Golden Lion

Golden Lion Wilbur Smith Kristian Kristian Worldwide bestselling author Wilbur Smith will take you on an incredible journey on the thrashing seas off the coast of Africa in this glorious return to the series that made him who he is: The Courtney series.East African Coast, 1670.In a time of brave and brutal adventure, one man will journey across land and sea to pursue his greatest enemy …The Golden Bough, captained by Henry ‘Hal’ Courtney, is running south from Ethiopia to Zanzibar. Below deck, both his crew and his lover, the fearless warrior Judith Nazet, sleep. As the moon glints through clouds, Hal sights a ship passing close by. Although there is an uneasy truce between the warring English and Dutch, Hal scents danger. When the Bough is boarded, the crew must go hand to hand to defend their ship and their lives.But soon Hal will face even graver danger, as he discovers his mortal enemy still lives and is hell-bent on revenge. he must pursue his nemesis across desert savannah, through the seedy underbelly of Zanzibar’s slave markets and shark-infested waters, imperilling his own life at every turn. But it will take more than a slave’s shackles to hold Hal Courtney…A thrilling blend of extraordinary drama and epic storytelling, Golden Lion sees Wilbur Smith return in triumphant form to the adventures of his beloved and bestselling Courtney family. GOLDEN LION Wilbur Smith with Giles Kristian Copyright (#u8ac0981a-47b6-5827-9104-0b770f3f4896) HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016 Copyright © Orion Mintaka (UK) Ltd 2016 Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016 Cover photographs © Joel W. Rogers / Corbis (ship); GS / Gallery Stock (beach scene) Map © John Gilkes 2016 Wilbur Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books Source ISBN: 9780007535743 Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007535736 Version: 2018-09-21 Dedication (#u8ac0981a-47b6-5827-9104-0b770f3f4896) I dedicate this book to my wife, Niso. From the day we first met she has been a constant and powerful inspiration to me, urging me on when I falter and cheering me when I succeed. I truly do not know what I would do if she were not by my side. I hope and pray that day never comes. I love and adore you, my best girl, words cannot express how much. Contents Cover (#ufff2bbe1-8e8b-5437-b844-a298fdaa7330) Title Page (#u99454c33-4343-58f7-b850-2d53fc34d060) Copyright Dedication Map They were no … (#uf7f4c7de-e81c-5f7e-b414-63a11f880a08) The battle had … (#ufab2e137-f4c9-5d43-a9c5-fb43c084dd86) The armed East … (#ubf107eaf-7fbb-5b0a-b890-52ae51ffabb0) As the first … (#u206dd61b-942b-5505-ae1d-69ac8923ba2a) Judith had given … (#u81b8f9db-589f-5316-a40c-8155f2155231) When the Buzzard … (#u2cf5546c-4c26-5cd0-95fe-06b2f76f1cd0) The Buzzard might … (#ua3887030-6092-5b10-9a89-4167ae8f55b5) A ship’s captain … (#u3e7eeec4-0f5b-5c38-a0ac-12297f5cc71b) Pett was hungry … (#ub9b9dff7-44ec-563b-90d2-b2b2a92f865c) Hal ascended the … (#u57dd3a40-b02f-57b9-9e99-3e850da00bb5) Because she felt … (#ub4af18ad-e54b-55a7-8afe-43fc4587f6b1) The Delft, still … (#ud0c66a62-69c4-5780-80cc-08bb515dcc61) William Pett took … (#litres_trial_promo) Jahan drove through … (#litres_trial_promo) William Pett was … (#litres_trial_promo) Pett heard voices … (#litres_trial_promo) A scant twelve … (#litres_trial_promo) Two days had … (#litres_trial_promo) The Delft, now … (#litres_trial_promo) From the moment … (#litres_trial_promo) Hal was standing … (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Wake up, my … (#litres_trial_promo) Judith was taken … (#litres_trial_promo) If Zanzibar was … (#litres_trial_promo) The three men … (#litres_trial_promo) The storm came … (#litres_trial_promo) Captain Jebediah Rivers … (#litres_trial_promo) Not for the … (#litres_trial_promo) The slave market’s … (#litres_trial_promo) The men who … (#litres_trial_promo) Hal came to … (#litres_trial_promo) Hal had only … (#litres_trial_promo) ‘You must eat,’ … (#litres_trial_promo) The Madre de … (#litres_trial_promo) Hal started slow … (#litres_trial_promo) Judith longed to … (#litres_trial_promo) Judith was nearing … (#litres_trial_promo) The pinnace dropped … (#litres_trial_promo) That first night … (#litres_trial_promo) The second day … (#litres_trial_promo) Hal lost track … (#litres_trial_promo) The Amadoda looked … (#litres_trial_promo) In Lobo’s private … (#litres_trial_promo) The Buzzard and … (#litres_trial_promo) ‘My eyes are … (#litres_trial_promo) The Buzzard was … (#litres_trial_promo) They pulled the … (#litres_trial_promo) About the Authors Also by Wilbur Smith About the Publisher Map (#u8ac0981a-47b6-5827-9104-0b770f3f4896) They were no longer men. They were the detritus of war cast up by the Indian Ocean upon the red sands of the African continent. Most of their bodies were torn by grape shot or hacked by the keen-edged weapons of their adversaries. Others had drowned and the gas in their swollen bellies as they rotted had lifted them to the surface again like cork bungs. There the carrion-eating seabirds and the sharks had feasted upon them. Finally a very few of them had been washed through the breaking surf onto the beaches, where the human predators waited to pick them over once again. Two small boys ran ahead of their mother and grandmother along the water’s edge, squealing with excitement every time they discovered anything deposited upon it by the sea, no matter how trifling and insignificant. ‘There is another one,’ cried the eldest in Somali. He pointed ahead to where a ship’s wooden spar was washed ashore, trailing a long sheet of torn canvas. It was attached to the body of a white man who had lashed himself to the spar with a twist of hempen rope whilst he still lived. Now the two boys stood over his carcass laughing. ‘The birds have pecked out one of his eyes,’ shouted the eldest boy. ‘And the fish have bitten off one of his arms,’ his little brother gloated, not to be outdone. A shred of torn sail canvas, obviously applied by the man while still alive, was knotted around the stump of his amputated arm as a tourniquet, and his clothing had been scorched by fire. It hung off his gaunt frame in tatters. ‘Look!’ screeched the elder boy. ‘Look at the buckle on his sword-belt. It must be made of gold or silver. We will be rich.’ He knelt beside the body and tugged at the metal buckle. At which the dead man groaned hollowly and rolled his head to glare at the boys with his one good eye. Both children screamed with horror, and the elder released his grip on the sword-belt and sprang to his feet. They rushed back to their mother and clung to her skirts whimpering and whining with terror. The mother ran to examine the booty, dragging the children along with her on her skirts. The grandmother hobbled along behind them. Her daughter dropped to her knees beside the body and she slapped the man’s face hard. He groaned again. ‘Zinky is right. The Ferengi is still alive.’ She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out the sickle with which she cut the grass to feed her chickens. ‘What are you going to do?’ Her mother panted from her run. ‘I am going to cut his throat, of course.’ The woman took hold of a handful of the man’s sodden hair and pulled his head back to expose his throat. ‘We don’t want to have to argue with him about who owns the belt and buckle.’ She laid the curved blade against the side of his neck, and the man coughed weakly but did not resist. ‘Wait!’ ordered the grandmother sharply. ‘I have seen that buckle before when I was in Djibouti with your father. This man is a great Ferengi Lord. He owns his own ship. He has great wealth. If we save his life he will be grateful and he might give us a gold coin, or even two!’ Her daughter looked dubious, and considered the proposition for a while, still holding the sickle blade to his throat. ‘What about his beautiful metal buckle of great value?’ ‘We will keep it, naturally.’ Her mother was exasperated with her daughter’s lack of acuity. ‘If he ever asks for it we will tell him we have never seen it.’ Her daughter removed the sickle blade from the man’s throat. ‘So what do we do with him now?’ ‘We take him to the doctor in the village.’ ‘How?’ ‘We lay him on his back on this strip of lembu.’ She indicated the canvas strip wrapped around the spar. ‘And you and I pull him.’ She turned to regard her grandchildren sternly. ‘The boys will help us, of course.’ In his head the man was screaming. But his vocal cords were so parched and cracked and ravaged by smoke and flame that the only sound that emerged was a reedy, tremulous wheezing, as pitiful as the air escaping from a pair of broken bellows. There had been a time, barely a month or two ago, when he had set his face to the storm and grinned with savage glee as the wind and sea-spray hurled themselves against his weather-beaten countenance. Yet now the warm, jasmine-scented breeze that barely wafted into the room through the open windows felt to him like thorns being dragged across the pitiful tatters of his skin. He was consumed by pain, scourged by it, and though the doctor lifting the bandages from his face was doing his best to work with the most consummate delicacy, each additional inch of exposure stabbed him with another needle-sharp stiletto of pure, concentrated agony. And with every infliction came a new, unwanted memory of battle: the searing heat and brightness of the flame; the deafening roar of gunfire and burning wood; the crushing impact of timber against his bones. ‘I am sorry, but there is nothing else to be done,’ the doctor murmured, though the man to whom he spoke did not understand much Arabic. The doctor’s beard was thin and silvery and there were deeply lined, sallow pouches beneath his eyes. He had practised his craft for the best part of fifty years and acquired an air of wisdom and venerability that calmed and reassured most of the patients in his care. But this man was different. His injuries were so severe that he should not be alive at all, let alone sitting virtually upright in bed. His one arm had been amputated, only Allah the merciful knew how. His ribcage on that same side of his body resembled the side of a barrel that had been stove in by a battleaxe. Much of his skin was still scorched and blistered and the scent of the flowers that grew in such profusion beneath the open window was lost in the roast-pork odour of burned flesh and the sickening stench of pus and putrefaction that his body now exuded. The fire had claimed his extremities. Two of the fingers on his remaining hand had been reduced to stumps of blackened bone that the doctor had also sawn off, along with six of the man’s ten toes. He had lost his left eye, pecked out by sea vultures. The lid of the other eye had all but burnt away so that he now stared out at the world with a cold, unblinking intensity. But vision was not the worst of his losses; the patient’s manhood had been reduced to little more than a charred stump of shiny, livid scar tissue. When – or more likely if – he ever rose from his sickbed, he would have to squat like a woman to urinate. If he wished to satisfy a lover, the only means available to him would be his mouth, but the chances of anyone being willing to let this particular maw anywhere near her body, even if being paid to do so, were very remote indeed. It could only be by the will of God that the man had survived. The doctor sighed to himself and shook his head as he regarded the devastation revealed when the bandages were unwound. No, such an atrocity could not possibly be the work of Allah, the almighty and most merciful. This must be the handiwork of Shaitan, the devil himself, and the monster before him was surely no better than a fiend in human form. It would be the matter of a moment for the doctor to snuff out this satanic being that had once been a man, and by so doing prevent the horrors that it would surely inflict if left free to roam the world. His medicine contained a sweet, syrupy tincture that would dull the pain by which the man was plainly wracked before sending him to sleep and then, with the softness of a woman’s touch, stopping his heart for ever. But the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan himself had sent word from Ethiopia commanding that this man of all men should be taken to the maharajah’s personal residence in Zanzibar and there be treated with particular care. It was surely, Jahan had observed, an act of divine providence that anyone had survived a burning by fire, the amputation of one arm, the loss of one eye, drowning in water and a roasting by the sun in the hours or days before he had been found by local children, cast up on the beach. His patient’s survival, the doctor was therefore informed, would be rewarded with unbounded generosity, but his death would be punished with correspondingly great severity. There had been many times in his long career when the doctor had discreetly put suffering patients out of their misery, but this was most assuredly not one of them. The man would live. The doctor would make absolutely certain of that. The man could not so much see as sense a glimmer of light, and with every orbit of the doctor’s hand around his head, and every layer of bandage that was removed, the light grew less dim. Now he became aware that the glow seemed to be reaching him through his right eye only. The left one was blind but he could still feel its presence as it fell prey to the most damnable itching sensation. He tried to blink, but only his right eyelid responded. He raised his left hand to rub his eye, but his hand was not there. He had, for a second, forgotten that his left arm was long gone. Reminded of it, he was conscious that the stump was also itching. He raised his right arm, but his hand was caught in a strong, dry, bony grip and he heard the doctor’s voice again. He could not understand a word of what was said, but the general meaning was clear enough: don’t even think about it. He felt a cool compress being held to his eyes, soothing the itching somewhat. As it was removed, slowly, slowly his vision returned to him. He saw a window and beyond it the blue of the sky. An elderly Arab in white robes and a turban was bending over him, unwinding the bandage with one hand and gathering it with the other. Two hands, ten fingers: how strange to look upon them with such envy. There was someone else in the room, a much younger man standing beyond the doctor. He had the look of the East Indies in the delicacy of his face and the tint of his skin, but his white cotton shirt was cut in a European style and tucked into breeches and hose. There was white blood in there somewhere, too, for the man in the bed could see that the Asiatic brown of the young man’s complexion was diluted by a pale pinkish tinge. Now he looked at him and tried to say, ‘Do you speak English?’ His words were not heard. His voice was barely a whisper. The man gestured with his broken claw of a right hand for the young half-caste to come closer. He did so, very clearly having to fight to keep a look of utter revulsion from breaking out across his face as the sight before him grew ever closer and clearer. ‘Do you speak English?’ the man in the bed repeated. ‘Yes, sir, I do.’ ‘Then tell that mangy Arab …’ He stopped to drag some air into his chest, grimacing as it rasped his smoke- and flame-ravaged lungs. ‘… Tae stop being so bloody lily-livered wi’ my bandages.’ Another breath was followed by a short, sharp gasp of pain. ‘… And just pull the buggers off.’ The words were translated and the pace of removal was greatly increased. The doctor’s touch was rougher now as he ceased to bother with any niceties. Evidently the translation had been a literal one. The pain merely increased, but now the man on the bed was starting to take a perverse pleasure in his own agony. He had determined that this was a force – no different from the wind or the sea – that he could take on and master. He would not be beaten by it. He waited until the last scrap of rank, fetid fabric, sticky with blood and raw skin, had been torn from his head and then said, ‘Tell him to fetch me a mirror.’ The young man’s eyes widened. He spoke to the doctor who shook his head and started jabbering at a much faster pace and higher pitch. The young man was clearly doing his best to reason with him. Eventually, he shrugged his shoulders, waved his hands in a gesture of exasperated defeat and turned back to the bed. ‘He says he will not do it, sir.’ ‘What’s your name, boy?’ the wounded man asked. ‘Althuda, sir.’ ‘Well, Althuda, tell that stubborn bastard that I am the personal acquaintance, no, the brother-in-arms of Ahmed El Grang, the King of the Omanis, and also of the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan, younger brother of the Great Mogul himself. Tell him that both men value the service I have done them and would be mightily offended if they knew that some scraggy old sawbones was refusing tae do as I asked. Then tell him, for the second time, tae fetch me a damn mirror.’ The man slumped back on his cushions, exhausted by his diatribe and watched as his words were conveyed to the doctor, whose attitude was now magically transformed. He bowed, he scraped, he grovelled and then he raced across the room with remarkable speed for one so apparently ancient and returned, rather more slowly, with a large oval looking glass in a brightly coloured mosaic frame. It was a heavy piece and the doctor required Althuda’s assistance to hold it over the bed at such an angle that the patient could examine his own appearance. For a moment the man in the bed was shocked by what he saw. The iris of his sightless eye was a dead lifeless blue, surrounded by a ball of raw, bloodshot white. The cheek beneath it had been burned so badly that a hole the size of a woman’s fist had been burned in it and his jaw and teeth were clearly visible in a gross display of the skull beneath the skin. His hair had all been scorched off save for one small ginger tuft that sprouted just above his right ear, and the skin of his scalp was barely visible beneath all the scabs and sores that marred it. He looked like a corpse that had been a good week or two in the ground. But that, he thought to himself, was exactly how he should look, for he wasn’t really alive any more. He had once possessed an enormous gusto for life. He plunged into his pleasures, be they drinking, fucking, gambling, fighting or grasping whatever he could get his hands on. All that had been taken from him now. His body was a ruin and his heart was as cold as the grave. Yet all was not lost. There was a force within him that he could feel rising up to replace all his old lusts and impulses. It was as powerful as a mighty river in full spate but it ran with bile rather than water. For this was a flood of anger, bitterness, hatred and, above all, an overwhelming desire for revenge against the man who had reduced him to this ruinous state. The man fixed Althuda with his one good eye and said, ‘I asked you your name, but do you know mine?’ ‘No, sir.’ A skeletal grimace spread across the man’s face in a ghastly parody of a smile. ‘Then I will tell you. I am Angus Cochran. I’m a proud Scotsman and my title is Earl of Cumbrae.’ Althuda’s eyes widened in horrified recognition. ‘You’re … You’re the one men call the Buzzard,’ he gasped. ‘Aye, that I am. And if you know that, perhaps you’ve also heard of the man who did this tae me, a cocky English laddie by the name of Hal Courtney. Oh, yes, I can see that rings a bell all right, doesn’t it, boy?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Well let me tell you this, then. I’m going tae find Courtney, no matter how long it takes me, or how far I have tae go. I’m going to bring him down. And I am going tae wet my beak with his blood.’ The battle had swept back and forth across the Kebassa Plateau of north-east Ethiopia, from soon after dawn until the dying light of day. Now its clamour had died down, replaced with the triumphant whoops of the victors, the desperate pleas for mercy from their defeated enemies and the piteous cries of the wounded begging for water or, if their ends were close at hand, their mothers. An army of Christian Ethiopians had inflicted a third overwhelming defeat on the Muslim host that had been raised at the behest of the Great Mogul himself to invade their land. The first two had proved to be false dawns and any sense of security they had engendered had swiftly proven to be unwarranted. But this victory was so complete as to put the matter beyond dispute. The enemy’s forces were routed on land and any ships bearing reinforcements and supplies that had dared to attempt the crossing of the Red Sea from Aden to the Eritrean coast had swiftly been sunk by the vessel that commanded those waters single-handed, an English frigate named the Golden Bough. The vessel had been commissioned to sail in pursuit of financial gain. Now her captain led her in the service of freedom and the preservation of the most important religious relic in Ethiopia and indeed all Christendom: the Tabernacle itself, in which the Jews had carried the tablets of stone, brought down by Moses from Mount Zion and where the Holy Grail itself was now said to reside. A large tent had been erected behind the Ethiopian lines. A company of warriors clad in steel helmets and breastplates stood guard at its entrance. Inside it was hung with precious tapestries illustrating scenes from the life of Christ. They were woven from silks whose colours shone like jewels in the flickering light of a dozen burning torches and a myriad candles, while the halos around the Saviour’s head gleamed with threads of pure gold. In the middle of the tent stood a large table on which a model of the battlefield and the surrounding countryside had been built. Hills were shown in exact topographical detail; streams, rivers, lakes were picked out in blue, as was one edge of the model, for that represented the sea itself. Exquisitely carved ivory figurines of foot soldiers, horsemen and cannons represented the units of infantry, cavalry and artillery that had been arrayed on either side. At the start of the day they had been arranged in a perfect copy of the two armies’ orders of battle, but now most of the figures representing the Arab forces had been knocked over or removed entirely from the table. The atmosphere in the tent was subdued. A tall, imposing figure in ecclesiastical robes was deep in conversation with a knot of senior officers. His grey beard flowed down almost to his knees, and his chest was as bedecked with golden crosses and chains of rosary beads as it was with medals and insignias of rank. The low murmur of the men’s voices was in stark contrast to the high-pitched squeals of excitement and delight coming from the vicinity of the table. ‘Bang! Bang! Take that!’ a small boy was shouting. In his hand he held a model of an Ethiopian cavalry man, mounted on a mighty stallion, and he was sweeping it back and forth across one corner of the table, knocking down any Arab figures that had somehow been left standing after the battle. Then a guard opened the flap at the tent’s entrance and in walked a soldier whose white linen tunic worn over a shirt of chain mail seemed designed more to emphasize the wearer’s slim, willowy physique than to offer any serious protection. ‘General Nazet!’ shouted the little boy, dropping his toy soldier and racing across the carpeted floor to hurl himself at the soldier’s steel-clad legs, on which wet, scarlet splashes of enemy blood still glinted. He then hugged them as tightly as if he were snuggling against his mother’s soft, yielding bosom. The general removed a plumed helmet to reveal a bushy head of tightly packed black curls. With a quick shake of the head they sprung to life, forming a circle whose unlikely resemblance to one of the halos on the nearby tapestries was only enhanced by the golden glow of the candles. There was no sign of the sweat and filth of battle on the general’s smooth, amber skin, narrow, almost delicate nose and fine-boned, hairless jawline; no hint of stress or exhaustion in the soft, low voice that said, ‘Your Majesty, I have the honour of informing you that your army’s victory is complete. The enemy is vanquished and his forces are in retreat.’ His Most Christian Majesty, Iyasu, King of Kings, Ruler of Galla and Amhara, Defender of the Faith of Christ Crucified, let go of the general’s legs, took a step backwards and then began jumping up and down, clapping his hands and whooping with glee. The military men approached and congratulated their comrade in a more sober fashion, with shakes of the hand and pats on the shoulder while the priest offered a blessing and a prayer of gratitude. General Nazet accepted their thanks with calm good grace and then said, ‘And now, Your Majesty, I have a favour to ask you. Once before I resigned my commission as the commander of your forces, but circumstances changed. My emperor and my country needed me and my conscience would never have allowed me to turn my back on my duty. So I put on my armour and I took up my sword once more. I was a soldier general and yours to command. But I am also a woman, Your Majesty, and as a woman I belong to another man. He let me go once to return to your service and now, with your permission, I wish to return to him.’ The boy looked at her. He frowned thoughtfully. ‘Is the man Captain Courtney?’ he asked. ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ Judith Nazet replied. ‘The Englishman with the funny eyes that are coloured green, like leaves on a tree?’ ‘Yes, Your Majesty. Do you remember, you welcomed him into the Order of the Golden Lion of Ethiopia as a reward for his bravery and service to our nation?’ ‘Yes, I remember,’ said Iyasu, in an unexpectedly sad little voice. Then he asked, ‘Are you going to be a mummy and daddy?’ The boy emperor pursed his lips and twisted his mouth from side to side, trying to understand why he suddenly felt very unhappy and then said, ‘I wish I had a mummy and daddy. Maybe you and Captain Courtney can come and live in the palace and be like a mummy and daddy to me.’ ‘Well now, Your Majesty, I really don’t think that …’ the cleric began. But the boy wasn’t listening. His full attention was directed at Judith Nazet who had crouched down on her haunches and was holding out her arms to him. Iyasu went to her once again, and this time it was like a child to its mother as he laid his head on Judith’s shoulder and fell into her embrace. ‘There-there,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry. Would you like to come and see Captain Courtney’s ship?’ The little boy nodded, wordlessly. ‘Maybe you can fire one of the cannons. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?’ There was another nod against Judith’s shoulder and then Iyasu lifted his face from the folds of her tunic, looked up at her and said, in a small voice, ‘You’re going to sail away with Captain Courtney, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘Please don’t go,’ Iyasu asked and then, with desperate determination, cried out, ‘I command you not to go! You must obey me! You said you had to!’ Then the dam broke and, sobbing, he collapsed back onto her shoulder. The cleric took a step towards his young master, but Judith held up her hand. ‘One moment, Bishop. Let me deal with this.’ She let Iyasu cry a little longer until he was calmer and then dried his eyes and wiped his nose with her tunic. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you know that I like you very much, don’t you, Your Majesty.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And even if I go away, no matter how far, I will always like you and remember you. And just think, if I go to faraway countries like England or France I will be able to write and tell you all about the wonderful extraordinary things I see there.’ ‘Do you promise to write to me?’ ‘You have my word, as a soldier, Your Majesty.’ ‘And if I go on Captain Courtney’s ship, will he let me fire a cannon?’ ‘I will order him to do so. And since I’m a general and he’s only a captain he will have to obey me.’ The Emperor Iyasu pondered a moment, gave a thoughtful sigh and then turned away from Judith and said, ‘Bishop Fasilides, please be good enough to tell General Nazet that she has my permission to leave.’ The armed East Indiaman Earl of Cumberland, named after the first governor of the Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies, was forty days out of Bombay with a hundred tons of saltpetre on board. She was bound for the Port of London where the saltpetre would be unloaded and taken to the royal armoury at Greenwich Palace, there to be mixed with sulphur and charcoal to provide gunpowder for His Majesty King Charles II of England’s army and navy. At the stern of the vessel, where the captain had his quarters, there were a number of other cabins for the ship’s senior officers and any important passengers that might be aboard. In one of these cabins a man was on his knees, his hands clasped together in prayer and his eyes closed as he sought permission to kill. His name was William Pett. He had come aboard with official papers identifying him as a senior official of the East India Company and requiring any person engaged in Company business to provide him with whatever assistance he might require in the furtherance of his duties. Pett had approached Captain Rupert Goddings, master of the Earl of Cumberland, at a dinner hosted by Gerald Aungier, the first Governor of Bombay. He explained that his business in India was completed, hinting that it had been a delicate matter, involving negotiations with various Portuguese and Indian notables that he was not at liberty to discuss in any detail. ‘You understand the need for discretion, I’m sure,’ Pett said, in the tone of one man of the world to another. Goddings was a large, ebullient, cocksure man with a splendidly upturned black moustache, whose years as a merchant captain had made him a considerable fortune. He was a perfectly competent seaman, and, if only because he lacked the imagination to be scared, possessed a degree of bravery. But not even his closest friends would have called him a great intellect. Now he adopted a suitably thoughtful expression and replied, ‘Quite so, quite so … Very easily offended, some of these Indians, and the Portuguese aren’t much better. It’s all that spicy food, in my view. Heats up the blood.’ ‘I have, of course, sent regular reports home, summarizing the progress of our talks,’ Pett continued. ‘But now that they’re done it’s essential that I return home as soon as possible so as to discuss them in detail with my directors.’ ‘Of course, quite understand. Vital to keep John Company fully informed. You’ll be wanting a berth on the Sausage, then, I dare say.’ For a moment, Pett had been caught unawares. ‘I’m sorry, Captain, the sausage? I don’t quite follow.’ Goddings had laughed. ‘By God, sir, I dare say you don’t! It’s Cumberland, don’t you see? They make sausages up there, so I’m told. I’m a Devonshire man myself. Anyway that’s why the Earl of Cumberland has always been known as the Sausage. Surprised you don’t know that, come to think of it, being a Company man.’ ‘Well, I’ve always been more involved with financial and administrative functions than with nautical affairs. But to return to your kind invitation, yes, I would be very grateful of a berth. Of course, I have funds with which to pay for my passage. Would sixty guineas be sufficient?’ ‘It certainly would,’ said Goddings, thinking to himself that the Company must really value Mr Pett if they were prepared to let him spend that kind of money. ‘Come aboard!’ Pett smiled, thinking to himself how easy it was going to be to earn the five hundred guineas he was being paid to kill Goddings. It was apparent, even on this brief encounter, that Goddings was prey to a trait that Pett had observed in many stupid people: a total unawareness of his own stupidity. This blissful ignorance led to a fatal excess of self-confidence. Goddings had, for example, believed that he could cuckold an elderly director of the Company by the brazenly public seduction of the old man’s much younger wife, and that he would get away with it. He was about to discover, a very short time before he departed this world, just how wrong he had been. Upon boarding the Earl of Cumberland Pett had taken his time before making his move against the captain. He needed to find his sea legs and to learn as much as he could about the ship’s company and the various friendships, alliances, enmities and tensions that existed within it, all of which he intended to exploit in the execution of his plan. More than that, however, he was waiting for the signal without which he could not kill, the voice in his head, a messenger from heaven whom Pett knew only as the Saint, who came to assure him that his victim deserved to die and that he, William Pett, would be rewarded in heaven for his efforts to purify the earth of sin. Pett slept each night in a wooden cot that was suspended from hooks in the timbers that spanned the cabin, so as to keep it stable when the ship rolled. Now he knelt by the cot as the presence of the Saint filled his mind and soul – indeed, his entire being – with the knowledge that he was blessed and that the whole company of angels and archangels was watching over him and protecting him. For as long as the vision lasted, Pett experienced a blissful ecstasy greater than any he had ever known with a woman, and when he rose it was with joy in his heart, for he would be doing God’s work tonight. His chosen weapon was a perfectly ordinary table knife that he had taken from the captain’s table, where he ate every night with Goddings and his senior officers. Pett had honed its blade with a whetstone he had discreetly purloined from the ship’s stores until it was as sharp as any dagger. Once he had used it to kill Goddings, he planned to take advantage of the confusion that the discovery of the captain’s body was bound to cause and leave it amongst the personal effects of a sulky, unpopular young midshipman, whose incompetence and bad character had made him the target of the captain’s wrath on a number of occasions. No one would doubt that the lad had reason to want revenge and he would have no friends to speak in his defence, though Pett was minded to volunteer to act on his behalf as summary justice was meted out. That was for later. Now, however, he placed the knife in the right-hand pocket of his breeches, left his cabin and knocked on the door of the captain’s quarters. ‘Come in!’ Goddings called out, suspecting nothing for it had become the two men’s custom to share a glass of brandy every evening, while discussing the day’s events aboard ship, ruminating on the ever-growing might and wealth of the East India Company (with particular reference to how a man might get his hands on a larger share of it), and generally setting the world to rights. The two men talked and drank in their usual companionable fashion, but all the while Pett was waiting for the moment to strike. And then the Saint, as he always did, provided the perfect opportunity. Goddings, by now somewhat befuddled by drink, having consumed much more than Pett who had discreetly kept his consumption to a minimum, got up from his chair to fetch more brandy from a wooden chest whose interior had been divided into six compartments, each of which contained a crystal glass decanter that was filled with a variety of spirits and cordials. Goddings turned his back as he rummaged through the decanters to find one containing more brandy, quite oblivious to Pett, who had risen silently from his seat, taken the knife from his pocket and was crossing the cabin towards him. At the very last moment, just as Pett was about to stab the blade into Goddings’s right kidney, the captain turned around. For Pett, moments such as these seemed to stretch out forever. He was aware of every movement his victim made, no matter how tiny; every breath he took; every flicker of expression on his face. Goddings’s eyes widened in a look of utter bewilderment, the total surprise of a man who simply could not understand what was happening to him or why. Pett delivered three quick stabs, as sharp and fast as a prizefighter’s jabs, into Goddings’s fleshy gut. The captain was too shocked to shout out in alarm, or even to scream in pain. Instead he mewled like an infant as he looked down helplessly at the crimson outpour of blood that was drenching his white waistcoat and, for he had wet himself with fear and shock, the stain of urine spreading across his breeches. With his last iota of strength, Goddings attempted to defend himself. He hurled the decanter, missing Pett who easily swayed out of its way, instead striking the lantern which hung from a low beam above his desk, knocking it off its peg onto the escritoire on which lay his open logbook and a nautical chart. The oil from the lantern and the brandy from the decanter were both highly inflammable, as were the paper documents. The lantern’s flame was the final ingredient and soon fire was flickering across the varnished wood of the escritoire and running in streams of burning liquid across the cabin floor. Pett did not move. He was still glorying in what he had done. He remained in the cabin, even as the flames crackled and the air filled with smoke, with his pulse racing and his breath coming in ever shorter gasps, as Goddings suffered through the final seconds of his life. Finally there came the moment of death for Goddings and ecstatic release for his killer and now, as if awoken from a trance, the latter began to move. Pett knew full well that fire was the deadliest of all perils at sea, and a ship whose cargo was saltpetre and whose cannons were fired by gunpowder was little more than a floating bomb. Now the fuse had been lit, he had to escape the Earl of Cumberland as fast as he could. Like him, Goddings slept in a cot. It was made of wood and would serve as an impromptu life raft. Moving swiftly, but without the slightest panic, Pett unhooked the captain’s cot from the hooks to which it was attached. Then he carried it across to the windows that ran across the stern end of the cabin, pounded at the glass until it shattered and then hurled the cot out of the opening he had made. A moment later, Pett climbed up onto the window ledge and, heedless of the glass shards scraping against his skin, threw himself out into the warm night air. As he fell through space, towards the glittering blackness of the sea, Pett had little idea of where he was, other than somewhere between India and the Cape of Good Hope. He was not sure that he could find the cot, or even if it was still floating on the surface of the waves. He had no idea what manner of sea-creatures might be lurking in the depths beneath him, ready to attack him, kill him and eat him. And quite apart from all of that, he did not know how to swim. None of that mattered, not in the slightest. William Pett had answered the voice of the Saint. He was doing God’s will. And thus no harm could befall him. He was absolutely sure of it. As the first rays of the dawn sun cast a soft orange glow across the harbour at Mitsiwa, the pride of the Ethiopian fleet sat at anchor, joyfully flying the Union Flag of her native British Isles. The Golden Bough had been built on the orders of George, Viscount Winterton, at the stupendous price of almost two thousand pounds. Winterton already possessed a substantial private fleet of merchantmen and privateers. His intentions for the Bough were to provide his beloved son Vincent with an agreeable vessel on which to follow the family’s seafaring traditions, while providing himself with further additions to what was already one of the largest fortunes in England. The Honourable ‘Vinny’ Winterton now lay buried on the shore of Elephant Lagoon, beside the waters of the Indian Ocean a short way north of the Cape of Good Hope, killed in a duel that was, in truth, little more than an act of murder. Yet his father’s money had been well spent, even if the Golden Bough’s recent incarnation, as the flagship and sole fighting vessel of an African navy, was no more part of the viscount’s plans than his boy’s demise. She was as slim and pleasing on the eye as a thoroughbred racehorse and could cut through the water with rare speed and grace. On a broad reach, with her sails full and a good breeze blowing, she could escape any warships that outmatched her and catch any that did not. And like a horse with a winning jockey, the Bough rewarded a captain who was strong in skill and nerve, for she could be sailed tight into the wind when other vessels would be left floundering or forced to change their bearing. In all his months of commanding the Bough in peace and in combat, on windless millponds and storm-tossed maelstroms, Hal Courtney had come to know his ship from bilge and ballast to bowsprit and rudder. He knew precisely how to squeeze every last knot out of her and how best to arm her for the perils she was sure to encounter. Hal knew that every captain had to balance the firepower gained from additional cannons with the weight they added to his ship’s displacement. Some chose fewer guns for a faster, more nimble ship, whilst others preferred to rely on firepower. With the Golden Bough Hal had both speed and armament. The pick of the guns with which she had originally been provided had been combined with the finest pieces captured in countless engagements. Now he could call on a deadly assortment of cannons and small arms, from mighty culverins, whose twelve-foot barrels fired cannon balls that weighed almost twenty pounds apiece and could snap a mast in two, to much smaller (but equally deadly) falconets and murderers, which could be loaded with grapeshot and turned at point-blank range on enemies trying to board the ship. So the Bough’s teeth were as sharp as her limbs were swift. And that was why her captain adored her so. Naturally he wanted one of the great loves of his life to look her best when she was reintroduced to the other. Four months earlier, Judith Nazet had been aboard the Golden Bough when the leisurely voyage she and Hal were making down the east coast of Africa, bound for England, via the bay where his family fortune was hidden, was interrupted by a dhow bringing a desperate plea from her emperor. During the few days Judith had spent on the Bough, however, the crew had come to admire her almost as much as Hal did. They were awestruck by her achievements on the battlefield and lovestruck by the beautiful, utterly feminine woman she became when she laid down her sword and armour. So when Hal had ordered that the ship should be readied for her return, adding that he wanted her looking even more perfect than on the day she had first been launched, his men set to work with a will. For a full week they had hung over the sides on ropes, scrubbing and tarring the hull and hammering new nails into the planks so that no sign remained of the months of naval service – all the broadsides fired, boarders repelled, timbers burned and blood shed – that the Bough and her crew had given. Every piece of accessible timber received attention, repairing, replacing, scraping, caulking, tarring, greasing and painting. The mastheads were blacked and the fore and aft staysails along with the mainsail were unbent for repair. They tarred the lines and polished the culverins and put up more awnings on deck to provide shade for their honoured guests. They scraped every scrap of rust or blood off the ship’s cutlasses, lances and boarding axes and polished the muskets and swivel-guns until they gleamed fit to dazzle in the burning tropical sun. One particular bloodstain had been caused by an unfortunate Arab warrior who had been shot at close range in the thigh by a musket ball that had ruptured an artery and sent a crimson fountain spurting across the oak planks from which the deck was made. The blood had soaked deep into the wood, leaving an unsightly discolouration on the quarterdeck, just aft of the mainmast. He had his men sluice down the deck and scrub it until its second washing was with their own sweat, but even when they had finished there were still shadows on the boards where the blood had soaked deep into the grain. Mitsiwa harbour was ringed by a sandy beach, so Hal sent a party ashore to gather up buckets filled with the coarse, rasping sand and then bring it back to scrub into the planks so that their surfaces would be scraped away, and the stain with them. Hal had stood over the men as they worked deep into the night and had even got down on his hands and knees and started scrubbing alongside them when they flagged, for he believed that no man should ever order another to do something he was unwilling to do himself. Finally he had been forced to admit that the deck, which was shining a silvery-white in the moonlight, was as flawless as it was ever going to be and such blemishes as did remain would be lost in the shade thrown by the awning with which the whole area would be covered for the day and night that lay ahead. Hal had decreed that his beloved’s return would be marked by a feast befitting such a joyous occasion. The men of the Golden Bough had sailed hard, fought hard and seen a dozen of their mates die in battle before being wrapped in shrouds and committed to the sea. They had earned the chance to eat, drink and generally let their hair down and Hal was going to make sure that they did it in style. Yet for all that this was a happy day, it was also a momentous one. He knew that whether they were married or not – and Hal was determined that when he wed his bride it would be in an English church with a Protestant vicar – he and Judith were committing their lives to one another. He had loved before, and known both the bitterness of being deceived and the pain of great loss, but there was a sense of certainty and permanence to his love for Judith that he had never known before. She was his woman. She would be the mother of his children. That was a lot for a young man to take in, no matter how sure he felt. Dawn found him leaning against the poop rail, from which he could survey every mast, every spar and every scrap of sail of the ship under his command. Now, though, the sails were all furled and the ship was at rest. Off in the distance Hal could see the activity on the shoreline as local merchants prepared to fill their boats with the carcasses of goat, mutton and chicken; the baskets of vegetables and fruit; the huge earthenware pots filled with several varieties of wat, the thick, spicy stew of meat or vegetables that was Ethiopia’s national dish, and the piled loaves of injera, the sourdough on which wat was customarily served; sacks of green coffee beans (to be roasted, ground, brewed and then served with sugar or salt), barrels of strong, red wine from the vineyards of the Lebanon and flagons of tej, or honey wine, as potent as it was sweet; and finally great garlands of flowers with which to bedeck the ship and provide a suitably beautiful and fragrant setting for the bride. Hal watched the distant bustle for a few minutes. Though he was barely twenty years old, he had acquired a grown man’s strength and an air of absolute command, earned by his seamanship and courage in battle that made men twice his age happy to follow his orders without question. There was not yet the faintest trace of grey in the thick, black hair that Hal tied with a thong behind his head, and the green eyes that had so amazed the Emperor Iyasu were as clear and sharp as ever. Yet the almost feminine beauty that he had possessed just a few years earlier had entirely disappeared. Just as his back still bore the scars of the whippings he had been forced to endure as a prisoner – little more than a slave – of the Dutch, so his experiences had made his face leaner, harder and more weather-beaten. His jaw was more firmly set, his mouth more stern, his gaze more piercing. Now, though, his eyes dropped to the water lapping against the Bough’s hull and he said, ‘I wish my parents could be here to meet Judith, though I don’t even remember my mother, I was so young when she died. But my father …’ Hal sighed. ‘I hope he’d think I was doing the right thing … I hope he wouldn’t think badly of me.’ ‘Of course not! He was always so proud of you, Gundwane. Think of the very last words he said to you. Say them now.’ Hal was unable to speak. In his mind’s eye, all he could see was his father’s rotting, dismembered body hanging from a gibbet in the Cape Colony for all its inhabitants to see and for all the gulls to feast upon. Having falsely accused Sir Francis Courtney of piracy, the Dutch had tortured him to the edge of death, hoping to discover the location of his treasure. Yet Sir Francis had not broken. His enemies had been none the wiser as they hanged him from the gibbet while Hal looked on helpless and heartbroken from the high wall where he was serving a sentence of hard labour. ‘Say them, for him.’ The voice was gentle, but insistent. Hal breathed deeply, in and out, before he spoke. ‘He said that I was his blood and his promise of eternal life. And then … Then he looked at me and said, “Goodbye, my life.”’ ‘Then there is your answer. Your father sees you now. I who took him to his final resting place can tell you that his eyes face towards the sun and he sees you always, wherever you are.’ ‘Thank you, Aboli,’ said Hal. Now for the first time he looked at the man who had been his father’s closest companion and was now the closest thing he had to a father figure. Aboli was a member of the Amadoda tribe who lived deep in the forests, many days’ journey from the coast of East Africa. Every hair had been ceremonially plucked from the polished ebony skin of his scalp, and his face was marked with ridged whorls of scar tissue, caused by cuts inflicted in his early boyhood and intended to awe and terrify his enemies. They were a mark of royalty for he and his twin brother were sons of the Monomatapa, the chosen of heaven, the all-powerful ruler of their tribe. When both boys were still very young, slavers had attacked their village. Aboli’s brother had been carried to a place of safety, but Aboli had not been so lucky. Many years had passed before Sir Francis Courtney had freed him and, in so doing, created a bond that had endured beyond the grave, from one generation to another. The nickname Gundwane by which Aboli referred to Hal meant ‘Bush Rat’. Aboli had bestowed it when Hal was just a boy of four and it had stuck ever since. No other man on board the Golden Bough would have dared be so familiar with their skipper, but then, everything about Aboli was exceptional. He stood half a head taller even than Hal, and his lean, muscular body moved with a cobra’s menacing, sinuous grace and deadly purpose. Everything that Hal knew about swordfighting – not just the technique or the footwork, but the understanding of an opponent and the warrior spirit needed to defeat him – he had learned from Aboli. It had been a tough education, with many a bruise inflicted and a quantity of blood spilled along the way. But if Aboli had been tough on his young pupil, it had only been because Sir Francis demanded it. Thinking of those days, Hal gave a wry chuckle, ‘You know, I may be master of this ship, but every time I stand here on the quarterdeck I think of being back on the Lady Edwina, getting a roasting from my father for whatever it was I’d done wrong. There was always something. Do you remember how long it took me to learn how to use the backstaff and the sun to calculate the ship’s position? The first times I tried, the backstaff was bigger than I was. I’d stand out on the deck at midday, not a scrap of shade, sweating like a little pig and every time the ship rolled or pitched the damn staff almost knocked me over!’ Aboli gave a deep laugh like the rumble of distant thunder as Hal went on, ‘And making me speak to him in Latin, because it was the language of gentlemen! You have no idea how lucky you are never to have had to learn about gerunds and ablative absolutes. Or cuffing me round the ears because I couldn’t remember the name of every single sail the ship carried. Even when I got one answer right he would tell me a hundred things I was doing wrong. And it was always right here on the quarterdeck, where every single crewman could see me.’ Hal’s expression suddenly turned serious. ‘You know, there were times when I really, truly hated him for that.’ ‘Yes, and the fact that he did what he did, knowing that you would not understand and would hate him for it, was the proof of his love,’ Aboli replied. ‘Your father prepared you well. He was hard on you, but only because he knew you would be tested time and again.’ The African smiled. ‘Maybe, if your god wills it, you will have a little Courtney of your own to be hard on soon.’ Hal smiled. He was having a tough enough time imagining himself as a husband, let alone a father. ‘I’m not sure that I’m ready to be a father, yet. I sometimes even wonder if I’m ready to be a captain.’ ‘Ha!’ Aboli exclaimed, laying a huge hand on Hal’s shoulder. ‘You have slain your mortal enemies. You have saved the Tabernacle and the Holy Grail. You have won the heart of a woman who has defeated mighty armies.’ Aboli inclined his head slowly. ‘Yes I think you are ready to rock a baby to sleep in your arms.’ Hal laughed. ‘Well, in that case I think we’d better get ready to meet its mother.’ The captain was the master of a ship crewed by living skeletons. Having spent almost all his money on the cargo stashed in barely a score of wooden cases that took up just a fraction of his ship’s hold, he had bought the cheapest provisions he could, and thus been sold biscuit that was riddled with weevils and fungus before he had even left harbour, vegetables that were rotten and dried meats that were so tough as to make for better shoe leather than food. He and his crew were fugitives. They could not put in to any civilized port to buy, work or beg for more supplies without risking immediate imprisonment, always assuming that they would not be blown out of the water by any of the ships pursuing them long before they sighted land. He was, in short, a man in no need of any further troubles. And yet another was headed his way. He knew that a bad situation was about to get worse the moment he heard the voice from the crow’s nest: ‘Captain! There’s something floating in the sea, just off the starboard bow! It looks like a piece of wood, or an upturned boat.’ The captain shook his head and muttered to himself, ‘Why do I need to be told this?’ His question was immediately answered as the lookout shouted, ‘There’s something moving! It’s a man! He’s seen us … And now he’s waving!’ The captain was aware of fifty pairs or more of hungry eyes, staring in his direction, willing him to give the order to sail on and leave the man to his fate. The last thing the ship needed was another mouth to feed. And yet the captain could hardly claim to be a man of honour, but he wasn’t wicked. A scoundrel, perhaps, but not a villain. And so he ordered the ship to be hove to. Then he had a boat lowered to fetch this man who had appeared out of nowhere, hundreds of leagues from the nearest shore. ‘Never mind, lads,’ he called out. ‘If we don’t like the bastard we can always eat him!’ A short while later a bedraggled, sunburned figure of above average height, but almost as thin as the crewmen who surrounded him, was dragged up the side of the hull and deposited on the deck of the ship. The captain had come down from the poop deck to greet him. He spoke in his native tongue and asked, ‘Good day, sir. Whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?’ The man gave a little nod of the head and replied, in the same tongue, ‘Good day to you too, Captain. My name is William Pett.’ Judith had given considerable thought to what she should wear on the day that she and Hal were reunited. She had been tempted to commission a steel breastplate, moulded perfectly to her figure, around which she would drape a silk sash in the national colours of red, yellow and green, upon which her decorations would be pinned in all their golden and bejewelled splendour. The emperor had given her a rapier of fine Damascus steel, a weapon that was both deadly and perfectly designed to suit a woman’s size and strength. These martial adornments would look well hanging from her hip as she stepped onto the deck of the Golden Bough and would serve to remind the men aboard that she was not a helpless, delicate creature with nothing to contribute to the life and work of the ship, but a warrior as battle-hardened as any of them. And yet, as much as she wanted the men to respect her, she also wanted her man to love and desire her, and, yes, though she hated to admit it, she wanted to look pretty for him. They had managed to snatch a single precious hour together a month earlier, when both had been called to a council of war. But even though they put every second they had together to the best possible use, and her longing for him was slaked at least for a short while, the reminder of the ecstasy that he could induce in her served only to make their subsequent parting even harder to bear. She never wanted anything whatever to come between them again. So although her sword and armour and military decorations were all stowed in her luggage that she would be bringing aboard, Judith herself wore a traditional Ethiopian dress of pure white cotton that fell to her ankles. The hem, sleeves and the neck were all decorated with bands of brightly coloured embroidery, bearing a pattern of golden crosses. There were necklaces of gold and amber beads around her neck and she wore circular golden earrings, with pearls at their centre. Her hair had been woven into braids that lay close to her scalp and over them she placed a headpiece formed of two finely worked strands of pearls and gold beads. One ran horizontally around her head and was linked to the other that ran from back to front, over the top of her head. A small gold and pearl brooch that matched her earrings lay at the centre of her forehead, just below her hairline, attached to both strands and holding them both in place. Finally Judith draped a shawl of white linen gauze over her head and across her shoulders as a mark of modesty. In private, she was willing to play the concubine, but in public, at least, her reputation would remain unsullied. She rode in a carriage to the port of Mitsiwa, escorted by a troop of the emperor’s mounted guard, all dressed in their finest ceremonial uniforms, with pennants bearing the lion of Ethiopia fluttering from their lances. The carriage halted by the dockside and the guard was immediately called upon to form a perimeter around it as a flock of locals rushed to cast eyes on their nation’s heroine, scarcely able to believe that the great Judith Nazet, who had become a figure of almost mythical glory in their eyes, could possibly be here, in person amongst them. One of the guardsmen dismounted and walked to the carriage door. He opened it and pulled down a set of steps. Then he stood back, so that all could see Judith as she emerged from within. At the very last moment, partly because she had anticipated that her arrival might draw a crowd, and partly because she wanted to give her people a reminder of the glorious victory in which they could all take pride – for many of the men had been in the army she commanded – Judith had decided to wear the sash bearing her many honours. As she stepped out into the open, the dazzling, mid-morning sunlight shone down upon her, and upon the gold, pearls, jewels and brightly enamelled and beribboned medals and awards with which she was adorned so that she seemed to sparkle and glow more like a goddess than a mortal woman. A sound rose from the crowd, less a cheer than an awed gasp. But though she smiled and waved to the people, Judith’s eyes and her heart were given to one man only. Hal Courtney stood waiting for her at the foot of the steps. Though he was the captain of a fighting ship, he wore no badge of rank. Though he, too, was entitled to call himself a member of the Order of the Golden Lion of Ethiopia, and held the rank of a Nautonnier Knight of the Temple of the Order of St George and the Holy Grail – the band of navigators whose origins lay in the medieval Knights Templar, to which he, like his father before him, belonged – he bore no medals nor badges of honour. Instead he stood there before her, with his hair tied back with a plain black ribbon, wearing a freshly laundered white shirt, loosely tucked into his black breeches and open at the neck. The gleaming fabric billowed a little in the gentle breeze, giving occasional hints of the lean, strongly muscled torso beneath it. At Hal’s hip hung his sword, a blade of Toledo steel, below a hilt of gold and silver, with a large star sapphire on its pommel that had been given to Hal’s great-grandfather by the greatest of all Elizabethan admirals, Sir Francis Drake himself. As she looked at her man, so filled with strength, and confidence and vigour, his face, which had looked almost stern as she first caught sight of it, broke into a grin filled with boyish glee, enthusiasm and unabashed desire. Judith had stood firm in the heat of battle. She had held her own in the council chamber against men twice or even three times her age, who towered over her in both physical stature and hard-won reputation. Neither they, nor her enemies, had ever intimidated her. And yet now, in the presence of Hal Courtney, she felt her legs weaken beneath her, her breath quicken and she was suddenly seized by such a feeling of light-headedness that if he had not stepped forward to take her in his arms, she might easily have fallen. She let him hold her for a second, letting herself enjoy the delicious sense of helplessness, barely hearing the cheers of the crowd, or even the words that Hal was saying over the beating of her heart. She was dimly aware that he was leading her through the mass of delirious townspeople, with guardsmen up ahead of them using their horses to force a path down to the jetty. She heard cheers for ‘El Tazar’ – the Barracuda – for that was the name by which Hal had come to be known as he preyed upon their enemy’s shipping. Then she held Hal’s hand as he guided her down the stone steps and said, ‘Be careful now, my darling,’ as she stepped onto the Golden Bough’s pinnace, an armed launch whose single sail was furled, though there was a man at every one of her eight oars and Big Daniel Fisher, Hal’s senior coxswain, was standing at the rudder. ‘Welcome aboard, ma’am,’ Big Daniel said. ‘I hope you won’t think me forward or nothing, but you’re the prettiest sight any of us have clapped eyes on in a very long time.’ ‘Thank you, Daniel,’ said Judith with a happy little laugh. ‘I don’t think that’s forward at all.’ She looked around the boat and then asked Hal, ‘Where’s Aboli? I can’t believe he’d let you out of his sight on an occasion like this.’ Hal gave a huge shrug, throwing his hands up as if to suggest complete bafflement and with an exaggerated look of wide-eyed innocence replied, ‘I don’t have a clue where he’s got to. You seen him, Daniel?’ ‘No, sir, can’t say as I have.’ ‘Anyone?’ The crewmen shook their heads in a pantomime of ignorance and said no, they didn’t know either. It was obvious that they were up to something, but Judith was happy to play along with the game. ‘Well, I am sorry not to see him,’ she said, and then settled herself on a bench next to Hal as he ordered, ‘Cast off and take us back to the ship, please, cox’n.’ ‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Big Daniel who started barking out orders to the oarsmen to back them away from the jetty, before he swung the pinnace around and set a course to the Golden Bough which lay on the water, a couple of hundred yards or so ahead of them. ‘She looks beautiful,’ said Judith, watching Hal look towards his ship and knowing the pride that he took in her. ‘Well, the men and I did a bit of cleaning and tidying up,’ said Hal, nonchalantly. ‘Had us working our fingers to the bone, night and day for a week, more like, ma’am,’ Daniel observed. ‘Poor Daniel, I hope he wasn’t too much of a hard taskmaster,’ said Judith. ‘Oh you know what Captain Courtney’s like, ma’am. Takes after his father, so he does, likes to run a tight ship.’ The words were almost thrown away, but Judith knew Hal well enough to realize that Daniel could not have paid him a higher compliment and she gave his hand a squeeze to signal that she heard and understood it. As they drew close to the Golden Bough, Daniel ordered the men to stop rowing and ship their blades. As one, the oars were raised into a vertical position and the pinnace was brought to rest with just the lightest of touches against the larger ship. Lines were thrown down from the deck above and made fast against the pinnace’s cleats. A net was hanging down the Bough’s hull to enable those in the pinnace to climb up to the deck. Judith stood and took a pace towards the net, but Hal gently held her arm to stop her and shouted up. ‘Lower the swing, lads, nice and gently if you please.’ Judith looked up and saw a boom hanging over the side of the ship. ‘We use it to bring supplies aboard,’ said Hal. ‘But I thought we could put it to a better purpose today.’ The boom was garlanded in a profusion of vividly coloured flowers, like a horizontal, tropical maypole. From it there hung a canvas sling that had been decorated with coloured ribbons, signal flags and anything else the men could find to make it look jolly. The sling was lowered down to the pinnace and Hal helped Judith sit on it, as if on a garden swing. ‘Make sure she’s safe and sound,’ he ordered Daniel, then pecked Judith on the cheek and said, ‘I’ll see you on deck, my darling.’ Hal leaped onto the net and started clambering up it with what looked to Judith like the speed and agility of a monkey up a tree. She giggled at the thought, then held on tight to the sling as Daniel shouted, ‘Haul away!’ and she was lifted up into the air. By now all trace of the warrior General Nazet had disappeared and Judith was simply a young woman in love, having the time of her life. She gave a little squeal of alarm and excitement as she rose up through the air, watching Hal come to the top of the net and then spring onto the deck where he stood, surrounded by the ship’s company. ‘Three cheers for the captain’s lady!’ shouted the Bough’s veteran helmsman Ned Tyler. ‘Hip-hip!’ A great cheer rang out as Judith appeared on her swing, several feet above the level of the deck. ‘Hooray!’ the men cried, waving their hats in the air as the boom swung her over their heads. As the second cheer rang out she was lowered to a patch of deck that had been cleared to receive her. As Ned Tyler gave the third ‘Hip-hip!’, Judith let go of the sling and jumped the last few feet to the bare wood, landing with the grace and agility of an acrobat, and as she found herself again in Hal’s arms the third cheer echoed around them and grew even longer and louder as he gave her a single, all-too-short kiss whose burning intensity filled her with a thrilling sense of anticipation of what would follow that night, and a terrible frustration that she would have to wait so long. Hal pulled himself away and said, ‘You were asking after Aboli. Perhaps this will enlighten you.’ He shouted a few words in a tongue that Judith knew was African, but could not comprehend. A few seconds later there came the reply, a loud keening cry that she instantly recognized as the start of a chant. It was answered by a mass of deep, masculine voices grunting, ‘Huh!’, followed immediately by feet stamping the deck as one. The first voice continued with the chant and, as it did, the sailors fell back to either side so that the deck in front of Judith emptied and there before her came a sight that thrilled her heart almost as much as the feel of Hal’s arms around her. Aboli stood on the bare planking. On his head he wore a tall headdress of white crane’s feathers that seemed to increase his already magnificent height so that he resembled a giant or a jungle god rather than a mortal man. In his hand he carried a broad-bladed stabbing spear and around his neck there was a kilt of leopard’s tails. Behind him came the Amadoda, men of his tribe who had been recruited to serve on the Golden Bough and who had swiftly proven to be as powerful and deadly at sea as they had been in the forests and open savannah that was their native land. They, too, wore crane-feather headdresses, though none was as tall or as splendid as Aboli’s, for he was their chief. Forward they came, their voices joining with his in rich, sonorous harmonies that proclaimed their valour, their comradeship and their willingness to die for their cause. All around, the rest of the crew looked on in slack-jawed amazement, for they had never seen the Amadoda like this, in all their glory. The men came forward until they were just a few paces from Judith and Hal and their song, their foot-stamps, their grunts and their perfectly co-ordinated movements combined in a way that was part dance, part military drill and part sheer celebration of the joy and pride of being a true warrior. Their song finished and all around burst into applause, none more than Judith, for she, too, was a daughter of Africa and even though the words they sang were not known to her, she understood the spirit in which they were sung completely. Then Aboli stepped towards her. With courtly dignity he removed his headdress and placed it on the deck beside him. Then he got down on one knee, reached out and took Judith’s right hand in his, lowered his head and kissed her hand. It was the tribute of a born aristocrat to his queen. Judith was all but overcome with the magnificence of his gesture and as he rose to his feet again, she kept hold of his hand and said, ‘Thank you, Aboli. Thank you with all my heart,’ for she knew that he had pledged himself to her and that she could count on him, absolutely, forever. Hal was next to take Aboli’s hand. ‘Thank you, old friend. That was magnificent.’ Aboli smiled. ‘I am a prince of the Amadoda. What else could it be?’ And so the festivities began. As morning gave way to afternoon, and afternoon to evening, food was eaten, and drink consumed, then the crew’s musicians got out their fiddles, pipes and drums and the singing and dancing began. Judith let Hal lead her out to the floor and they improvised a combination of reel and jig that seemed to match the band’s seafaring tunes well enough. Some of the native cooks and serving girls also found themselves pressed into service on the dancefloor, though Hal had made it very clear indeed that no liberties were to be taken and that any man found to have forced himself on a woman could expect a taste of the lash. Finally, as the sun went down, Hal stood on the steps leading up to the poop deck, looked out over the revellers and called for silence. ‘Right, you drunken scoundrels,’ he shouted, sounding less than entirely sober himself, ‘I have a few words to say to you all.’ He was greeted by shouts of encouragement and a few good-humoured catcalls. ‘Now, my name – my proper, formal name – is Sir Henry Courtney.’ ‘It’s all right, skipper, we know who you are!’ a wag called out. ‘Good, because there’s a reason I said that, which will soon become clear. But first, let me say this: tomorrow we set sail for England!’ A huge roar of approval arose from the Anglo-Saxon contingent of the crew. ‘Of course,’ Hal went on, ‘those members of the ship’s company whose homeland lies here in Africa will be free to return to their homes. But not before we have completed one last task. ‘As many of you know, my father, Sir Francis Courtney, along with the help of many of you here, captured many ships, sailing under Dutch and other flags—’ ‘Damn cheese-heads!’ someone shouted, to great approval from his mates. ‘—and from these prizes he took a very large amount of gold, silver and other valuables. We are going to go and recover that treasure and all of you – every last one – will get his share, fair and square, according to his length of service and seniority. And I can promise …’ Hal had to raise his voice over the babble of cheers and excited chatter, ‘that not a man-jack of you will walk away with less than fifty pounds, at the very least!’ Hal grinned at the cheers his promise provoked, then raised his hand for silence again. ‘You all fully deserve your reward. No man could ask for better, braver, more loyal crewmates than you have been to me. You’ve proved your worth as sailors and fighters a hundred times over. You have pledged yourselves to me and now I make this pledge to you. I am going to lead you back home and give you all you need to lead a fine life when you get there. But first, gentlemen, I wish to propose a toast. Would you please raise your glasses to the woman that I will be taking back to my home, there to become my wife, my beloved Judith. Men, I give you: the future Lady Courtney!’ When the toast had been drunk, along with several more proposed from various members of the crew, Hal and Judith were finally free to retire together to his quarters. Being the creation of a wealthy aristocrat, the Golden Bough did not lack for creature comforts. There was not a battleship in the Royal Navy that housed its skipper more comfortably than the cabin provided for the Bough’s master. An elegantly carved desk provided the perfect place for the captain to keep his logbook up to date, while fine Persian carpets were enough to make guests feel that they were in the drawing room of a gentlemanly country house or London pied-?-terre, rather than the lower deck of an ocean-going sailing ship. ‘I have made one significant improvement to our sleeping arrangements since you last sailed on the Bough,’ said Hal as he paused outside the door to his cabin. ‘It kept the ship’s carpenter busy for a good week. Now, close your eyes …’ Judith did as she was told as Hal opened the cabin door then took her hand and led her into his personal domain. She took a few more blind steps until he said, ‘Stop!’ and a moment later, ‘You can open your eyes now.’ Before her hung a sleeping cot, but this was twice the width of a normal berth and hung from four hooks instead of the usual two. Diaphanous white gauze curtains were gathered round the ropes on each corner, and a coverlet of silk damask whose pale grey and silver pattern glimmered in the light from the stern windows lay over sheets and pillows of finest Egyptian cotton. ‘Hal, it’s so beautiful,’ Judith gasped. ‘I found the linen aboard a dhow we captured,’ Hal said with a grin. ‘The captain said it was bound for a sheikh’s harem. I told him I had a better use for it.’ ‘Oh, really?’ said Judith, teasingly. ‘And what use in particular did you have in—’ She never had the chance to finish her question, for Hal simply picked her up and deposited her on the silken bedcover, thinking how wise he had been to make the carpenter test the hooks from which the cot was suspended to make sure they could handle any conceivable strain. When the Buzzard had first sailed north to seek his fortune in the service of the Arab invasion of Ethiopia, caring not a jot for the religious or political issues at stake but choosing the side he believed most likely to pay him best, he barely spoke a word of Arabic. He considered it an ugly tongue, one beneath his dignity. He soon realized, however, that his ignorance was a great disadvantage since men around him could converse without him having the first idea what they were saying. So he began to study the language. His endeavours had continued during his convalescence so that it was now no difficulty for him to comprehend the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan when the latter said, ‘I must congratulate you, your lordship, on your remarkable recovery. I confess, I had not believed you would ever rise from your bed. But now just look at you.’ In his pomp, the Buzzard had been a master of sly condescension and insincere compliments and he was not inclined to believe that the haughty figure before him meant a single one of his honeyed words. The contrast between the Indian prince in his silk and gold-threaded finery, dripping with more jewels than a king’s mistress, and the Buzzard, a decrepit, one-armed Caliban, with his skin like pork crackling and a face uglier than any gargoyle ever sculpted was simply too great to be bridged by words. But the Buzzard was a beggar and could not afford to be a chooser, so he gave a little nod of his head and wheezed, ‘You’re too kind, your royal highness.’ And, in all truth, his recovery, however partial it might be, was indeed the product of an extraordinary effort of will. The Buzzard had lain in bed and made an inventory of his body, concentrating on those parts of it that still functioned at least moderately well. His legs had not been broken, and though they were covered with burns and scar tissue, the muscles beneath the ravaged skin seemed to be capable of supporting and moving his body. Likewise, though his left arm was no more, his right arm was still whole and his hand could still grasp, so he might yet hold a sword again one day. He had the sight of one eye and hearing in one ear. He could no longer chew properly and his digestion seemed to have become unduly sensitive so that he could only eat food that had already been broken down into a soft, mushy porridge. But it was enough that he could still eat at all, and if his food was nothing more than a bland, tasteless porridge, it hardly mattered, since his tongue seemed unable to distinguish flavour any more, no matter how much salt, sugar or spice was added. Above all, however, the Buzzard’s mind was still sound. He had suffered terrible headaches and the pain in every part of his body – including, strangely, those that no longer existed – was unrelenting. Still he was able to think, and plan, and calculate, and hate. It was that hatred above all that drove him on. It had forced him to keep getting up when at first, unused to the imbalance of his body, he kept falling. It drove him through gruelling physical activities, in particular the building up of his surviving arm’s strength by the repeated lifting of a sack of millet, procured from Jahan’s kitchens, when with every single breath he took the air cut through his throat and lungs like caustic acid. The black, burning fire in the Buzzard’s soul seemed to fascinate Jahan. ‘Please, don’t let me interrupt you. Pray continue with your exertions,’ he said, and stepped right up to his guest, making no effort to disguise the mix of revulsion and fascination he felt in the presence of such a foul and monstrous distortion of a man. The Buzzard felt Jahan’s lordly eye upon him and the urge to defy him drove him on. He lifted the sack, which he held in his hand by the neck, again and again, though his exhausted muscles and scorched chest begged him to stop. He was feeling faint, lathered in a film of pus and bloodstained sweat and on the point of collapse when there was a knock on the door and one of Jahan’s functionaries entered. The man was unable to conceal the shock on his face when he set eyes on the Buzzard, who was bent almost double, his one good hand resting on his knee and his back heaving up and down. But he re-gathered his composure and spoke to Jahan. ‘There is a man at the gate who insists that you wish to see him, your sublime excellency. He says his name is Ahmed and he is a leather worker. It seems he has finished the task you set for him. When I asked him to explain himself he refused, claiming that you had sworn him to secrecy.’ Jahan smiled. ‘That is indeed true. Send him in.’ Then he bestowed a particularly condescending smile upon the Buzzard, and said, ‘I have brought you a small gift, your lordship. Just a miserable thing, but I believe it may be of interest.’ William Grey, His Majesty’s Consul to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, stood in the line of supplicants waiting to plead their case outside Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan’s palace, cursing the bad luck and even worse judgement that had brought him to this intolerable situation. Through all his years in Zanzibar, Grey had been welcomed as an honoured guest by Jahan, as he was by far the most powerful, wealthy and influential members of Zanzibar society. For Grey was not only the representative of one of Europe’s greatest monarchs, he was also a convert to Islam, a change of faith that had brought him much favour and granted him access to places and people beyond the reach of any Christian. Then that conniving Scots rogue Angus Cochran, titled the Earl of Cumbrae, but more aptly nicknamed the Buzzard, had arrived in Zanzibar, closely followed by an arrogant young pup called Henry Courtney, whereupon the life of ease and privilege that Grey had constructed over many years had fallen apart in the matter of a few short months. It had all begun with the Buzzard pestering Grey to use his influence to obtain him a commission to fight for the Sultan of Oman against the Emperor of Ethiopia. The piratical Scot planned on growing rich in war booty taken from the Christians and was happy to pay the very reasonable fee Grey charged for his services. To give the Buzzard his due, he had kept his word. The moment the Letter of Marque was placed in his hands he set sail for the Horn of Africa and set to work on the task for which he had been commissioned. Five weeks later, young Courtney arrived, apparently eager to join the struggle against Ethiopia and, like the Buzzard, he also purchased a Letter of Marque. Not surprisingly, Courtney was eager to hear all he could about the war and had been fascinated to discover that the Earl of Cumbrae was also playing his part. Grey had not given Courtney’s interest in the earl a second thought. Why should he? The Muslim cause was about to receive a second heavily armed warship, with which it would exert total control over all the waters between Arabia and the coast of Africa. As the man who had helped procure the ships, Grey would be held in greater esteem than ever. In the event, however, Courtney had weighed anchor and chased after the Scotsman without so much as a by your leave, sneaking away like an ungrateful, deceitful, two-faced traitor and fighting for the Ethiopian emperor and his general Nazet. It transpired that his real intent all along had been the pursuit of vengeance against the Buzzard, whom he held responsible for his own father’s death. A short while later news had reached Zanzibar that Courtney had found the Scotsman and engaged him in battle. The story went that the Buzzard, fighting till the last, had been burnt alive and gone down with his ship, the Gull of Moray. In the old days, Grey would have been able to confirm the veracity of this account and uncover a great deal more information to which the common herd were not privy. But this was no longer possible, for Courtney had taken to harassing, capturing and sinking Arab vessels up and down the Red Sea, to the consternation of the men who owned the stricken vessels and could no longer profit from their cargoes. These men now held Grey at least partially responsible for their losses and shunned him accordingly. Every door in Zanzibar, or at least every door that mattered, had been slammed in his face and Grey now knew no more than the lowliest guttersnipe or coffee-shop gossip. All he could do was keep coming here, to the maharajah’s palace, in the hope that one day his serene, magnificent and merciful highness Sadiq Khan Jahan would show compassion for his plight and allow him to plead his case. Grey looked ahead of him in the queue and saw Osman, a procurer of women and small boys with whom he had once done regular business. But he’d not laid hands on one of Osman’s pretty little fancies, male or female, in months. Osman – a mere flesh-peddler! – had given him a regretful shrug and said he could no longer be seen to do business with a man of Grey’s reputation. Grey seethed as he watched Osman gossiping with one of the guards at the gate. The press of people, the clamour of their pleading voices and the smell of their unwashed bodies combined to form an unbearable assault on his senses. Grey had long lived in the tropics and affected Arab dress as well as religion, for long flowing robes were more comfortable by far than the heavy coats of thick wool that most Englishmen insisted on wearing, as if entirely indifferent to their geographical and climatic circumstances. Nonetheless, he was perspiring like a pig on a spit and his temperature rose still higher when he saw a leather-peddler he knew, Ahmed by name, given the sign to enter the palace. Ahmed was carrying a large box, similar to the ones ladies used to convey their headgear. Grey paid it no mind. A few minutes later, another of the palace functionaries appeared at the gate and had a word with one of the guards. At once three men were despatched into the crowd, beating men and women out of the way with long wooden staffs as they forced their way through the mob. With a start Grey realized that they were heading directly for him. He panicked and tried to get away but the sheer press of bodies was so heavy that he could not force his way through and suddenly he was not only sweating like a pig but squealing like one too as he was grabbed by the arms and half-dragged, half-carried up to the gates and then through them before being deposited unceremoniously on the ornately tiled floor. Grey rose to his feet to find the same official who had summoned Ahmed standing close by. ‘If you will come this way, effendi, His Excellency, in his great wisdom and mercy, wishes to speak to you.’ As he followed the official along a cool, shaded cloister, through which he could see the waters of a fountain glittering in the noonday sun, Grey realized that the three guards who had been sent to fetch him were following close behind. They no longer carried their staffs, but each bore a wickedly curved scimitar tucked into his scarlet waistband. It struck Consul Grey that the invitation to an audience with the maharajah might not turn out to be quite the blessing he’d been hoping for. The Buzzard might not have many of his senses in full working order, but he was still perfectly capable of smelling a rat when one went by right under his nose. That heathen bastard Jahan was up to something, he was sure of it, but what? And how in heaven’s name did an insignificant little man who worked in leather fit into the maharajah’s plans? Before the question could be answered there was a knocking on the door. Jahan called out, ‘Enter!’ and who should step into the room, looking like a huge jellied pudding, trembling with fear, but His Majesty’s Consul in Zanzibar himself. The Buzzard waited while his fellow Briton bowed and scraped to the maharajah and then rasped, ‘Good morning, Mr Grey. Hadn’t expected to clap an eye on you again.’ The Buzzard was becoming used to the successive expressions of shock, disgust and barely suppressed nausea (or even expressed nausea in some extreme cases) that his appearance provoked. But Grey’s discomfiture was even more absolute than most. His mouth opened and closed wordlessly as he searched in vain for something remotely appropriate to say before he finally gasped, ‘But … But … You’re supposed to be dead.’ The Buzzard stretched the remains of his lips into something approximating a smile. ‘Evidently I am not. Apparently the Almighty still has plans for me in this world, rather than the next.’ ‘Truly, Allah is all-knowing and merciful,’ said Grey, darting a glance at Jahan to see whether his piety had been appreciated. It was the maharajah who spoke next. ‘Now that you two gentlemen have become reacquainted, let me explain the purpose of this audience. I shall start by saying this: I hold the pair of you personally responsible for the insufferable loss of life and the damage and loss of property caused to our people’s shipping by that filthy infidel Henry Courtney. It is my fervent desire, and that of my brother the Grand Mogul himself, to seek vengeance in the fullest measure against Courtney and his men. We find ourselves, however, in a quandary. ‘My brother is currently concluding an agreement with the East India Company, concerning trade between our lands in India and the kingdom of England. He believes that such an agreement will deliver enormous rewards and he naturally does not wish to endanger the prospect of great riches by conducting a public campaign against one of His Majesty the King of England’s subjects, particularly one who comes from an eminent family.’ ‘The Courtneys, eminent?’ the Buzzard thought to himself. ‘That’ll come as a shock tae all the lords and ladies who’ve never even heard of ’em!’ ‘As a result, we must seek retribution with discretion and subtlety, using proxies who can act as figureheads for our vengeance. And who could be better suited to that role than two men such as yourselves? You both have very good reason to hate Captain Courtney. You know something of this man and how he thinks and you must, I am sure, be keen to atone for your own recent failings, for which many a ruler less merciful than myself might very well have you both executed.’ ‘Does your royal highness wish us to kill Captain Courtney ourselves?’ Grey asked, in tones of barely disguised alarm. ‘Well, perhaps not with your own blades, no,’ Jahan reassured him. ‘I fear you would prove no match for him, Consul, and as for the earl here, he was unable to best Courtney with two hands, so I hardly give him much chance with one. But I feel certain that you can devise a way to bring him down. You can find him and trap him, even if others must come in for the kill. And you can then take responsibility for his execution, for who would not agree that you had reason to take his life after the deception with which he tricked you, Consul Grey, or the hideous djinn into which he transformed you, my poor Earl of Cumbrae.’ ‘And if we do not agree tae pursue him for you?’ the Buzzard asked. Jahan laughed. ‘Come now, of course you will agree! In the first place I am offering you all the resources of men and equipment you need for the vengeance you desire above all else. And in the second, both you and Consul Grey will die here, in this building, on this day if you do not agree to my terms. I am a merciful man. But I will not be wronged a second time and let that insult go unpunished.’ Grey threw himself to the floor and abased himself in a grovelling salaam. ‘Your highness is too kind, too merciful for a wretch like me. I am honoured and grateful beyond all telling for the chance to serve you in this way.’ ‘Yes, yes, Consul, thank you, but please, stand on your own two feet like a man,’ Jahan replied. Then he looked at the Buzzard. ‘And you?’ ‘Aye, I’ll do it. I’ll even tell you where the conniving sod’s bound for too, because there’ll only be one place he’ll want to go.’ ‘All in due course,’ Jahan said. ‘First however, it has struck me, Cumbrae, watching you in recent weeks, that your skin must now be especially sensitive. You will not, I believe, be able to survive exposure either to our burning sun, or the winds and spray that will buffet you should you ever step aboard a ship. I have therefore commissioned a form of headgear that will protect you.’ He clapped his hands and at once Ahmed the leather merchant opened his box and pulled out what looked to the Buzzard like some kind of leather cap, or hood. There was a design upon it, too, but the way that Ahmed was holding it made it impossible for him to work out exactly what it was. Ahmed now approached the Buzzard, his eyes cast down at the floor as he walked, as if he were too terrified even to glance at the face of the monster before him. When the leather merchant reached the Buzzard a new problem presented itself: he was a good head shorter than the Scotsman. Ahmed looked imploringly at Jahan who nodded and said, ‘Be so good as to bow your head, Cumbrae.’ ‘I’ll bow tae no man!’ the Buzzard rasped. ‘Then you will lose it.’ Jahan paused and then went on in a conciliatory tone, ‘Please do not force my hand. Bow your head and let this craftsman do his work and I will reward you with everything you need to gain the revenge you so desperately crave. Defy me and you will die. So, what will it be?’ The Buzzard bowed his head. A moment later he winced and then cried out in pain despite himself as the leather hood was pulled over his raw skin and worked into position. The Buzzard now found himself looking out at the world through a single eye hole, cut into the leather, which was fitted tight, in fact almost moulded to the shape of his face. He could breathe through two more openings beneath his nostrils, but so far as he could tell, the whole of his head was covered except for his mouth. A moment later, even that freedom was curtailed, for Ahmed brought up another flap of leather. Part of it was formed into a cup that fitted around the Buzzard’s chin. There was a gap between the flap and the rest of the mask just wide enough to allow him to move his mouth a little. The Buzzard felt a tugging to one side of his face as the flap was tightened and then he heard a click that sounded very much like the closing of a padlock. Yes, he could feel the weight of it now. The Buzzard felt a sudden surge of alarm, verging on panic. He jerked his head up and with his one good arm lashed out at Ahmed, knocking him to the ground. Before he could make another move, the soldiers raced across the floor and one of them grabbed his right arm and forced it up behind his back, until the Buzzard had no option but to bend his body and head down. Once more he felt the tradesman’s nimble fingers, as a broad leather collar was placed around his throat and, like the mask, padlocked. The Buzzard heard Jahan say, ‘Mr Grey, be so good, if you will, as to carry the looking glass that is lying on that table to your right over to your fellow countryman. I’m sure the earl would like to see how he looks now.’ ‘M-m-must I …?’ Grey stammered. ‘Please,’ Jahan said, with cold-blooded calm, ‘do not oblige me to remind you of the alternative should you refuse.’ The Buzzard heard Grey’s shuffling footsteps coming towards him and then the soldier let go of his arm and he was able to straighten his body. As he lifted his head, the Buzzard’s eyes were directly level with the mirror, barely two paces away from him. He saw what the world would see and now it was his turn to cry out in revulsion at what confronted him. His head was entirely enclosed in leather the colour of a tarred ship’s plank. Crude stitches of leather thread held the various pieces of the mask together and formed the sharply angled eyebrows that gave the impression of eyes set in a furious, piercing stare. To make the effect even more shocking, the blank eye was painted with white and black paint to look as though it was open and all-seeing, while the hole through which the Buzzard now gained his pitifully limited view of the world appeared to be a blank, blind void. The nose was a predatory beak, a hand span long, that thrust from his face in a cruel visual pun on his Buzzard nickname. Further stitches shaped the mask’s mouth into a permanently manic grin, made all the more ghastly by the jagged white teeth, with pitch black gaps between them that had been painted around the orifice through which he was expected to speak, eat and drink. The Buzzard had once seen a mask like this hanging from the wall in a Portuguese slaver’s house. He had got it from the witch doctor of some tribe deep in the hinterland of Musa bin Ba’ik. Now this was his face … The Buzzard could not bear it. Crying out in pain and frustration he clawed at the padlocks on the side of his head and neck, as if his few remaining fingers could break through the iron that bound him, and as he did so he encountered one last humiliation: a metal ring, attached to his collar, underneath his chin. He at once knew what it meant. If he displeased Jahan, or tried to escape, he could be chained to a wall, or dragged through the streets like nothing more than the lowliest pack animal or whipped dog. The Buzzard fell to his knees, a broken man. He had survived burning and near-drowning. He had clung to life when the ocean and the sun had done their best to destroy him. He had endured pain beyond any mortal man’s comprehension and the looks of disgust from all who laid eyes on him. But this was the final straw. Now Jahan came across and crouched down on his haunches beside the Buzzard and held out a metal cup, decorated with exquisite patterns of dark blue, turquoise and white enamel. Speaking as softly as he might to a frightened, angry young horse who had just felt a saddle on his back for the first time, he said, ‘Here, this is sweet, fresh sherbet. Drink.’ The Buzzard took the cup and drew it up to his mouth. He tilted it to drink and the cup banged against his leather beak, so that none of the liquid could escape it. He turned his head to one side and tried to pour the sherbet into his mouth but it just spilled across his mask and not a drop fell into his mouth. He nodded and bobbed his beaky mask into every position he could think of, but he could not find a way to drink. As they watched this performance the other men in the room were first intrigued and then amused. Grey could not help himself. He gave an effeminate titter that set off the guards, and even Jahan, so that the room soon echoed to the sounds of their laughter that quite drowned out the Buzzard’s screams of impotent rage. Finally he threw the cup away and the clatter it made as it skimmed across the marble floor silenced the other men. Jahan spoke again, ‘Know this, you who used to be a lord and a ship’s captain. You have ceased to be a man. Stand, and I will show you how you will be given water to drink.’ Jahan clapped and a black African servant came into the room bearing a copper jug with a long spout of the sort used to water plants. The servant approached the Buzzard with wide-eyed horror on his face and, holding the jug as far away from himself as he possibly could, lifted it and poked the spout into the mask’s mouth hole. The Buzzard’s lips took the spout between them and he drank the cool water with pathetic eagerness and gratitude until Jahan clapped again and the spout was withdrawn. ‘You will be fed and watered by slaves, for whom the duty will be a form of punishment. When you walk through the streets women will turn their heads away from you for fear of what they see. Children who misbehave will be told stories of how you will come in the night to seize them unless they change their ways. Young men who wish to prove their courage will dare one another to throw rotten vegetables at you, until one of them is foolish enough to do so and is executed by my men for his impertinence. And then the people will truly fear and hate you. ‘But next to yours their hatred will be as a grain of sand is to a mighty desert. For your whole being will be consumed by hate. And because you hate, and because I alone can offer you the chance to satisfy that hate, you will serve me. ‘As for you, Mr Grey …’ and now Jahan’s voice became cold and hard as he looked at the consul, ‘you will leave my house and you will not come back, ever again, unless it is with Henry Courtney’s head upon a platter, or the means to destroy him in your possession. Bring me either of those things and your previous standing here will be restored and enhanced, so that you will enjoy honour amongst my people once again. Until then, however, you will be counted a pariah. Now begone!’ The Buzzard almost managed a smile to match the one on his mask as he watched the downcast Grey make his exit. Then Jahan turned back to him and said, ‘It occurred to me just now that you are a eunuch, and so I will grant you a special favour that I would never bestow on any man who was complete. You may accompany me as I have dinner with my favourite concubines. They are creatures of flawless beauty, plucked from India, from Persia, from the Russian steppes and even one seized from a fishing village on the coast of your own island. They will all be fascinated to meet you. I dare say the braver ones will even wish to handle you, just to see if you are real. Of course, you may not touch them, nor eat my food, nor sup my drink. But you can be present and feast your one true eye on the treats laid out before you. And on the day that Henry Courtney dies, I will give you the choice of any woman in my harem and you may do whatever you wish with her, anything at all. So think on that, why don’t you, when they are petting you this evening. Imagine how you will find a way to satisfy your desires. And ask yourself whether any of these women, as lovely as they are, could ever bring you quite as much pleasure as watching Captain Courtney die.’ Three days later, the Buzzard was commanded to make his first expedition into the outside world. Dressed in a hooded black djellaba he was walked down to the docks and back, escorted by six of Jahan’s men, whose job was both to protect their charge and to ensure that he did not escape. They were specifically instructed to march sufficiently far apart so that all whom the Buzzard passed were afforded a good look at him. Exactly as Jahan had predicted, the masked man’s appearance caused something close to panic among the people thronging the narrow streets of Zanzibar. Women turned away and covered their children’s eyes. Men spat on the ground as he passed, or held up blue nazar amulets to ward off the evil eye that gazed so balefully from the leather face. Finally, as they were walking through a square ringed by shops and eating houses, one hot-blooded young daredevil reached down into the open sewer that ran down one side of the square and with his left hand – the one he used for wiping his backside – picked up and threw a mass of foul-smelling excrement at the Buzzard. Whether by good aim or good luck the noxious projectile flew between the guards, and hit the Buzzard on the left side of his body, just where his arm should have been. At once two of the guards darted into the crowd and seized the young man before he had a chance to make good his escape. He was dragged, screaming insults and curses to the middle of the street, where the commander of the detachment was standing, his scimitar drawn, waiting to carry out Jahan’s orders that anyone who assaulted the Buzzard in any way should be subject to instant, public execution. When the culprit drew near it became clear that he was no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, a hot-headed lad who’d acted in youthful high spirits without giving the slightest thought to the consequences. The commander hesitated. He was a decent man with a son of his own and he did not want to deprive another man’s family of their boy, simply for expressing the disgust that everyone – the commander included – felt in the presence of the masked man. The Buzzard noted the commander’s hesitancy. He could hear the first, nervous cries for mercy coming up from the crowd. Every instinct told him that this was a crucial moment: one that might determine whether he was seen as a monster to be feared or a freak to be pitied, and of the two he knew exactly which he preferred. ‘Give me your sword,’ he growled at the commander, then reached out with his right hand and ripped it from the man’s grasp before he had a chance to argue. The beak and the glaring eyes turned their predatory gaze on the two soldiers who were holding the boy. ‘You two, tie his hands behind his back!’ the Buzzard commanded. ‘And look sharp or I swear the maharajah will hear of it.’ The men, who looked almost as frightened as their captive, immediately did as they were told. The Buzzard heard one of them apologizing to the boy and begging for his forgiveness. ‘Silence!’ he rasped. A heavy weight of bitter resentment settled over the watching throng, but no one said a word as the boy was bound and then forced to his knees. All his adolescent bravado had vanished and he was just a fearful, weeping child as one of the soldiers forced his head down so that the back of his neck was exposed. The Buzzard looked down at the boy’s bare, brown skin, raised the scimitar and swung it down as hard as he could. He missed the neck. Instead the blade sliced into the top of the boy’s back between his shoulder blades. A terrible, high-pitched wail of pain echoed around the square. The Buzzard tugged on the blade that was stuck between two vertebrae, forced it free and swung again, hitting the neck this time, but failing to sever it. Three more blows were required and the boy was already dead – a corpse held in place by the two soldiers – before his head finally dropped from his shoulders onto the dusty ground. The Buzzard stepped back, his chest heaving, and looked right around the square, turning through three hundred and sixty degrees as he surveyed the scene and all the people in it, basking in the fear and hostility he saw on every face. Then he ordered the commander of the guards, ‘Take me back tae the palace,’ and as the soldiers reformed the escort around him he thought to himself, Aye, that’ll do it. I believe I’ve made my point. A ship’s captain had to be on duty, or ready to be summoned by those who were, at any hour of day or night. Once Hal had set to sea, he did not allow Judith’s presence to distract him from his responsibility to his ship and all who sailed in her. To do so would have been to take undue liberties with the admiration and affection his crew felt for him. Nor would Judith have allowed it. She knew what it was to be a leader and would not have wanted to come between Hal and his duties, nor would she have respected him if he had allowed that to happen. But if there was one hour of the twenty-four in each day that they could dedicate to one another, rather than anything or anyone else, it was the one that preceded the dawn. This was the time when the ship seemed at its quietest, when the sea and wind were most often at their calmest and when they could take advantage of the peace and the silence to express, whether in words, or actions, or both, their love for one another. Hal could never sate his desire for Judith. He loved the moment when he thrust into her, plunging so deep that he could hardly tell where his body ended and hers began, fusing as one being and experiencing the same ecstatic moment of release with such intensity that for that one blissful moment there was nothing and no one in the whole universe but them. And yet for all that shared passion, there was no moment more soothing to Hal’s heart than waking to see Judith still asleep, her lovely face just visible in the darkness of the cabin, her breathing soft and gentle. There was something so peaceful about her, so trusting. She felt completely safe with him, and the depth of her trust and love for him filled Hal with a desire to keep her and protect her for as long as he lived. One morning, however, when they were eight days and around a thousand miles out of Mitsiwa, heading almost due south along the east coast of Africa, rarely more than thirty miles or so from land, Hal was awoken by a groaning sound. When he opened his eyes, Judith was not lying peacefully beside him but was curled up, with her back towards him and her knees pulled tight to her chest. From the noises she was making, she was in a great deal of physical distress. ‘My darling, are you all right?’ Hal asked, unable to keep the alarm from his voice. ‘It will pass,’ she replied, but then her body shook and she retched convulsively, though nothing but sound came out of her mouth. ‘You’re sick,’ he said, stating the obvious. He put a hand to her forehead. ‘You feel hot. Do you have a fever?’ Judith swallowed hard then rolled over so that she was facing him. She propped herself up on one elbow and laid her other hand on Hal. ‘Don’t be worried, my love. I’m not sick. Far from it. Indeed, I have never in my life been more healthy.’ Hal took the hand she had placed on him and held it tight. ‘Please, my darling, do not feel that you have to reassure me. You’re so brave, but …’ ‘Shh …’ she hushed him. ‘I promise you, there is no need to be alarmed.’ She managed a faint smile. ‘Not unless you are troubled by the thought of impending fatherhood.’ ‘Impending … what?’ he gasped. ‘Do you … I mean are you …?’ ‘Yes, my darling, I am with child. I am going to have a baby, your baby … our baby.’ ‘That’s wonderful news!’ Hal exulted, and then he seemed stricken by doubt. ‘But are you sure? How do you know?’ ‘Because we were together more than two months ago for the council of war, if you remember …’ ‘Oh, I remember perfectly, believe me!’ ‘Well, since that time I have not bled and now I feel sick in the mornings. If I were at home, my mother and my aunts and all the women of the family would be telling me what I am telling you.’ She gave a contented little laugh. ‘Perhaps I will have a son who is as strong, and handsome and kind as you.’ ‘Or a daughter as beautiful, and loving and as brave as you.’ For a moment they basked in the glow that lovers know when they are young and in love and have just accomplished the miracle that is the most ancient and universal of all human accomplishments and yet for two people is also the newest and most unique. And then Hal started, almost as if he had been shocked or stung, and turned his head away from Judith. He stared out into the darkness beyond the cabin windows, his ears pricked, his nose sniffing the air like a hunting dog that has caught the scent of his prey. ‘What’s the matter, my love?’ Judith asked. ‘Is something troubling you? Have no fear, I will keep our baby safe inside me. All will be well.’ ‘No, it’s not that,’ Hal replied. ‘Something else.’ He rose from the bed and dressed hurriedly, pulling on shoes and breeches and leaving his shirt unfastened as he bent down to kiss Judith’s forehead. ‘I just want to check something. Don’t worry, it’s probably nothing.’ Seeing her anxious face Hal grinned reassuringly. ‘It’s wonderful news about the baby. I love you with all my heart. And I’ll be back here with you in a trice.’ As he headed up to the quarterdeck, Hal’s mind snapped free of the bedchamber and concentrated instead on his captain’s duty. Two days earlier, a lookout had spotted a Dutch caravel, several miles off to starboard. For the rest of the day, the Dutchman had come in and out of sight as the wind and visibility changed, so that it had seemed as though the Golden Bough were being tracked. At a time of war, this would be an alarming turn of events. The caravel in itself was smaller than the Bough and no threat to her safety, but Hal would be bound to wonder what other, more powerful vessels might be lurking out of sight, over the horizon. But England and Holland had been at peace for over a year, so there was no cause to be worried. Furthermore, when dawn had broken the following day, the caravel had disappeared. Yet still a nagging suspicion had played at the back of his mind, a seaman’s instinct that told him to be on his guard. Now that same instinct had tugged at Hal again. Something told him, and for all the world he could not be certain what it might be, that the Dutchman was still out there. He would not be able to rest easy until he was sure of what the captain of that mysterious caravel was up to. Hal emerged on deck to be greeted by something close to serenity. The wind was little more than the most gentle of breezes, and the silvery light of the moon was reflected in the still, glassy waters. Across the deck lay the scattered, sleeping forms of the Amadoda warriors, who always passed the night in the open air rather than endure the filth and stench below decks. Ned Tyler was at the helm and he nodded a greeting to his captain. ‘What brings you up here so early, Cap’n?’ he asked. ‘Can’t believe you’re tiring of the company in your cabin.’ Hal chuckled. ‘No chance of that. I just had a fancy that the Dutchman was still out there.’ ‘There’s not been a sound out of young Tom, sir. And he’s a good lad. Not like him to sleep on duty.’ Tom Marley was a spotty, jug-eared lad, the youngest member of the crew and the subject of much good-natured teasing. But Hal agreed he had the makings of a decent seaman. ‘Get him down here, if you will, Mr Tyler.’ ‘Aye-aye, sir.’ Ned looked up towards the top of the mainmast and gave a short, piercing whistle. Tom Marley immediately waved back, whereupon Ned gestured to him to get down on deck. Marley began descending the rigging with a fearless speed and agility that reminded Hal of the time, not so very long ago, when he was up and down to the crow’s nest at his father’s behest, several times a day. The lad reached the deck, ran across to where Hal and Ned were standing and stood straight up, his hands behind his back, looking nervous. ‘It’s all right, Tom, you’ve not done anything wrong,’ said Hal and the boy’s shoulders relaxed as the tension left his body. ‘I just want to know if you’ve spotted anything recently, like that Dutchman that was following us two days ago, for example.’ Tom shook his head decisively. ‘No sir, I ain’t seen nothing like that Dutchman, nor any other ship neither. And I’ve kept my eyes open, Captain. I’ve not been dozing off or nothing.’ ‘I’m sure you haven’t. Now, Cook should be up by now, you run along and get something to eat.’ ‘But my watch ain’t finished yet, sir.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ Hal said, suddenly feeling an urge to see for himself for once, rather than rely on others as a captain so often had to do. ‘You sure it’s a good idea you going back up there, Cap’n?’ Ned asked. ‘Been a while.’ ‘Are you suggesting I can’t still get up there faster than any man on this ship?’ ‘No sir, wouldn’t dream of it.’ ‘Well, watch me and I’ll show you.’ And with that, Hal ran to the mast, grabbed a rope and started clambering up the rigging, past the limp, windless sails towards the inky sky above. Pett was hungry. Of course, everyone aboard was hungry. The ship’s decks and even the bilges had been scoured for rats to eat. Any gulls that were foolish enough to land on deck or perch in the rigging were greeted with volleys of stones, small pieces of shot, or anything else anyone could grab and throw that might kill or stun a bird. Playful dolphins that swam alongside the boat found themselves attacked by the ship’s smaller guns and any shots that managed to hit their targets were swiftly followed by splashes as the crew’s best swimmers dived into the water to retrieve the corpses before the sea of nearby sharks could take them. Pett’s hunger, however, was of a different kind. He’d spent the past week locked in a dark, stinking, rat-infested cockpit on the orlop deck. He had assured the ship’s captain that he was a senior official of the British East India Company and demanded to be treated as a gentleman, but the man had refused to listen, insisting that this imprisonment was for Pett’s own safety. ‘You must understand that it is not long since my men were fighting the British, so they have no great love for your people,’ the captain had said, with a regretful shrug of the shoulders. ‘They are also starving and so desperate for food that they might resort to – how shall I say? – inhuman methods to find it. You should count yourself lucky, sir, that I gave the order to have you rescued. Many of my men were very displeased by that decision. They did not like the idea of adding another mouth to feed. Forgive me; I made a foolish jest: I said that if they did not like you, they could eat you. It is my honest fear that some of them might have taken me at my word.’ Since then, Pett had survived on what amounted to barely starvation rations. His body, already thin, was becoming close to skeletal. But he was never a man who possessed the slightest interest in or appreciation for the pleasures of the dinner table, so a lack of decent meals was no loss to him. No, he suffered from another hunger, that which clawed at his guts when the voices called him, the Saint’s voice above all, imploring him to do God’s will by scouring the world of sin and the impure souls who perpetrated it. Pett could never be sure when the voices would come. Sometimes, months would pass without a single visit, but there were also times like this when the clamour in his head would barely die down at all from one day or even week to the next: always the voices, shouting at him, imploring him, repeating again and again the same implacable commandment: thou shalt kill. Yet there could be no candidates for his deliverance as long as he was locked away in this solitary confinement. And then the Saint, as he always did, provided the means of Pett’s salvation. He was an emaciated, thirst-ravaged member of the crew. His crime, so far as Pett could gather, was that he stole one of the very last crusts of stale bread from the locked chest in the captain’s quarters. The man was delirious. He must have been, Pett thought, to have thought he could possibly succeed in his theft when the only way of opening the chest in which the precious crumbs were located was to blow the lock off with a pistol shot that could be heard from one end of the ship to the other. Or perhaps the man just didn’t care. For twelve hours he had sat opposite Pett, occasionally breaking into rambling, slurred, incomprehensible speeches before falling into an uneasy slumber, during which he still cried out in tones of rage and alarm, though he remained asleep all the while. Pett would long since have despatched him into a silent, eternal slumber were not both men chained to iron rings set in the ship’s hull with a good ten-foot span of filth-encrusted planks between them. Pett’s chain, attached to another ring round his ankle, was just five feet long, making it almost impossible for him to reach the other man and strike a fatal blow. But he felt entirely confident that the Saint would not have brought him the man without providing the means with which to send him from this world to the next. Sure enough, events were moving in Pett’s direction for the ship’s company – or at least a goodly portion of it – appeared to be setting off on an expedition. The ship’s walls made it hard to work out exactly what was being said, but one message came through above all others: this was a do-or-die attempt to seize more supplies. Orders were barked and passed on. There was much bustle, movement and all the noise that one would associate with a group of men preparing for an important endeavour. Eventually Pett heard boats being lowered, along with muffled demands for silence. Wherever they were going, clearly they did not wish to alert anyone to their movements. But no sooner had the boats set off from the ship than those who had been left behind settled down to what sounded like heated debates, presumably about the likely outcome of the expedition. No matter: the key point was that they were not paying the slightest attention to William Pett, or his cell companion. He thus had the perfect opportunity to take action without being interrupted in his labours. That was why he was already on the move. Slowly for the first few inches, silent as a leopard in the dark, ignoring the cramping pain in his limbs from long confinement. Pett made every effort to remain completely silent as he moved, so it could only have been pure chance that his intended victim chose this precise moment to awaken. He stared at Pett for a second or two, evidently trying to make sense of his sudden appearance in the middle of the floor, realized he was in danger and scrambled away in the gloom, extending his chain as far away from Pett as possible. The man’s irons rattled and terror made the whites of his eyes glow against the blackness as he shouted for help, throwing himself back against the damp plank walls, somehow knowing that the other man meant to kill him. Pett kept moving. He had almost reached his fear-stricken target, but then his leg chain pulled taut. He cursed and threw himself forward, stretched like a striking mamba, and managed to grab hold of the other man’s foot. The man kicked and convulsed but Pett clung on, taking blows to the face which he did not feel, and hauled the man towards him, inch by inch. The man tried to seize hold of the deck itself, to dig his fingers into it like grappling hooks, but the boards were slick with rodent faeces and slime and he could get no purchase. The man shrieked again, his voice breaking with terror. He cried out to God, but the Almighty was not interested – He had other plans – and the Saint and all the angels were crying out to Pett to execute them on His behalf. Now Pett’s face was level with the man’s stinking crotch and still he hauled as though his own life depended on it. ‘Keep still and I’ll make it quick,’ Pett said, knowing he was wasting his breath. Frenzied, slime-fouled fingers clawed at his head and face as the man tried to push him back whence he had come. But there was no going back. Pett thrust his hand up and found the man’s throat, thumb crushing the bony cartilage of the larynx, fingers binding at the back of his emaciated neck like the lacing on a lady’s corset. For all his lack of nourishment the jailed sailor was surprisingly strong. Years at sea, hauling on the sheets and climbing the shrouds had seen to that, and now he clawed at Pett’s hand, trying to tear it away from his own neck. But William Pett was a man of experience. He had done this many, many times before and knew that he only needed to hold on a little longer. Just a little longer. Pett was also a connoisseur, a collector of other men’s deaths. In his mind he ordered them: the peaceful and the violent; the many who met their ends with terror and the very few who were composed and tranquil at the last. A less elevated distinction divided those whose bowels loosened at the moment of passing and those who remained unsullied. Had Pett given the matter the slightest thought in advance, he would have wagered that the lack of any material in a starving man’s digestive system would tend to suggest a clean death. But no, though the sailor’s defecation was only modest in quantity, it wanted for nothing in stench. At the very same moment, the hands on Pett’s hand relaxed. The man beneath him shuddered like a spent lover and went still. Pett held on still, gasping for breath in that dank, airless place. The dead man convulsed one last time, his heels tapping out a ragged beat against the deck, and then it was over. You did well, the Saint whispered in his mind. But you are on a ship. Next time, thrust a sharp sliver of wood, or a metal pin through the ear canal into the brain. You will achieve a quick kill and no telltale signs left behind to arouse suspicion. The Saint was right, Pett thought, as he often was. No matter now. It was time to prepare for the moment of discovery. He would have preferred to put the dead man up against the side and make it look as though he had died in his sleep, but Pett’s chain would not let him push the body up against the far wall of the cockpit. So he rolled the body over and it lay face down in the filth, the dead man’s befouled petticoat breeches the first thing anyone would see when they brought a light into the place. Then Pett scrambled back to his own corner by the cable tier and waited. Hal ascended the mainmast with lithe assurance. As he dropped into the bucket of the crow’s nest just below the top of the mast he looked up at the thin cloud skating across the moon. His breath was a little shorter than it had been when he was a lad and making the climb to the masthead several times a day. But it was still just as much of a pleasure to drink in the cool clean air up where the breeze was an elixir, cut only with the scent of the tarred lines, the musty smell of the sail canvas and, now and then when the wind was right, the sweet, spicy aroma of the soil of Africa itself wafting across the ocean from the coast. He peered north into the gloom for a sign of the Dutchman that had last been seen three leagues off the Bough’s stern. A glimpse of white caught his eye, where the cloud had torn to let the last glimmer of moonlight through. Hal knew his eyes were as good as those of any man aboard – that was one reason he had chosen to look for himself, rather than rely on another to do it – but as he searched the ocean the clouds closed ranks once more, the darkness returned and then there was nothing to be seen. ‘Where are you then?’ he murmured. Dawn came, a bloodstain on the hem of night’s gown as the last of the northerly played out across the canvas and the Bough slowed to a crawl, then drifted without purpose as she lost steerage, eventually refusing to go another yard into the south. As the sea mist settled over the surface, shrouding the ship and the waters around her in a soft blanket that muffled sound as much as it hampered vision, the Bough rolled gently in the swells. Hal might have been lulled to sleep like a baby in its cot had he not been startled by Ned Tyler calling up to him. The helmsman was asking permission to let go the anchor, for it was better to stay where they were than risk drifting blindly at the whim of the tides until they found themselves high and dry on a sand bar. Hal felt a little guilty then, being up there like a young ensign instead of on the quarterdeck or the poop like the captain he was. But he refused to abandon the search just yet, not when every instinct told him it must be the Dutchman out there. She was a small caravel: three-masted and square rather than lateen-rigged. A captured prize most likely, taken from the Spanish or Portuguese Hal guessed, for it was rare to see such a ship flying Dutch colours. She would still be getting enough out of the breeze to keep her moving for she was only half the size of the Bough. Hal knew he had nothing to fear from such a ship, and not just because his culverins could blast her out of the water if it came to a fight. ‘Damn this truce,’ he whispered, narrowing his eyes as if they could somehow penetrate the mist and catch another glimpse of canvas. Peace now prevailed between the English and the Dutch, though Hal wished it did not. It had been a Dutch governor of the Cape Colony who had ordered the torture and murder of his father and Dutchmen who had followed his instructions to the brutal, gory letter. Hal longed for the legitimacy that war provided. For then he would be able to spill Dutch blood by the gallon in retribution for his father’s suffering. Suddenly he fancied he caught the Dutchman’s scent in the air, a waft of fresh tar and the stale sweat of her crew, but it was gone again in a heartbeat. Aboli was right to say that Sir Francis had prepared Hal well for the responsibilities of captaining a ship. And yet there was something else too, something that even his father could not have taught him, and that was the warrior’s instinct. Hal felt that coursing through him like the blood in his veins. He could, when it was called for, be a killer. That instinct had made him leave his soft bed and the beautiful woman sleeping in it to climb up there to the masthead. It was that same instinct that alerted him to the danger now. He had not seen the first of the cloth-muffled grappling hooks that clumped onto the Golden Bough’s deck, but Hal saw the first dark shapes coming over the side in the mist. ‘To arms! To arms!’ He gave the alarm, as the first pistols spat flames which cut through the murk, briefly illuminating the faces of the men who had come to kill them. Hal was already out of the crow’s nest. Down he came into the chaos that was enveloping them. He thanked Almighty God for inducing the Amadoda tribesmen to sleep beneath the stars, for now they were leaping to their feet, seizing their weapons and hurling themselves into the fight. Faced by the tribesmen’s ferocity, spears and axes, the attackers must be regretting their impertinence. But even from halfway down the mast, Hal could tell that those men clambering over the Bough’s gunnels were heavily armed. Each had a pistol in hand and another pair tied with cords around their necks. As Hal glanced down he saw one of the Amadoda thrown back by the force of a pistol ball that blew a hole in his naked chest. The man fell to the deck, with the whites of his eyes rolling up into his skull. Hal jumped the last five feet to the deck. As his feet hit the planking he suddenly realized that he was unarmed. He had not thought to pick up his flintlock pistol or his sword when he left his cabin. ‘Here, Gundwane!’ Hal turned and caught the sabre by the hilt, nodding to Aboli who had thrown it. Then he launched himself into the chaos, slashing open a man’s face, then spinning away to stab the blade deeply into another’s guts. ‘Golden Bough on me!’ he shouted, and the Amadoda cheered, as they surged forward. Others of the Golden Bough’s crew were pouring up through the hatches. Shoulder to shoulder Hal and Aboli hacked their way into the enemy. And yet the Dutchmen still had loaded pistols and these roared, spitting out death and disaster. One huge Dutchman whose features were masked by a dense growth of dark beard, fired his pistol then reversed it and clubbed down the black man who opposed him. Three Amadoda went down before him but then Big Daniel was there. His sword had lodged in a dead man’s shoulder, but his own raw strength was weapon enough. Daniel threw up a brawny arm to block the Dutchman’s pistol, then clutched his beard in both hands and pulled its owner’s face towards him as he thrust his own head forward, smashing the big man’s nose with a splintering crack that Hal heard even above the din of battle. The Dutchman staggered, blood cascading down his face and beard. Big Daniel glanced to one side, retrieved his sword from the dead man’s shoulder and went at the bearded man like a butcher at a side of beef. Hal shouted with exultation. Any advantage the Dutch may have gained with the surprise of their attack had been nullified by the speed and ferocity with which the Bough’s men had responded. Victory was still not entirely his, but even in his young life Hal had fought enough ship-board battles to know when the balance was shifting. One last effort and that shift would be decisive. He was about to utter his rallying cry when he heard Aboli’s voice call out, ‘Gundwane!’ Hal glanced across the deck and saw that Aboli was pointing with his sword aft towards the m?l?e around the foot of the mizzenmast. ‘No!’ he told himself in despair. ‘That cannot be!’ Because she felt sick, Judith climbed out of her bunk, if only to find a bedpan to vomit into. That nausea saved her life. It meant that she saw the shadowy figures emerging out of the mist and clambering up the stern of the Golden Bough, climbing past the windows of the captain’s cabin. Then one of them braced his feet against the stern, pushed away to make the climbing rope swing out like a pendulum and smashed through the glass and into the cabin. Judith was already waiting for him, dressed only in her nightgown but with her sword in hand. Her hesitation over what to wear to go aboard the Bough had saved her life, for instead of being packed in one of her trunks and stowed away in the hold, her kaskara sword had come with her in her travelling baggage and had been placed in her cabin. The man who was first through the window had barely laid a toe on the cabin deck when he took the point of the kaskara through his throat. Judith pulled the blade away. Then as he went down she spun as nimbly as a dancer around the second boarder as he blundered past his wounded comrade. Then she aimed a savage, slashing blow across the small of his back that sliced through one of his kidneys and dropped her arm, with him writhing, screaming and bleeding at her feet. More men were piling into the cabin now and Judith realized that she was in danger of boxing herself into a corner, for the men she’d downed had formed a barrier, partially blocking the way between her and the cabin door. She moved fast, fighting her way to the door, her sword flashing from side to side as she parried, stabbed and slashed, struggling to defend herself against the increasing number of men who now opposed her. She fended one thrust away above her left shoulder, then swung her curved sword down and across her body, backhanded, slicing deep into another man’s arm, almost chopping it in two. But amidst the mayhem Judith’s mind remained calm. Hard-fought experience had taught her that the key to survival was maintaining the ability to concentrate and calculate while others around were letting rage, fear or panic cloud their minds. Examine the enemy. Look him in the eyes. Read his mind. Even as she fought for her life, Judith was doing these things, and what she saw in her enemies was desperation. These men were wild-eyed, haggard and starving. If she exchanged more than three or four clashes of the blade with any one of them she could feel his strength dissipating as the power in his sword-arm ebbed. She was a child of Africa. She knew all about hunger and she knew a starving man when she saw one. Whoever these raiders were, they attacked with the savage frenzy of men who had nothing to lose. She heard the sound of gunfire and the shouts and screams of men in battle coming from the decks above and knew that Hal and his crew must be fighting for their lives too. They had been taken by surprise. The fate of the Golden Bough was hanging by a knife-edge. But if she and they could only hang on long enough for the enemy’s strength to fade, they could still triumph. And they had to win. Judith had to survive – not for herself but for the child she carried inside her. She felt a new, unfamiliar spirit surging through her, the passionate defiance of a lioness defending her cub, and she knew that she would not – could not – give in to the men confronting her. Two more of them lay dying by the time she reached the cabin door. She sprang through it, bought a couple of precious seconds as she slammed it closed behind her, dashed to the steps that would take her up on deck and scrambled up them, waiting at any second for the clamp of a man’s hand around her ankle. None came. She ran out onto the quarterdeck, in the shadow of the mizzenmast and looked around to get her bearings and see how the battle stood. Judith barely paused for a second, but that second was too long. She suddenly felt hands grab her from behind, one around her waist and the other locked around her neck. She was lifted off her feet and though she flailed her arms in a frantic attempt to retaliate against the man who had her in his grasp she could do nothing and her efforts just seemed to amuse her captor who was laughing as he shouted, ‘Kapitein! Kijk eens wat ik gevonden!’ Judith did not speak Dutch, but she could recognize the language well enough and it wasn’t hard to work out that he was calling out to his captain. She knew her man well enough to know that Hal would never knowingly risk her life, not even for the Golden Bough. So whoever held her held the ship. Judith’s arms fell motionless by her side, she let her sword fall to the deck and her head slumped. The battle was lost and it was entirely due to her. The battle fever was upon Hal. He had seen a tall, thin scarecrow of a man loom up behind Judith, realized she was unaware of this new threat and roared a warning but it was lost in the battle din. There were Amadoda and Dutchmen between Hal and Judith and he thrust into the press trying to force a way through, parrying sword blows aimed at him, striking back where he could and yelling to Judith in vain. But when he broke through the chaos of seething steel, flesh and pistol flame, he saw that he was too late. The man now had an arm across Judith’s breast, a knife to her throat and one pox-scarred cheek pressed against the black crown of her head as though he were inhaling her perfume. In front of them stood a man whom Hal marked as the Dutchman’s captain, for he wore a silk-edged waistcoat and fine breeches rather than the canvas petticoats of most sailors. He confirmed his command by stepping forward and sweeping the broad felt hat off his head and waving it through the pistol smoke that hung over the deck. The sun had by now broken free of the eastern horizon and burned away the early morning mist and it crossed Hal’s mind that had the Dutch come any later he would have killed them before they ever stepped foot aboard. Fortune had favoured the enemy, it seemed. ‘Englishmen!’ The Dutch captain shouted, still waving the hat above his head to catch the men’s attention. ‘Stop this madness! There is no need for more blood to be spilled.’ His accent was thick but his English was good. ‘Where is your captain?’ Hal stepped forward, his gore-slick sword still raised before him, but making no attempt to use it against his adversary. Gradually, the realization spread that the battle seemed to have ended, though the reason for it ending was not yet clear to many of the combatants. Men broke off from the fight, gasping for breath, some screaming in pain. One man held his severed left arm in his right hand and was staring at it as though unable to comprehend how it had got there. ‘I am Captain Sir Henry Courtney of the Golden Bough,’ Hal announced, pointing the sword at the Dutch captain, ‘and you, sir, are a coward, to seek advantage by threatening a woman.’ The Dutchman frowned at this, then glanced behind him. ‘That woman fought like a man. Perhaps we should treat her as one … Ach!’ The captain shrugged and his face broke into a disarmingly friendly expression. ‘What does it matter, eh? Let us all just stop this senseless fighting, and talk a little sense.’ Hal was gripped by indecision. He had seen his last love, Sukeena, killed by a poisoned blade when she too was with child. She and their baby had died in his arms and he would not see Judith suffer the same fate, nor let another child of his be killed before it had ever taken a single breath. Yet how could he yield his ship and everything he and his crew had fought so hard for? What manner of captain would that make him? Instinctively he glanced up at the quarterdeck half expecting to see his father Sir Francis standing there proud and steadfast and unafraid, his hard eyes boring into him, judging Hal against his own tall measure as he had ever done. But there was no ghost to tell Hal what to do. The Golden Bough was his ship. He was its captain. ‘I am Captain Tromp of the Delft and now it seems …’ the Dutchman said, a smile tugging the corner of his mouth ‘… of this fine ship the Golden Bough also.’ Tromp’s men cheered at this, evoking curses from the Bough’s crew who clamoured at their captain to be released once more to the slaughter. For still more men had come from below and now stood blinking in the dawn light, clean blades and primed pistols in their hands. One word from Hal and the Bough’s deck would become a slaughter yard again. But one of the corpses could easily be Judith, his love and her infant. ‘We outnumber you five to one, Captain Tromp,’ Hal called, trying to hide the desperation he felt for Judith, hoping she would not see it either, for it was important for a captain to appear decisive and composed. ‘And yet you are not fighting,’ Tromp said. ‘Which tells me that you would do anything to save this woman from harm. And though I am sure that you are a gentleman, Captain, I suggest that the reason you stay your sword is not a matter of mere chivalry. She has your heart, does she not?’ Hal locked eyes with Judith and even by the early light of the dawn he could see the steel in them. She showed no sign of fear, only a cold resolve, as the pox-marked man with the knife to her throat growled obscenities in her ear. ‘I do not think he will kill her, Captain,’ Aboli said, breathing deeply at Hal’s right shoulder. ‘Because if he does then he knows he and all his men will certainly die.’ ‘Let us carve them up, Captain!’ Robert Moone, one of the Bough’s boatswains, called. ‘Aye, we’ll feed their craven livers to the sharks!’ boatswain John Lovell yelled, pointing his sword at Captain Tromp. Hal wracked his brain, trying to find a way out of the choice that confronted him between his boat and crew on one side and his woman and child on the other. ‘How can I let them hurt her, Aboli?’ Hal hissed and was on the point of lowering his sword when Judith threw back her head, smashing her skull against her captor’s nose like a hammer against an eggshell. He howled in pain and let her go, dropping his knife as he instinctively raised his hands to his broken nose and bloody face. In a single, flowing sequence of movements Judith broke free, picked up her sword, slashed the razor edge across the belly of the man who had grabbed her and leapt at Tromp. His attention had all been on Hal. He was slow to react to what was happening behind him. By the time he had turned round Judith had covered the ground between them, and had put the pin-sharp tip of her blade to his throat before he could raise his own sword. Seeing this, some of the Dutchmen threw themselves at Hal’s men, believing they had no choice but to fight or die, but they were cut down where they stood and the rest of Tromp’s boarding party dropped to their knees and hoisted their swords and boarding axes above their heads. ‘It is over, Captain,’ Aboli said, stooping to saw his blade across the throat of Judith’s would-be captor who now sat slumped against the Bough’s side, his gut ropes lying in a glistening, bloody mess between his legs. The knowledge that Judith had been in danger, and the guilty awareness of how close he had come to surrendering his boat and with it his honour combined to drive Hal into a state of barely controlled fury. He was striding forward, ready to cut Tromp down, but Aboli gripped his shoulder with a big hand. ‘It is over,’ he said again. The bloodlust abated and Hal stood for a moment letting the tremble work through his arms and the big muscles in his legs. Then he walked over to Judith and Captain Tromp, who held out his sword hilt first. Judith was still holding the point of the kaskara at his throat. ‘You have my surrender, Captain Courtney,’ the Dutchman said, looking down his nose at Hal because he dared not move his head. ‘Not too soon,’ Hal snarled at him, snatching the sword from his hand and passing it to Aboli behind him. ‘You were a damned fool to think you could take my ship.’ Hal looked at Judith, who gave him a quick nod of the head to signal that she and her child were unhurt. There would be a time for them to hold one another tightly, to kiss and to celebrate their survival in the act of love, but this was not it. Tromp was watching the personal dramas being played out before him, noting the connections between the big African and his captain, and between the captain and the woman who appeared so perfectly feminine and yet could fight like the fiercest trained warrior. ‘I am an ambitious man, Captain Courtney,’ he said, almost casually, as though ambition rather than hunger had driven him to attempt a reckless assault on a larger, better armed vessel with a much more numerous crew. ‘Your ambition has cost you dear, sir,’ Hal said, trying to keep a rein on his fury. In victory a true warrior must show forbearance, his father had once said. He must not give in to the base instinct for revenge. He must summon that forbearance required to show clemency. Yet even the noblest warrior was not expected to ignore wrongdoing when he saw it. ‘You have broken the truce between our two countries, Captain Tromp,’ Hal said, making a show of calmly pulling his sword through a handkerchief to clean the blood off it. ‘There is a truce?’ Tromp said, doing a passable job of seeming surprised, for the truce by now was over a year old. ‘You lying cheese-head!’ one of Hal’s men yelled from the mainmast shrouds up which he had climbed to get a clear view of proceedings. ‘Well you are not alone in wishing that there were no truce, Captain Tromp,’ Hal admitted. ‘I would gladly hunt Dutchmen below the Line, above the Line, and to the very gates of hell, if I only had a damned Letter of Marque. I would be the scourge of the Dutch as my father was. And I would have run you down when I first laid eyes on your ensign two days ago.’ ‘Then I admit I am relieved that our two countries have put aside their differences,’ Tromp said with an easy-going, roguish smile that Hal suspected had put many a pretty girl deeply in his thrall. Tromp’s face was haggard with starvation, yet Hal could see that he was a handsome man, with sand-coloured hair and mariner’s eyes the colour of the Indian Ocean itself. Hal was now almost certain that Aboli had been right. Tromp would have never killed Judith. The man had rolled the dice and he had lost, and now he was Hal’s prisoner and by the law of the sea his ship, the Delft, now belonged to Hal also. The Dutchmen had come in two pinnaces and when he examined them Hal recalled the brief whiff of tar he had smelt on the air, for they had tarred their sails black to conceal them against the night. It had been a bold move on Tromp’s part and Hal almost admired the man for fighting from the front rather than sending another to lead the boarding party. They might have succeeded in capturing the Golden Bough by stealth, too, had the Amadoda tribesmen not leapt up from their beds on the deck and fought like panthers in the face of all that pistol fire. And then there had been Judith. If not for her bravery and martial skill Hal would have given Tromp the Bough, and now his heart was bursting with pride in her. That pride only grew when he looked at his crew and saw the way they regarded Judith. They already loved her, and admired her reputation, but now that they had witnessed what she was capable of with their own eyes, she had earned their profound respect and perhaps to an extent their fear. Few of them had seen a woman fight the way she had done and word was coming up from the captain’s cabin of the havoc she had wreaked upon her assailants down there, also. ‘Go and rest, my love,’ Hal told her while Big Daniel and Aboli oversaw the binding of Tromp and his surviving men, and another boatswain, William Stanley, had the Bough’s crew gather up the dead from both sides. ‘I’d prayed that I would never have to kill again,’ Judith said, placing a bloody hand on the swell of her belly as though she feared that their unborn child was now somehow tainted by her own actions. ‘You saved the ship, my heart,’ Hal said softly. ‘I feared that I had lost it,’ she replied. Then she looked at the Dutch prisoners, who were now being led away towards the Bough’s lowest decks and laid a gentle hand on Hal before she said, ‘Do not harm them.’ ‘There will be no more killing today,’ he assured her, looking to the east where the sun was a blazing orb rising above a bank of grey cloud to flood the ocean with molten gold and blood. ‘Not if this Captain Tromp gives me his ship.’ ‘Which he will do, ma’am, don’t you worry, unless he wants us to feed slices of his raw bumfiddle to the sharks,’ Big Daniel said, shoving Tromp towards the steps that ran down to the bowels of the ship. Aboli watched the defeated captain’s head disappear and then, speaking in his native tongue so that the others would not hear him question their leader, asked Hal, ‘What if the crew of his ship put up a fight, Gundwane? We have lost enough men today. Is she worth the loss of any more? And this wind is weaker than a warthog’s fart. If she knows we are coming after her and runs it will take us a day or more to overhaul her.’ ‘Hmm …’ Hal grunted, noting what Aboli had to say. But he was a predator, born, bred and raised to hunt the seas for maritime prey and he could no more turn down the prize of a ship and its cargo than a hungry lion could resist the chance of fresh meat. ‘Mister Moone, strike the colours if you please!’ Hal called. Then he turned to Aboli. ‘I have an idea,’ he said with a wolf’s grin, speaking in plain English so that his crew could hear their captain and take strength from his confidence. ‘Tell Daniel to bring Tromp back here. I think we’ll need him topsides after all.’ Aboli, who was as pleased as anyone else on the ship to know that he had his captain back and ripe and ready for the next scrap, nodded and went to fetch the Dutchman. The Delft, still lying at anchor, emerged from the dawn half-light. Ned Tyler turned the Golden Bough’s bows into the east so as to come up on the Dutch caravel’s larboard side, thus trapping her between them and the sandbars that stood a short way offshore at the mouth of a river delta. As they drew nearer, with the Golden Bough making little more than two knots in a breeze so faint that he could barely feel it on the back of his neck, Hal could see a scattering of men at her gunwales and atop the mizzen. A few more were up the rigging, ready to scramble out along the yards to release the sails. Clearly Tromp had left only a skeleton crew behind when he set off on his expedition to capture the Bough. They were crouching under the forecastle bulwarks, Hal with his flintlock primed and his sword, only recently cleansed of the blood it had gathered earlier in the morning, in his right hand. ‘Aye, well our naked ensign staff should help ease their minds,’ Big Daniel replied, just as quietly. ‘They’ll reckon their skipper won the ship an’ struck our colours.’ There were just a few of the Bough’s men still on deck, and most of those were doing their best to avoid detection. As for the rest, Hal had ordered them to stay below, as if confined there as Tromp’s prisoners, until he gave the word. Tromp himself stood eight paces aft of Hal with his left hand gripping the rail at the foremost end of the deck just above the bowsprit, while his right hand clutched Hal’s own speaking trumpet. The morning air was still cool, yet sweat ran in rivulets down the Dutchman’s face and splashed in fat drops on the deck, for Aboli was crouched behind him with a ballock knife in hand. The African held the dagger’s wickedly sharp blade between Tromp’s legs, poised to geld the Dutchman should he deviate by so much as a flicker from the charade that Hal had contrived. ‘I reckon Tromp is as keen for this ruse to work as we are,’ Hal observed, to which Big Daniel nodded agreement, but tried to suppress a smile. The remainder of Hal’s men, armed with steel and muskets, were poised below decks, eager to pour from the hatches and board the caravel. All the gun ports were closed, but the gun crews were hidden behind them, with their culverins readied to spit fire and iron fury at the Delft. Hal was hoping it would take only one salvo to destroy her crew’s resolve for that way he could keep the caravel for the most part intact, which would make her a far more valuable prize. Hal took a deep breath, his nose filling with the scent of the tarred planks by his face, then looked up at Tromp and hissed, ‘Now, sir, speak your piece … unless you have your mind set on becoming a eunuch.’ The Dutchman hesitated for no longer than a moment, scratching the tuft of beard at his chin, glanced down at the blade poking between his legs then raised the speaking trumpet to his mouth, took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Men of the Delft! We have won a glorious victory!’ Hal knew enough Dutch to be satisfied so far, as Tromp called across the calm water, ‘I bring you the English ship the Golden Bough, all the treasures in her belly, and all her stores that will soon be in your bellies, too!’ The Dutch sailors’ cheers carried across to them and Hal watched Tromp raise his fist to the sky in a gesture of triumph, for he need say no more and his job was done. Aboli looked over his shoulder and gave Hal a great grin. The deception had worked! Hal waited until they were barely a canvas off the Delft’s stern, looming over the much smaller vessel and on the point of colliding with her before he stood, as did the other men beside him. ‘To me, men of the Bough!’ Hal yelled and the hatches opened, spewing armed men onto the deck. Englishmen, Welsh, Scots and Irish all armed with cutlasses and muskets shouted, ‘Hal and the Bough!’ Beside them ran the Amadoda, gripping their lances and boarding axes and whooping with the joy of being unleashed once more. On the gundeck below, the ports were knocked out and the culverins run out loaded and primed. As his men crowded the main deck, Hal took the speaking trumpet from Tromp who surrendered it with a sad sigh. The threat of Aboli’s knife was still close enough to his generative organs to keep his attention focussed. ‘Men of the Delft,’ Hal roared in his basic, working Dutch, ‘your captain won no victory. He and his men fought bravely, but there were far fewer of them than us and they are now my prisoners. Give up your ship and I will treat you well and give you food to eat. Refuse and I will send you to the sea bed without a crumb in your bellies.’ The Bough’s crew lining the gunwales yelled threats and made crude gestures, but they were all unnecessary. The prospect of a square meal alone was enough for the men of the Delft. They threw up their hands and surrendered without so much as a shot fired or blow struck. The man who came into the cockpit holding a ship’s lantern before him grimaced at the stench of fresh faeces. Seeing the corpse, he stopped and cast his light over it, prodded it with the toe end of his boot, then turned back to a tall African whose lean, muscled body glistened by the candle’s glow. ‘This one’s for the crabs,’ he said, and by the lamplight Pett saw that although the man was still young he bore the unmistakable air of a leader of men. His face derived much of its character from an eagle-beaked nose that spoke of high birth and he carried himself with the assurance that came both from giving commands upon which other men’s lives depended and also knowing that they would always be obeyed. Pett had positioned himself as far from the door to the cockpit as his chain would allow and had still not been spotted by the two men, whose arrival had told him all he needed to work out the general sequence of events that must have occurred since the expeditionary party had left the Delft. Evidently, the Dutch had not succeeded and the price of their failure was the capture of their ship. Here, then, was the victorious captain. He greatly interested Pett, though he was not yet clear in his mind whether he should look on this young commander as a potential client, or a man whom other clients might want dead. ‘Even the crabs must eat, Gundwane,’ the African said, giving the body a disdainful poke with his cutlass. This man looked every inch the warrior and he was very clearly his captain’s most trusted associate. Aboard ship, that would make him the first mate. Pett categorized the African as a potential impediment, to be considered and accounted for should the captain ever need killing. That aside, he had no interest in him, though it did strike him that he had never seen a black first mate before. ‘It is a tragedy, sir, that the man died on the very cusp of our salvation,’ Pett now spoke up. He could have died quicker. Much quicker, the Saint sniped in a voice that echoed so loudly around Pett’s skull that he could scarce believe others could never detect it. His own voice, however, had been heard, for the white man spun round, lifting the lantern even as instinct made him grip the hilt of the fine sword scabbarded at his hip. ‘Who’s there?’ he demanded, peering into the gloom. ‘My name is Pett, sir. I have been chained down here like a slave for these last weeks, so many I have lost count. Yet my prayers have been answered at last. I hardly dared believe my ears when I heard English voices above.’ He rattled his leg chain to emphasize his predicament. ‘Are you of the ship that cheese-head Captain Tromp meant to capture?’ ‘I am Sir Henry Courtney, captain of the Golden Bough,’ the young man said, ‘and you’ll be glad to know your captivity is over, Mr Pett.’ Courtney gestured at the stinking corpse. ‘Of what did this man die?’ he asked. He died of boredom while you took an age to choke the life out of him, the Saint told Pett. ‘Hunger?’ Pett said with a shrug. ‘I am not a man of medicine, Captain. Nor did I know the poor man well, though I can attest to what you have yourself no doubt discovered: this is a ship crewed by starving men. They showed no human kindness towards me, seeing me as just another mouth to feed, and throwing me in this floating dungeon. But this one soul who shared my confinement became a true companion. For which reason I would humbly entreat your permission to be allowed to prepare the body for burial myself, rather than have it done by someone who has never laid eyes on the deceased man before now.’ He raised a hand. ‘If it please you, Captain.’ ‘I have no objections,’ Henry Courtney said, then turned to the black man. ‘Ask Captain Tromp where we will find the key to Mr Pett’s irons, or failing that have the carpenter bring his tools.’ ‘Yes, Gundwane,’ the African said, disappearing back up the stairwell. ‘Very kind of you, Captain, much obliged.’ Pett affected a sombre expression to hide the relief he felt at the prospect of wrapping the corpse in its burial shroud. He had no desire to let anyone else see the bruises on the dead man’s neck, nor the swollen tongue and eyes that would betray the true cause of his death. ‘How did you come to be Captain Tromp’s prisoner?’ Captain Courtney asked, by now as oblivious to the stink as any man used to life at sea. Pett sighed, not too theatrically, he hoped. ‘’Tis a sad and somewhat lengthy tale, Captain, the telling of which will be easier once I have fed my empty belly and sluiced my parched throat.’ ‘Of course, how thoughtless of me,’ Courtney nodded. ‘You must join me for dinner, Mr Pett. For now, though, if you will excuse me, I have the rest of the ship’s inventory to inspect. Have no fear, one of my men will return to free you at the soonest opportunity.’ ‘Of course, Captain,’ Pett said, still barely believing his luck. Truly the Lord works in mysterious ways, he thought, as the young captain disappeared. Now he was left alone in the darkness, and yet he was not alone at all, for the Saint and all the angels were with him and William Pett felt truly blessed by their presence. When Tromp had ruefully admitted that there was neither gold, nor spice in his holds, Hal had presumed that there was nothing of any value aboard the Delft. And at first glance that presumption appeared to be entirely correct. Most of the hold was entirely bereft of cargo and was now being used as quarters for the Delft’s petty officers and as a place to treat men whose emaciation had made them too ill or feeble to work. But at its far bow end there were twelve barrels neatly stacked and lashed down with ropes to keep them from moving in the event of rough seas. Using his cutlass Aboli prised off one of the lids to find the barrel stuffed with sweet-smelling wood shavings and dried grass. When Hal caught up with him, he thrust his hand deep into the barrel. After a good rummage his fingers detected several small boxes. Hal pulled out one of them and, upon opening it, found a glass vial inside, no bigger than his thumb. ‘I don’t think much of Captain Tromp’s wine cellar,’ he joked, holding the vial up to the ship’s lantern and trying to peer through the thick green glass. ‘I have heard Hindoo sailors from India talk of Amrit, the Nectar of Immortality. Perhaps it is that,’ Aboli ventured, with a grin. Hal laughed. ‘If Tromp had found the elixir of life I doubt he would be sailing this worm-riddled Portuguese tub and picking fights with the likes of us.’ He pulled the cork stopper and sniffed the vial’s contents. ‘Whatever it is, it’s sour,’ he said. ‘I know a good way of testing the man to see if he is indeed immortal,’ Aboli said, waving his cutlass, but Hal was in no mood to laugh. He had clung on to the smallest hope that Tromp might have been carrying a more valuable cargo than he had let on. Clearly, however, he had nothing of any worth whatever on board. And yet, there had to have been some reason why these vials had been boxed with such care. The liquid they contained was certainly not a scent for which fashionable women would pay good money. Nor could it be some sort of medical potion, for if it were there would be labels promoting its properties. Hal felt a brief tremor of shock as the thought struck him that he might just have inadvertently inhaled a dose of poison, but a moment’s reflection told him that he was entirely unharmed. The puzzle deepened as Aboli opened the next barrel, from which Hal pulled three pieces of desiccated old wood, getting a splinter in his thumb for his trouble. Each piece was dark as an old ship’s timber, though none had the telltale signs of shipworm. ‘Do you have any idea at all what these might be?’ Hal asked, quite at a loss for a suggestion of his own. Aboli held up his hands and shrugged, admitting that he too was defeated. ‘Well, there’s only one man who can solve this conundrum,’ Hal said. ‘Go and fetch Tromp and let’s hear what he has to say for himself.’ A few minutes later, Aboli returned to the hold, accompanied by the Delft’s former master. Hal held up the pieces of wood and asked, ‘What in heaven’s name are these?’ Tromp grinned. ‘You should not take the name of heaven in vain, Captain. Those are pieces of the true cross.’ Hal had personal experience of Christianity’s most precious relics. So for a second he was almost prepared to believe that he was holding part of the cross on which Christ himself had died. But if so, why was Tromp smiling? Was he so lacking in faith that he could make a joke of the Saviour’s suffering? Hal kept his counsel for the time being. He said nothing as he put the pieces of wood back where he’d found them and then held up the green glass vial that had been his first discovery. ‘Ah,’ Tromp nodded cheerfully. ‘I see you have found that most sacred of treasures, the ancient bottle that contains the milk of the Virgin Mary. There is another in there that holds the tears the Blessed Mother shed as she watched her son die.’ Now Hal spoke, and his voice was tense with anger. ‘By God, sir, I’ll ask you not to take the names of Our Lord Jesus Christ and his blessed mother Mary in vain. You may find your blasphemy amusing. Be assured that I do not.’ The Dutchman raised his palms submissively. ‘I can see you are a man who is not easily fooled, Captain Courtney,’ he said. ‘But you are a rarity in that regard, or so I had hoped, for it was my intention to make hundreds of pounds from selling such curiosities.’ He scratched his pointed beard. ‘Or as I intended to describe them, such holy relics.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kristian/golden-lion/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.