship, their ears spread wide. Their trunks were raised straight and high, the nostrils at the tips questing the air for the scent of this strange apparition they saw coming towards them. The bull elephant lifted his long yellow tusks and shook his head until his ears clapped like the tattered grey canvas of an unfurling main sail. He trumpeted again.

  In the ship’s bows, Aboli returned the greeting, raising his hand above his head in salute and calling out in the language that only Hal could understand, ‘I see you, wise old man. Go in peace, for I am of your totem and I mean you no harm.’

  At the sound of his voice the elephants backed away from the water’s edge, then turned as one and headed back into the forest at a shambling run. Hal laughed again, at Aboli’s words and to watch the great beasts go, trampling and shaking the forest with their might.

  Then he concentrated once more on picking out the sandbanks and shoals, and in calling down directions to his father on the quarterdeck. The Resolution followed the meandering channel down the length of the lagoon until she came out into a wide green pool. The last scrap of her canvas was stripped and furled on her yards, and her anchor splashed into its depths. She swung round gently and snubbed at her anchor chain.

  She lay only fifty yards off the beach, hidden behind a small island in the lagoon, so that she was concealed from the casual scrutiny of a passing ship looking in through the entrance between the heads. The way was scarcely off her before Sir Francis was shouting his orders. ‘Carpenter! Get the pinnaces assembled and launched.’

  Before noon the first was lowered from the deck to the water, and ten men went down into her with their ditty bags. Big Daniel took charge of the oarsmen, who rowed them down the lagoon and put them ashore at the foot of the rocky heads. Through his telescope Sir Francis watched them climb the steep elephant path to the summit. From there they would keep a lookout and warn him of the approach of any strange sail.

  ‘On the morrow we will move the culverins to the entrance and set them up in stone emplacements to cover the channel,’ he told Hal. ‘Now, we will celebrate our arrival with fresh fish for our dinner. Get out the hooks and lines. Take Aboli and four men with you in the other pinnace. Dig some crabs from the beach and bring me back a load of fish for the ship’s mess.’

  Standing in the bows as the pinnace was rowed out into the channel, Hal peered down into the water. It was so clear that he could see the sandy bottom. The lagoon teemed with fish and shoal after shoal sped away before the boat. Many were as long as his arm, some as long as the spread of both arms.

  When they anchored in the deepest part of the channel, Hal dropped a handline over the side, the hooks baited with crabs they had taken from their holes on the sandy beach. Before it touched the bottom, the bait was seized with such rude power that before he could check it the line scorched his fingers. Leaning back against the line he brought it in hand over hand, and swung a flapping, glisten
ing body of purest silver over the gunwale.

  While it still thumped upon the deck and Hal struggled to twist the barbed hook from its rubbery lip, Aboli shouted with excitement and heaved back on his own line. Before he could swing his fish over the side, all the other sailors were laughing and straining to pull heavy darting fish aboard.

  Within the hour the deck was knee-deep in dead fish and they were all smeared to the eyebrows with slime and scales. Even the hard, rope-calloused hands of the seamen were bleeding from line burn and the prick of sharp fins. It was no longer sport but hard work to keep the inverted waterfall of living silver streaming over the side.

  Just before sunset Hal called a halt, and they rowed back towards the anchored galleon. They were still a hundred yards from her when, on an impulse, Hal stood up in the stern and stripped off his stinking slime-coated clothes. Stark mother naked he balanced on the thwart, and called to Aboli, ‘Take her alongside and unload the catch. I will swim from here.’ He had not bathed in over two months, since last they had anchored in the lagoon, and he longed for the feel of cool clear water on his skin. He gathered himself and dived overboard. The men at the galleon’s rail shouted ribald encouragement and even Sir Francis paused and watched him indulgently.

  ‘Let him be, Captain. He’s still a carefree boy,’ said Ned Tyler. ‘It’s just that he’s so big and tall that we sometimes forget that.’ Ned had been with Sir Francis for so many years that he could be forgiven such familiarity.

  ‘There’s no place for a thoughtless boy in the guerre de course. This is man’s work and it needs a hard head on even the most youthful shoulders or there’ll be a Dutch noose for that thoughtless head.’ But he made no effort to reprimand Hal as he watched his naked white body slide through the water, supple and agile as a dolphin.

  Katinka heard the commotion on the deck above, and raised her eyes from the book she was reading. It was a copy of François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel which had been printed privately in Paris with beautifully detailed erotic illustrations, hand-coloured and lifelike. A young man she had known in Amsterdam before her hasty marriage had sent it to her. From close and intimate experience, he knew her tastes well. She glanced idly through the window and her interest quickened. She dropped the book and stood up for a better view.

  ‘Lieveling, your husband,’ Zelda warned her.

  ‘The devil with my husband,’ said Katinka, as she stepped out onto the stern gallery and shaded her eyes against the slanting rays of the setting sun.

  The young Englishman who had captured her stood in the stern of a small boat, not far across the quiet lagoon waters. As she watched he stripped off his soiled and tattered clothing, until he stood naked and unashamed, balancing with easy grace on the gunwale.

  As a young girl she had accompanied her father to Italy. There she had bribed Zelda to take her to see the collection of sculptures by Michelangelo, while her father was meeting with his Italian trading partners. She had spent almost an hour of that sultry afternoon standing before the statue of David. Its beauty had aroused in her a turmoil of emotion. It was the first depiction of masculine nudity she had ever looked upon, and it had changed her life.

  Now she was looking at another David sculpture, but this one was not of cold marble. Of course, since their first encounter in her cabin she had seen the boy often. He dogged her footsteps like an over-affectionate puppy. Whenever she left her cabin he appeared miraculously, to moon at her from afar. His transparent adoration afforded her only the mildest amusement, for she was accustomed to no less from every man between the ages of fourteen and eighty. He had barely warranted more than a glance, this pretty boy, in baggy, filthy rags. After their first violent meeting, the stink of him had lingered in her cabin, so pungent that she had ordered Zelda to sprinkle perfume to dispel it. But, then, she knew from bitter experience that all sailors stank for there was no water on the ship other than for drinking, and little enough of that.

  Now that the lad had shed his noisome clothing, he had become a thing of striking beauty. Though his arms and face were bronzed by the sun, his torso and legs were carved in pure unsullied white. The low sun gilded the curves and angles of his body and his dark hair tumbled down his back. His teeth were very white in the tanned face, and his laughter so musical and filled with such zest that it brought a smile to her own lips.

  Then she looked down his body and her mouth opened. The violet eyes narrowed and became calculating. The sweet lines of his face were deceiving. He was a lad no longer. His belly was flat, ridged with fine young muscle like the sands of a wind-sculpted dune. At its base flared a dark bush of crisp curls, and his rosy genitals hung full and weighty, with an authority that those of Michelangelo’s David had lacked.

  When he dived into the lagoon, she could follow his every movement beneath the clear water. He came to the surface and, laughing, flung the sodden hair from his face with a toss of his head. The flying droplets sparkled like the sacred nimbus of light around the head of an angel.

  He struck out towards where she stood, high in the stern, gliding through the water with a peculiar grace that she had not noticed he possessed when clothed in his canvas tatters. He passed almost directly under where she was but did not look up at her, unaware of her scrutiny. She could make out the knuckles of his spine flanked by ridges of hard muscle that ran down to merge with the deep crease between his lean, round buttocks, which tightened erotically with every kick of his legs, as though he were making love to the water as he passed through it.

  She leaned out to follow him with her eyes, but he swam out of her view around the stern. Katinka pouted with frustration and went to retrieve her book. But the illustrations in it had lost their appeal, paling against the contrast of real flesh and glossy young skin.

  She sat with it open on her lap and imagined that hard young body all white and glistening above her and those tight young buttocks bunching and changing shape as she dug her sharp fingernails into them. She knew instinctively that he was a virgin – she could almost smell the honey-sweet odour of chastity upon him and felt herself drawn to it, like a wasp to an overripe fruit. It would be her first time with a sexual innocent. The thought of it added spice to his natural beauty.

  Her erotic daydreams were aggravated by the long period of her enforced abstinence and she lay back and pressed her thighs tightly together, beginning to rock gently back and forth in her chair, smiling secretly to herself.

  Hal spent the next three nights camped on the beach below the heads. His father had placed him in charge of ferrying the cannon ashore and building the stone emplacements to house them, overlooking the narrow entrance to the lagoon.

  Naturally Sir Francis had rowed across to approve the sites his son had chosen, but even he could find no fault with Hal’s eye for a field of fire that would rake an enemy ship seeking to pass through the heads.

  On the fourth day, when the work was done and Hal was rowed back down the lagoon, he saw from afar that the work of repairing the galleon was well in hand. The carpenter and his mates had built scaffolds over her stern, from which platform they were fitting new timbers to replace those damaged by gunfire, to the great discomfort of the guests aboard. The ungainly jurymast, raised by the Dutch captain to replace his gale-shattered main, had been taken down and the galleon’s lines were awkward and unharmonious with one mast missing.

  However, when Hal climbed up to the deck through the entryport, he saw that Ned Tyler and his work gang were swaying up the massive baulks of exotic timber that made up the heaviest part of the ship’s cargo and lowering them into the lagoon to float across to the beach.

  The spare mast was stowed at the bottom of the hold, where the sealed compartment contained the coin and ingots. The cargo had to be removed to reach them.

  ‘Your father has sent for you,’ Aboli greeted Hal, and Hal hurried aft.

  ‘You have missed three days of your studies while you were ashore,’ Sir Francis told him, without preamble.

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p; ‘Yes, Father.’ Hal knew that it was vain to point out that he had not deliberately evaded them. But, at least, I will not apologize for it, he determined silently, and met his father’s gaze unflinchingly.

  ‘After your supper this evening, I will rehearse you in the catechism of the Order. Come to my cabin at eight bells in the second dog watch.’

  The catechism of initiation to the Order of St George and the Holy Grail had never been written down and for nearly four centuries the two hundred esoteric questions and answers had been passed on by word of mouth; master instructing novice in the Strict Observance.

  Sitting beside Aboli on the foredeck, Hal wolfed hot biscuit, fried in dripping, and baked fresh fish. Now with an unlimited supply of firewood and fresh food on hand, the ship’s meals were substantial, but Hal was silent as he ate. In his mind he went over his catechism, for his father would be strict in his judgement. Too soon the ship’s bell struck and, as the last note faded, Hal tapped on the door to his father’s cabin.

  While his father sat at his desk Hal knelt on the bare planks of the deck. Sir Francis wore the cloak of his office over his shoulders, and on his breast sparkled the magnificent seal fashioned of gold, the insignia of a Nautonnier Knight who had passed through all the degrees of the Order. It depicted the lion rampant of England holding aloft the croix pattée and, above it, the stars and crescent moon of the mother goddess. The lion’s eyes were rubies and the stars were diamonds. On the second finger of his right hand he wore a narrow gold ring, engraved with a compass and a backstaff, the tools of the navigator, and above these a crowned lion. The ring was small and discreet, not as ostentatious as the seal.

  His father conducted the catechism in Latin. The use of this language ensured that only literate, educated men could ever become members of the Order.

  ‘Who are you?’ Sir Francis asked the first question.

  ‘Henry Courtney, son of Francis and Edwina.’