Birds of Prey Read online

  His father’s words excited Hal’s imagination, and conjured up once more the images of dragons and monsters that decorated the charts he had studied.

  ‘Heave away!’ his father ordered, and they bent to the long sweeps again. The two were alone in the leading boat: Sir Francis pulled the starboard oar with a long powerful stroke that matched Hal’s tirelessly. Between them stood the empty water casks, the refilling of which was the ostensible purpose of this expedition to the head of the lagoon. The real reason, however, lay on the floorboards at Sir Francis’s feet. During the night Aboli and Big Daniel had carried the canvas sacks of coin and the chests of gold ingots down from the cabin and had hidden them under the tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat. In the bows they had stacked five kegs of powder and an array of weapons, captured along with the treasure from the galleon, cutlass, pistol and musket, and leather bags of lead shot.

  Ned Tyler, Big Daniel and Aboli followed closely in the second boat, the three men in his crew whom Sir Francis trusted above all others. Their boat, too, was loaded with water casks.

  Once they were well into the mouth of the stream, Sir Francis stopped rowing and leaned over the side to scoop a mugful of water and taste it. He nodded with satisfaction. ‘Pure and sweet.’ He called across to Ned Tyler, ‘Do you begin to refill here. Hal and I will go on upstream.’

  As Ned steered the boat in towards the riverbank, a wild, booming bark echoed down the gorge. They all looked up. ‘What are those creatures? Are they men?’ demanded Ned. ‘Some kind of strange hairy dwarfs?’ There was fear and awe in his voice, as he stared up at the ranks of human-like shapes that lined the edge of the precipice high above them.

  ‘Apes.’ Sir Francis called to him as he rested on his oar. ‘Like those of the Barbary Coast.’

  Aboli chuckled, then threw back his head and faithfully mimicked the challenge of the bull baboon that led the pack. Most of the younger animals leaped up and nervously skittered along the cliff at the sound.

  The huge bull ape accepted the challenge. He stood on all fours at the edge of the precipice, and opened his mouth wide to display a set of terrible white fangs. Emboldened by this show, some of the younger animals returned and began to hurl small stones and debris down upon them. The men were forced to duck and dodge the missiles.

  ‘Give them a shot to see them off,’ Sir Francis ordered.

  ‘It’s a long one.’ Daniel unslung his musket and blew on the burning tip of the slow-match as he raised the butt to his shoulder. The gorge echoed to the thunderous blast, and they all burst out laughing at the antics of the baboon pack, as it panicked at the shot. The ball knocked a chip off the lip of the ledge, and the youngsters of the troop somersaulted backwards with shock. The mothers seized their offspring, slung them under their bellies and scrambled up the sheer face, and even the brave bull abandoned his dignity and joined the rush for safety. Within seconds, the cliff was deserted and the sounds of the terror-stricken retreat dwindled.

  Aboli jumped over the side, waist deep into the river, and dragged the boat onto the bank while Daniel and Ned unstoppered the water casks to refill them. In the other boat Sir Francis and Hal bent to the oars and rowed on upstream. After half a mile the river narrowed sharply, and the cliffs on both sides became steeper. Sir Francis paused to get his bearings and then turned the longboat in under the cliff and moored the bows to the stump of a dead tree that sprang from a crack in the rock. Leaving Hal in the boat he jumped out onto the narrow ledge below the cliff and began to climb upwards. There was no obvious path to follow but Sir Francis moved confidently from one hand-hold to another. Hal watched him with pride: in his eyes, his father was an old man – he must have long passed the venerable age of forty years – yet he climbed with strength and agility. Suddenly, fifty feet above the river, he reached a ledge invisible from below and shuffled a few paces along it. Then he knelt to examine the narrow cleft in the cliff face; the opening was blocked with neatly packed rocks. He smiled with relief when he saw that they were exactly as he had left them many months previously. Carefully he pulled them out of the cleft and laid them aside, until the opening was wide enough for him to crawl through.

  The cave beyond was in darkness but Sir Francis stood up and reached to a stone shelf above his head where he groped for the flint and steel he had left there. He lit the candle he had brought with him, and then looked around the cave.

  Nothing had been touched since his last visit. Five chests stood against the back wall. That was the booty from the Heerlycke Nacht, mostly silver plate and a hundred thousand guilders in coin that had been intended for payment of the Dutch garrison in Batavia. A pile of gear was stacked beside the entrance, and Sir Francis began work on this immediately. It took him almost half an hour to rig the heavy wooden beam as a gantry from the ledge outside the cave entrance, and then to lower the tackle to the boat moored below.

  ‘Make the first chest fast!’ he called down to Hal.

  Hal tied it on and his father hauled it upwards, the sheave squeaking at each heave. The chest disappeared and a few minutes later the rope end dropped back and dangled where Hal could reach it. He tied on the next chest.

  It took them well over an hour to hoist all the ingots and the sacks of coin and stack them in the back of the cave. Then they started work on the powder kegs and the bundles of weapons. The last item to go up was the smallest: a box into which Sir Francis had packed a compass and backstaff, a roll of charts taken from the Standvastigheid, flint and steel, a set of surgeon’s instruments in a canvas roll, and a selection of other equipment that could make the difference between survival and a lingering death to a party stranded on this savage, unexplored coast.

  ‘Come up, Hal,’ Sir Francis called down at last, and Hal went up the cliff with the speed and ease of one of the young baboons.

  When Hal reached him, his father was sitting comfortably on the narrow ledge, his legs dangling and his clay-stemmed pipe and tobacco pouch in his hands.

  ‘Give me a hand here, lad.’ He pointed with his empty pipe at the vertical crack in the face of the cliff. ‘Close that up again.’

  Hal spent another half-hour packing the loose rock back into the entrance, to conceal it and to discourage intruders. There was little chance of men finding the cache in this deserted gorge, but he and his father knew that the baboons would return. They were as curious and mischievous as any human.

  When Hal would have started back down the cliff, Sir Francis stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. ‘There is no hurry. The others will not have finished refilling the water casks.’

  They sat in silence on the ledge while Sir Francis got his long-stemmed pipe to draw sweetly. Then he asked, through a cloud of blue smoke, ‘What have I done here?’

  ‘Cached our share of the treasure.’

  ‘Not only our share alone, but that of the Crown and of every man aboard,’ Sir Francis corrected him. ‘But why have I done that?’

  ‘Gold and silver is temptation even to an honest man.’ Hal repeated the lore his father had drummed into his head so many times before.

  ‘Should I not trust my own crew?’ Sir Francis asked.

  ‘If you trust no man, then no man will ever disappoint you.’ Hal repeated the lesson.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ Sir Francis turned to watch his face as he replied, and Hal hesitated. ‘Do you trust Aboli?’

  ‘Yes, I trust him,’ Hal admitted, reluctantly, as though it were a sin.

  ‘Aboli is a good man, none better. But you see that I do not bring even him to this place.’ He paused, then asked, ‘Do you trust me, lad?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why? Surely I am but a man and I have told you to trust no man?’

  ‘Because you are my father and I love you.’

  Sir Francis’s eyes clouded and he made as if to caress Hal’s cheek. Then he sighed, dropped his hand and looked down at the river below. Hal expected his father to censure his reply, but he did not. After a while Sir Francis aske
d another question. ‘What of the other goods I have cached here? The powder and weapons and charts and the like. Why have I placed those here?’

  ‘Against an uncertain future,’ Hal replied confidently – he had heard the answer often enough before. ‘A wise fox has many exits to his earth.’

  Sir Francis nodded. ‘All of us who sail in the guerre de course are always at risk. One day, those few chests may be worth our very lives.’

  His father was silent again as he smoked the last few shreds of tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. Then he said softly, ‘If God is merciful, the time will come, perhaps not too far in the future, when this war with the Dutch will end. Then we will return here and gather up our prize and sail home to Plymouth. It has long been my dream to own the manor of Gainesbury that runs alongside High Weald—’ He broke off, as if not daring to tempt fate with such imagining. ‘If harm should befall me, it is necessary that you should know and remember where I have stored our winnings. It will be my legacy to you.’

  ‘No harm can ever come your way!’ Hal exclaimed in agitation. It was more a plea than a statement of conviction. He could not imagine an existence without this towering presence at the centre of it.

  ‘No man is immortal,’ said Sir Francis softly. ‘We all owe God a death.’ This time he allowed his right hand to settle briefly on Hal’s shoulder. ‘Come, lad. We must still fill the water casks in our own boat before dark.’

  As the longboats crept back down the edge of the darkening lagoon, Aboli had taken Sir Francis’s place on the rowing thwart, and now Hal’s father sat in the stern, wrapped in a dark woollen cloak against the evening chill. His expression was remote and sombre. Facing aft as he worked one of the long oars, Hal could study him surreptitiously. Their conversation at the mouth of the cave had left him troubled with a presentiment of ill-fortune ahead.

  He guessed that since they had anchored in the lagoon his father had cast his own horoscope. He had seen the zodiacal chart covered with arcane notations lying open on his desk in his cabin. That would account for his withdrawn and introspective mood. As Aboli had said, the stars were his children and he knew their secrets.

  Suddenly his father lifted his head and sniffed the cool evening air. Then his face changed as he studied the forest edge. No dark thoughts could absorb him to the point where he was unaware of his surroundings.

  ‘Aboli, take us in to the bank, if you please.’

  They turned the boat towards the narrow beach, and the second followed. After they had all jumped out onto the beach and moored both boats, Sir Francis gave a quiet order. ‘Bring your arms. Follow me, but quietly.’

  He led them into the forest, pushing stealthily through the undergrowth, until he stepped out suddenly onto a well-used path. He glanced back to make certain they were following him, then hurried along.

  Hal was mystified by his father’s actions until he smelt a trace of woodsmoke on the air and noticed for the first time the bluish haze along the tops of the dense forest trees. This must have been what had alerted his father.

  Suddenly Sir Francis stepped out into a small clearing in the forest and stopped. The four men who were already there had not noticed him. Two lay like corpses on a battlefield, one still clutching a squat brown hand-blown bottle in his inert fingers, the other drooling strings of saliva from the corner of his mouth as he snored.

  The second pair were wholly absorbed by the stacks of silver guilders and the ivory dice lying between them. One scooped up the dice and rattled them at his ear before rolling them across the patch of beaten bare earth. ‘Mother of a pig!’ he growled. ‘This is not my lucky day.’

  ‘You should not speak unkindly of the dam who gave birth to you,’ said Sir Francis softly. ‘But the rest of what you say is the truth. This is not your lucky day.’

  They looked up at their captain in horrified disbelief, but made no attempt to resist or escape as Daniel and Aboli dragged them to their feet and roped them neck to neck in the manner used by the slavers.

  Sir Francis walked over to inspect the still that stood at the far end of the clearing. They had used a black iron pot to boil the fermented mash of old biscuit and peelings, and copper tubing stolen from the ship’s stores for the coil. He kicked it over and the colourless spirits flared in the flames of the charcoal brazier on which the pot stood. A row of filled bottles, stoppered with wads of leaves, was laid out beneath a yellow-wood tree. He picked them up one at a time and hurled them against the tree-trunk. As they shattered the evaporating fumes were pungent enough to make his eyes water. Then he walked back to Daniel and Ned, who had kicked the drunks out of their stupor and had dragged them across the clearing to rope them to the other captives.

  ‘We’ll give them a day to sleep it off, Master Ned. Then tomorrow, at the beginning of the afternoon watch, have the ship’s company assemble to witness their punishment.’ He glanced at Big Daniel. ‘I trust you can still make your cat whistle, Master Daniel.’

  ‘Please, Captain, we meant no harm. Just a little fun.’ They tried to crawl to where he stood, but Aboli dragged them back like dogs on the leash.

  ‘I will not grudge you your fun,’ said Sir Francis, ‘if you do not grudge me mine.’

  The carpenter had knocked up a row of four tripods on the quarterdeck, and the drunkards and gamblers were lashed to them by wrist and ankle. Big Daniel walked down the line and ripped their shirts open from collar to waist, so that their naked backs were exposed. They hung helplessly in their bonds like trussed pigs on the back of a market cart.

  ‘Every man aboard knows full well that I will tolerate no drunkenness and no gaming, both of which are an offence and abomination in the eyes of the Lord.’ Sir Francis addressed the company, assembled in solemn ranks in the ship’s waist. ‘Every man aboard knows the penalty. Fifty licks of the cat.’ He watched their faces. Fifty strokes of the knotted leather thongs could cripple a man for life. A hundred strokes was a sentence of certain and horrible death. ‘They have earned themselves the full fifty. However, I remember that these four fools fought well on this very deck when we captured this vessel. We still have some hard fighting ahead of us, and cripples are of no use to me when the culverins are smoking and the cutlasses are out.’

  He paused to watch their faces, and saw the terror of the cat in their eyes, mixed with relief that it was not them bound to the tripods. Unlike the captains of many privateers, even some Knights of the Order, Sir Francis took no pleasure in this punishment. Yet he did not flinch from necessity. He commanded a ship full of tough, unruly men, whom he had handpicked for their ferocity and who would take any show of kindness as weakness.

  ‘I am a merciful man,’ he told them, and somebody in the rear ranks chuckled derisively. Sir Francis paused and, with a bleak eye, singled out the offender. When the culprit hung his head and shuffled his feet, he went on smoothly, ‘But these rascals would test my mercy to its limits.’

  He turned to Big Daniel, who stood beside the first tripod. He was stripped to the waist and his great muscles bulged in arms and shoulders. He had tied back his long greying hair with a strip of cloth, and from his scarred fist the lashes of the cat hung to the planks of the deck like the serpents of Medusa’s head.

  ‘Make it fifteen for each, Master Daniel,’ Sir Francis ordered, ‘but comb your cat well between the strokes.’

  Unless Daniel’s fingers separated the lashes of the cat after each stroke, the blood would matt them together and clot them into a single heavy instrument that would cut human flesh like a sword blade. Even fifteen with an uncombed cat would strip the meat off a man’s back down to the vertebrae of his spine.

  ‘Fifteen it is, Captain,’ Daniel acknowledged, and shaking out the whip to separate the knotted thongs, stepped up to his first victim. The man twisted his head to watch him over his shoulder, his expression blanched with fear.

  Daniel raised his arm high and let the lash stream out over his shoulder then, with a peculiar grace for such a big man, he swung forward. The
lash whistled like the wind in the leaves of a tall tree and clapped loudly on bare skin.

  ‘One!’ chanted the crew in unison, as the victim shrieked on a high note of shock and agony. The lash left a grotesque pattern over his back, each red line studded with a row of brighter crimson stars where the knots had broken the skin. It looked like the sting from the venomous tendrils of a Portuguese man-of-war.

  Daniel combed out the lash, and the fingers of his left hand were smeared with bright fresh blood.

  ‘Two!’ The watchers counted, and the man shrieked again and writhed in his bonds, his toes dancing a tattoo of pain on the deck timbers.

  ‘Avast punishment!’ Sir Francis called, as he heard a mild commotion at the head of the companionway leading down to the cabins in the stern. Obediently Daniel lowered the whip, and waited as Sir Francis strode to the ladder.

  Governor van de Velde’s plumed hat appeared above the coaming, followed by his fat flushed face. He stood wheezing in the sunlight, mopping his jowls with a silk handkerchief, and looked about him. His face brightened with interest as he saw the men hanging on the row of tripods. ‘Ja! Goed! I see we are not too late,’ he said, with satisfaction.

  Close behind him Katinka emerged from the hatch with a light, eager step, holding her skirts just high enough to reveal satin slippers embroidered with seed pearls.

  ‘Good morrow, Mijnheer,’ Sir Francis greeted the Governor with a perfunctory bow, ‘there is punishment in progress. It is an unsuitable spectacle for a lady of your wife’s delicate breeding to witness.’

  ‘Truly, Captain,’ Katinka laughed lightly as she intervened, ‘I am not a child. Heaven knows, there is a great paucity of diversion aboard this ship. Just think, you would collect no ransom if I were to die of boredom.’ She tapped Sir Francis’s arm with her fan, but he pulled away from this condescending touch, and spoke again to her husband.