Blue Horizon c-3 Read online

  Only the previous week Mansur had returned on one of the Courtney ships from a trading voyage up the east coast of Africa as far as the Horn of Hormuz. He was describing to them the wonders he had seen and the marvelous adventures he had shared with his father, who had captained the Gift of Allah.

  Mansur's father, Dorian Courtney, was the other partner in the company. In his extreme youth he had been captured by Arabian pirates and sold to a prince of Oman, who had adopted him and converted him to Islam. His half-brother Tom Courtney was Christian, while Dorian was Muslim. When Tom had found and rescued his younger brother they had made a happy partnership. Between them they had entry to both religious worlds, and their enterprise had flourished. Over the last twenty years they had traded in India, Arabia and Africa, and sold their exotic goods in Europe.

  As Mansur spoke Jim watched his cousin's face, and once again he envied his beauty and his charm. Mansur had inherited it from his father, along with the red-gold hair that hung thickly down his back. Like Dorian he was lithe and quick, while Jim took after his own father,

  broad and strong. Zama's father, Aboli, had compared them to the bull and the gazelle.

  "Come on, coz!" Mansur broke off his tale to tease Jim. "Zama and I will have the boat filled to the gunwales before you have even woken up. Catch us a fish!"

  "I have always prized quality above mere quantity," Jim retorted, in a pitying tone.

  "Well, you have nothing better to do, so you can tell us about your journey to the land of the Hottentots." Mansur swung another gleaming flapping fish over the side of the skiff.

  Jim's plain, honest face lit up with pleasure at the memory of his own adventure. Instinctively he looked northwards across the bay at the rugged mountains, which the morning sun was painting with brightest gold. "We travelled for thirty-eight days," he boasted, 'north across the mountains and the great desert, far beyond the frontiers of this colony, which the Governor and the Council of the VOC in Amsterdam have forbidden any man to cross. We trekked into lands where no white man has been before us." He did not have the fluency or the poetic descriptive powers of his cousin, but his enthusiasm was contagious. Mansur and Zama laughed with him, as he described the barbaric tribes they had encountered and the endless herds of wild game spread across the-plains. At intervals he appealed to Zama, "It's true what I say, isn't it, Zama? You were with me. Tell Mansur it's true."

  Zama nodded solemnly. "It is true. I swear it on the grave of my own father. Every word is true."

  "One day I will go back." Jim made the promise to himself, rather than to the others. "I will go back and cross the blue horizon, to the very limit of this land."

  "And I will go with you, Somoya!" Zama looked at him with complete trust and affection.

  Zama remembered what his own father had said of Jim when at last he lay dying on his sleeping kaross, burnt out with age, a ruined giant whose strength had seemed once to hold the very sky suspended. "Jim Courtney is the true son of his father," Aboli had whispered. "Cleave to him as I have to Tom. You will never regret it, my son."

  "I will go with you," Zama repeated, and Jim winked at him,

  "Of course you will, you rogue. Nobody else would have you." He clapped Zama on the back so hard he almost knocked him off the thwart.

  He would have said more but at that moment the coil of cod line jerked under his foot and he let out a triumphant shout. "Julie knocks at the door. Come in, Big Julie!" He dropped the oar and snatched up the

  line. He held it strung between both his hands with a slack bight ready to feed out over the side. Without being ordered to do so the other two retrieved their own rigs, stripping the line in over the gunwale, hand over hand, working with feverish speed. They knew how vital it was to give Jim open water in which to work with a truly big fish.

  "Come, my pretty ling Jim whispered to the fish, as he held the line delicately between thumb and finger. He could feel nothing, just the soft press of the current. "Come, my darling! Papa loves you," he pleaded.

  Then he felt a new pressure on the line, a gentle almost furtive movement. Every nerve in his body jerked bowstring taut. "She's there. She's still there."

  The line went slack again, "Don't leave me, sweetest heart. Please don't leave me." Jim leaned out over the side of the skiff, holding the line high so that it ran straight from his fingers into the green swirl of the waters. The others watched without daring to draw breath. Then, suddenly, they saw his raised right hand drawn down irresistibly by some massive weight. They watched the muscles in his arms and back coil and bunch, like an adder preparing to strike, and neither spoke or moved as the hand holding the line almost touched the surface of the sea.

  "Yes!" said Jim quietly. "Now!" He reared back with the weight of his body behind the strike. "Yes! And yes and yes!" Each time he said it he heaved back on the line, swinging with alternate arms, right, left and right again. There was no give even to Jim's strength.

  That can't be a fish," said Mansur. "No fish is that strong. You must have hooked the bottom." Jim did not answer him. Now he was leaning back with all his weight, his knees jammed against the wooden gunwale to give himself full purchase. His teeth were gritted, his face turned puce and his eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets.

  "Tail on to the line!" he gasped, and the other two scrambled down the deck to help him, but before they reached the stern Jim was jerked off his feet, and sprawled against the side of the boat. The line raced through his fingers, and they could smell the skin, burning like mutton ribs grilling on the coals, as it tore from his palm.

  Jim yelled with pain but held on grimly. With a mighty effort he managed to get the line across the edge of the gunwale and tried to jam it there. But he lost more skin as his knuckles slammed into the wood, with one hand he snatched off his cap to use as a glove while he held the line against the wood. All three were yelling like demons in hellfire.

  "Give me a hand! Grab the end!"

  "Let him run. You'll straighten the hook."

  "Get the bucket. Throw water on it! The line will burst into flames!"

  Zama managed to get both hands on the line, but even with their combined strength they could not stop the run of the great fish. The line hissed with the strain as it raced over the side, and they could feel the sweep of the great tail pulsing through it.

  "Water, for the love of Christ, wet it down!" Jim howled, and Mansur scooped a bucketful from alongside and dashed it over their hands and the sizzling line. There was a puff of steam as the water boiled off.

  "By God! We've almost lost all of this coil," Jim shouted, as he saw the end of the line in the bottom of the wooden tub that held it. "Quick as you can, Mansur! Tie on another coil." Mansur worked quickly, with the dexterity for which he was renowned, but he was only just in time; as he tightened the knot the rope was jerked from his grasp and pulled through the fingers of the other two, ripping off more skin, before it went over the side and down into the green depths.

  "Stop!" Jim pleaded with the fish. "Are you trying to kill us, Julie? Will you not stop, my beauty?"

  "That's half the second coil gone already," Mansur warned them. "Let me take over from you, Jim. There's blood all over the deck."

  "No, no." Jim shook his head vehemently. "She's slowing down. Heart's almost broken."

  "Yours or hers?" Mansur asked.

  "Go on the stage, coz," Jim advised him grimly. "Your wit is wasted here."

  The running line began to slow as it passed through their torn fingers. Then it stopped. "Leave the water bucket," Jim ordered. "Get a grip on the line." Mansur hung on behind Zama and, with the extra weight, Jim could let go with one hand and suck his fingers. "Do we do this for fun?" he asked, wonderingly. Then his voice became businesslike. "Now it's our turn, Julie."

  Keeping pressure on the line while they moved, they rearranged themselves down the length of the deck, standing nose to tail, bent double with the line passed back between their legs.

  "One, two and a tiger!" Jim gave th
em the timing, and they heaved the line in, swinging their weight on it together. The knotted joint came back in over the side, and Mansur, as third man, coiled the line back into the tub. Four times more the great fish gathered its strength and streaked away and they were forced to let it take out line, but each time the run was shorter. Then they turned its head and brought it back, struggling and jolting, its strength slowly waning.

  Suddenly Jim at the head of the line gave a shout of joy. "There she is! I can see her down there." The fish turned in a wide circle deep

  below the hull. As she came round her bronze-red side caught the sunlight and flashed like a mirror.

  "Sweet Jesus, she's beautiful!" Jim could see the fish's huge golden eye staring up at him through the emerald-coloured water. The steenbras's mouth opened and closed spasmodically, the gill plates flaring as they pumped water through, starving for oxygen. Those jaws were cavernous enough to take in a grown man's head and shoulders, and they were lined with serried ranks of fangs as long and thick as his forefinger.

  "Now I believe Uncle Dorry's tale." Jim gasped with the exertion. "Those teeth could easily bite off a man's leg."

  At last, almost two hours after Jim had first set the hook in the hinge of the fish's jaw, they had it alongside the skiff. Between them they lifted the gigantic head clear of the water. As soon as they did so the fish went into its last frenzy. Its body was half as long again as a tall man, and as thick around the middle as a Shetland pony. It pulsed and flexed until its nose touched the wide flukes of its tail, first on the one side, then on the other. It threw up sheets of seawater that came aboard in solid gouts, drenching the three lads as though they stood under a waterfall. They held on grimly, until the violent paroxysms weakened. Then Jim called out, "Hang on to her! She's ready for the priest."

  He snatched up the billy from its sling under the transom. The end of the club was weighted with lead, balanced and heavy in his big right hand. He lifted the fish's head high and swung his weight behind the blow. It caught the fish across the bony ridge above those glaring yellow eyes. The massive body stiffened in death and violent tremors ran down its shimmering sun-red flanks. Then the life went out of it and, white belly uppermost, it floated alongside the skiff with its gill plates open wide as a lady's parasol.

  Drenched with sweat and seawater, panting wildly, nursing their torn hands, they leaned on the transom and gazed in awe upon the marvelous creature they had killed. There were no words to express adequately the overpowering emotions of triumph and remorse, of jubilation and melancholy that gripped them now that the ultimate passion of the hunter had come to its climax.

  "In the Name of the Prophet, this is Leviathan indeed," Mansur said softly. "He makes me feel so small."

  The sharks will be here any minute." Jim broke the spell. "Help me get her on board." They threaded the rope through the fish's gills, then all three hauled on it, the skiff listing dangerously close to the point of capsizing as they brought it over the side. The boat was barely large enough to contain its bulk and there was no room for them to sit on

  the thwarts so they perched on the gunwale. A scale had been torn off as the fish slid over the side: it was the size of a gold doubloon and as bright.

  Mansur picked it up, and turned it to catch the sunlight, staring at it with fascination. "We must take this fish home to High Weald," he said.

  "Why?" Jim asked brusquely.

  "To show the family, my father and yours."

  "By nightfall he'll have lost his colour, his scales will be dry and dull, and his flesh will start to rot and stink." Jim shook his head. "I want to remember him like this, in all his glory."

  "What are we going to do with him then?"

  "Sell him to the purser of the VOC ship."

  "Such a wonderful creature. Sell him like a sack of potatoes? That seems like sacrilege," Mansur protested.

  "I give you of the beasts of the earth and the fish of the sea. Kill! Eat!" Jim quoted. "Genesis. God's very words. How could it be sacrilege?"

  "Your God, not mine," Mansur contradicted him.

  "He's the same God, yours and mine. We just call him different names."

  "He is my God also." Zama was not to be left out. "Kulu Kulu, the Greatest of the Great Ones."

  Jim wrapped a strip of cloth round his injured hand. "In the name of Kulu Kulu then. This steenbras is the means to get aboard the Dutch ship. I am going to use it as a letter of introduction to the purser. It's not just one fish I'm going to sell him, it's all the produce from High Weald."

  With the north-westerly breeze blowing ten knots behind them they could hoist the single sail, which carried them swiftly into the bay. There were eight ships lying at anchor under the guns of the castle. Most had been there for weeks and were already well provisioned.

  Jim pointed out the latest arrival. "They will not have set foot on land for months. They will be famished for fresh food. They are probably riddled with scurvy already." Jim put the tiller over and wove through the anchored shipping. "After what they almost did to us, they owe us a nice bit of profit." All the Courtneys were traders to the core of their being and for even the youngest of them the word 'profit' held almost religious significance. Jim headed for the Dutch ship. It was a tall three decker, twenty guns a side, square-rigged, three masts, big and beamy, obviously an armed trader. She flew the VOC pennant and the flag of the Dutch Republic. As they closed with her Jim could see the storm damage to hull and rigging. Clearly she had endured a rough passage. Closer still, Jim could make out the ship's name on her stern in faded

  gilt lettering: Het Gelukkige Meeuw, the Lucky Seagull He grinned at how inappropriately the shabby old lady had been named. Then his green eyes narrowed with surprise and interest.

  "Women, by God!" He pointed ahead. "Hundreds of them." Both Mansur and Zama scrambled to their feet, clung to the mast and peered ahead, shading their eyes against the sun.

  "You're right!" Mansur exclaimed. Apart from the wives of the burghers, their stolid, heavily chaperoned daughters and the trollops of the waterfront taverns, women were rare at the Cape of Good Hope.

  "Look at them," Jim breathed with awe. "Just look at those beauties." Forward of the mainmast the deck was crowded with female shapes.

  "How do you know they're beautiful?" Mansur demanded. "We're too far away to tell. They're probably ugly old crones."

  "No, God could not be so cruel to us." Jim laughed excitedly. "Every one of them is an angel from heaven. I just know it!"

  There was a small group of officers on the quarter-deck, and knots of seamen were already at work repairing the damaged rigging and painting the hull. But the three youths in the skiff had eyes only for the female shapes on the foredeck. Once again they caught a whiff of the stench that hung over the ship, and Jim exclaimed with horror: "They're in leg irons." He had the sharpest eyesight of the three and had seen that the ranks of women were shuffling along the deck in single file, with the hampered gait of the chained captive.

  "Convicts!" Mansur agreed. "Your angels from heaven are female convicts. Uglier than sin."

  They were close enough now to make out the features of some of the bedraggled creatures, the grey, greasy hair, the toothless mouths, the wrinkled pallor of ancient skin, the sunken eyes and, on most of the miserable faces, the ugly blotches and bruises of scurvy. They stared down on the approaching boat with dull, hopeless eyes, showing no interest, no emotion of any kind.

  Even Jim's lascivious instincts were cooled. These were no longer human beings, but beaten, abused animals. Their coarse canvas shifts were ragged and soiled. Obviously they had worn them ever since leaving Amsterdam, without water to wash their bodies, let alone their clothing. There were guards armed with muskets stationed in the mainmast bitts and the forecastle overlooking the deck. As the skiff came within hail a petty officer in a blue pea-jacket hurried to the ship's side and raised a speaking trumpet to his lips. "Stand clear," he shouted in Dutch. This is a prison ship. Stand off or we will fire into
you."