Golden Lion (41 page)

‘Coward!’ Hal spat. Full of rage and hunger to kill these heinous fiends who thought nothing of treating men like the meanest of beasts, feeling fellowship with the African now, rather than rivalry, he brought his forehead down on the man’s nose, bursting it.

‘Get him off me!’ the whip man was screaming, and Hal felt himself being lifted into the air. He kicked and flailed, broke free but fell to the deck and then they were on him again.

‘Hold him still!’ Barros bellowed as the officers hauled Hal up, one of them wrapping Hal’s hair around his fist and yanking his head back so that Captain Barros’s face came into view just inches from Hal’s own.

‘You insolent English dog!’ Barros spat, backhanding Hal across his face. ‘You would get yourself killed over a filthy Negro?’ He struck again, the knuckles splitting Hal’s lip.

‘I would kill
you
for him,’ Hal said, rage driving out any sense of his own best interests, still less those of Judith and their child from his mind. Blood spilled from his lip into his beard and he licked the torn flesh, relishing the moisture in his parched mouth.

He knew what was coming and tensed the corded muscle of his stomach just as Barros drove his fist into it. The blow knocked the wind from him but not enough to prevent him calling Barros a milk-livered son of a Spanish whore.

Barros did not reply. Instead, he went over to the side and pulled one of the unused belaying pins from the rail on the inside of the bulwarks. Brandishing the solid wood shaft like a club, he cracked it against Hal’s temple.

White-hot light seared through Hal’s vision and in his blindness he heard Barros say, ‘You are a friend to the animals, Englishman, I wonder if that affinity stretches to the fish.’ He turned to his men. ‘Fetch another rope. We shall have ourselves another wager, gentlemen.’

They held Hal and the African down while they tied the long ropes round their chests. Hal surrendered to the inevitable, preserving his stamina for when he would need it, but the African was still fighting, terror overcoming his exhaustion, as he and Hal were manhandled aft and lowered over the stern larboard rail. Down they went, the sailors of the
Madre de Deus
on the other ends of the ropes, and Hal cursing as the flesh of his forearms and lower legs was shredded against the barnacles on the ship’s hull. And when he splashed into the ocean he yelled because of the burning pain of the salt water in his wounds.

The men of the
Madre de Deus
let the ropes play out and Hal and the African were swept off into the ship’s wake, spluttering and thrashing to keep their heads above water. Hal arched his body and kicked furiously but the rope was long and as more of it was let out he drifted back beyond the worst of the rough, hull-ploughed, bubbling ocean, so that by hauling himself along the rope he could hold his mouth clear of the water.

He looked across and was relieved to see that the African had not drowned either but was gripping the rope with grim determination, the muscles of his arms bunched and swollen with the strain.

‘Hold on!’ he called, making a show of grabbing with his hands, hoping the African could discern his meaning, even if his actual words were incomprehensible. ‘Just hold on. They’ll pull us up soon!’ Which was what Hal was telling himself, for surely Captain Barros was not such an idiot that he would rather see them die than earn himself the money they would bring in at the slave block.

The ship’s officers had removed their broad hats now for fear of them being blown over the side. Hal could see them gathered at the stern rail and beyond them he saw the
Madre de Deus
’s
sails, and two dozen sailors clambering up the shrouds.

He’s slowing the ship
, Hal thought, fully aware of what it would mean if the ship lost two or three knots. But sure enough he could see her topmastmen strung out across the mizzen and mainmast, dark shapes against the blue sky. They were busy furling the topgallants and royals and when it was done there was a discernible drop in his own speed through the water. This at least made it easier to keep his head above the surface and when he looked across at the African he grimaced, an expression that Hal interpreted as relief.

He thinks we are saved
, Hal thought.
The fool dares to hope we will come through this trial with a few cuts and bruised pride.
The thought of his own blood in the water made Hal look behind him for the first time. Craning his neck as he clung on to the rope, he strained to see beyond the furrow of his own wake.

That’s when he saw the following fins.

He could hear the
Madre de Deus
’s crew cheering now. They lined the merchantman’s rails and clung to the shrouds whooping with excitement.

‘God help us,’ Hal muttered. The shoal of tiger sharks was a cable’s length behind them. He was certainly no stranger to the predators that roamed the warm waters of the Indian Ocean: black-tip sharks, hammerhead sharks, the great white sharks that were known to swallow men whole, and the ever-present blunt-nosed tiger sharks which terrified all sailors because they were so voracious and insatiable. Hal had seen some that were twenty-five feet long from nose-tip to tail-tip. He had heard of tiger sharks attacking longboats, even biting off pieces of the hull and swallowing them.

He had seen one bite through the tough shell of an enormous sea turtle. What such a predator would do to his own body did not bear thinking about and yet he could think of nothing else, knowing that the creatures had the scent of his blood in their noses.

The African screamed with terror, for he too had seen the company they were keeping. But Hal had no advice for the man. There was nothing to be done now but hope and, if it came to it, fight.

The
Madre de Deus
was down to perhaps four knots through the water, which told Hal that Barros had struck some canvas from the foremast too. Or perhaps the wind had dropped. Either way it made Hal’s blood far colder than the water around him and he hoped that the Portuguese had had their fun and would haul them back up before the sharks attacked.

But the merchantman’s crew had not finished with them yet. Wagers had been made. There was money to be won and lost.

Hal did not even see the shark that attacked him. He felt the impact though, its great wedge-shaped head driving into his right thigh and spinning him over so that for a heartbeat he was on his back looking up at the sky through two feet of ocean. Then he righted himself, took a deep breath and let go his grip on the rope. The slack played out until the noose of it dug in beneath his arms, the knot holding, and now he expelled the air from his lungs and twisted until his face was beneath the water, his eyes searching the blue haze for the shark that had struck him.

He saw it. It had fallen back some thirty feet, its head moving from side to side as it swam beneath his wake.

They would pull him back aboard now. Surely. He had been the first to receive a shark’s crude enquiry. Barros’s men must have seen it and now they would haul him back up to the cheers of those who had won the wager.

But they did not pull him up, and then to Hal’s horror he saw another shark coming out of the gloom off his right hip, its tail thrashing as it put in a great burst of effort to catch up with him. Hal screamed underwater, twisting his torso over again and kicking his feet with every scrap of strength he could muster, and his left heel scuffed the shark’s snout, sending it careening off to the side, its yellow-white underside a flash in the blue gloom.

He saw another shark to his right and knew from its stocky shape and broad, flat snout that it was a bull shark. It thrashed its tail to keep up with him, then darted in close so that when Hal went under again he was looking into the creature’s evil little eye. Then the bull shark was gone and Hal arched his body, breaking the surface to take a gasping breath before putting his head under again.

When the next shark came it opened its jaws and Hal saw its razor-sharp serrated teeth and even in his terror he thought of Judith because he expected to die then, torn apart for the amusement of madmen. Yet he would not be taken that easily. He screamed and he rolled, kicking for all his worth and somehow those wicked-looking teeth missed him and the creature fell back, its energy spent.

This terror lasted the better part of an hour, Hal fending the sharks off, kicking their blunt snouts and eyes, or somehow writhing clear of their jaws just in time, and he had been aware of the African doing the same, the two of them fighting for their lives. But when he saw a terrible thrashing off his right shoulder he knew with dread certainty that the African had been bitten. The man did not cry out. Perhaps he was too exhausted. Perhaps he had been unable to fight any longer and had given up. The first Hal knew of it was when he came up, gasping for breath, and heard a collective groan from the men at the
Madre de Deus
’s stern rail.
Captain Barros was yelling furiously at his own crewmen on the end of the other rope for letting the African be taken. What did the fool expect?

Hal’s only thought was of himself. Sharks for miles around would be drawn to the fresh kill. The African’s blood and torn flesh in the water would send them into a feeding frenzy and he would be next. If he did not drown in the meantime, for he was bone-weary and feared he could not fight much longer. It was all he could do to keep his head above the churned water of the ship’s wake, and though terror was his strength, even that would fail him soon.

Then he realized that he was getting closer to the
Madre de Deus
’s hull. They were pulling him in. Up and up he went, hoisted like the day’s catch to the shrieking of gulls, and when they hauled him over the larboard rail he collapsed onto the deck.

He was vaguely aware of them clamping irons on to his numbing legs but did not fight them. Could not have even if his life depended on it. He was utterly spent.

‘Congratulations, Englishman, you are too much trouble even for the sharks to want to eat you,’ Barros said.

Hal had no strength to reply. But he was alive.

udith longed to see the sky. For too long now she had been trapped in a world of water, mud, mist and beds of reeds that pressed in from every side, stifling any trace of a breeze in the humid air and cutting them off from the light of the sun, though the heat of it weighed on them like molten lead.

There were ten of them making the journey: Pereira, the Portuguese second mate from the
Pelican
, and three other Portuguese sailors, all of them armed with muskets as well as their cutlasses; two African crewmen who had been designated as porters and were weighed down with supplies; Judith and Ann, and finally the masked man himself and the slave who tended to him. Judith tried to imagine what it was like for him to be trapped inside that leather carapace, for the padlocks that closed it and the ring at his neck made it plain that, for all his monstrous appearance and his command of this expedition, the masked man’s confinement was not of his choosing. And despite the strength of his sword-arm and the unrelenting harshness of his demeanour, he was utterly dependent on his servant for food and drink.

One evening, as they sat around the smouldering, smoking excuse for a fire that was the best that could be managed in that world of dampness, she had asked the Buzzard why, having defied Jahan, he had not removed the mask that the prince had placed upon him. ‘It must be unbearable in this heat. The air is so heavy. How can you even breathe?’

‘Oh aye, I could take this off, but then what would happen? With this mask I can terrify any savage from here to the Cape. Without it I’m just a faceless cripple.’

‘I pity you,’ Judith said, with an absence of sentiment that made the words all the more telling.

The Buzzard leaned forward and drenched every word in venom as he said. ‘Do not pity me, lassie. Keep your pity for yourself.’

They had made their way from the
Pelican
in the ship’s pinnace, sailing a network of tributaries that threaded through a coastal fringe of lush vegetation that lay between land and sea. The waterways were more intricate and convoluted in their twists, turns and intersections than any maze the human mind could devise, but the Buzzard and Pereira, a grey-bearded veteran who carried himself with the dignity of officer rank, navigated as best they could. They used strips of canvas tied to the branches of the mangrove trees that lined the river banks to mark their passage, so that if they saw the strips again, as they often did, they knew that they must have turned back upon themselves. Sometimes they argued over which way to go. At other times they pointed to one passage or another, nodding with remembrance and giving their orders to the man at the tiller.

Where the streams slowed and widened into pools, they saw the great, bloated bodies of hippopotami. At the Buzzard’s orders the sailors primed their muskets and lit their match cord before giving the fearsome creatures a wide berth. Judith knew them well, for she had often encountered them on the waterways of southern Ethiopia. However, Ann had never seen them before and she could not understand why the masked man took such precautions and the Africans looked so fearful.