Golden Lion (50 page)

hey pulled the oars with long strokes, driving the two boats into the swift current of fresh water flowing out of the gorge. Their presence in this secret place disturbed the flocks of water fowl that rose shrieking and honking into the sky.

So far they had not been disappointed with this secret place. No sooner had the
Golden Bough
dropped her anchor than her crew had been greeted by the sight of a small herd of elephants shambling out of the forest onto the beach, taking their lead from an old bull with massive tusks. When they saw human beings aboard the anchored ships, the grey giants stood their ground, raising their great heads, spreading their ears as they trumpeted a challenge at them.

‘Oh, what magnificent beasts,’ Judith said, watching them from the bows.

‘And cleverer than many people I have known,’ Aboli said in all seriousness.

‘Why don’t we shoot a few of them?’ Big Daniel suggested eagerly. ‘There’s a fortune in ivory right there. Good God, but the tusks on that bull must be ten feet long.’

‘There is easier plunder waiting for us, Dan,’ Hal said with a shake of his head. ‘I think we’ll leave them in peace.’

Hal had anchored the
Golden Bough
opposite the ruins of the old fort, and ran out all the guns, loaded with grapeshot in case of a surprise attack from savages of any colour; brown, black or white. Then he took Judith aside.

‘I am going to ask you to stay here, instead of undergoing a long couple of days in a pinnace. Besides there will be very little leg room on the way back, if you get my meaning. On the other hand, if you wait for my return here you will have fifty men and more to watch over you, and those long sandy beaches on which you and the baby can relax.’

‘For the sake of the baby I will do it. But promise you will return as soon as you possibly can; for I will miss you desperately.’

Before they had launched the two longboats and prepared the twelve-strong shore party the great grey pachyderms had lost interest and moved back into the forest, vanishing in an eerie silence.

Now, as the men bent to the long sweeps, Hal, Daniel and Aboli looked up at the cliff tops on either side of them from which troops of baboons barked a challenge.

They had rowed little more than ten miles from where the
Golden Bough
lay at anchor, the sails furled on her yards, until the fresh water stream narrowed abruptly and the cliff faces on either side of them were more sharply defined, as though the Great God Thor had cleaved them out of the rock with his celestial hammer.

‘This is the place, Master Daniel,’ Hal called to the other boat, and put the rudder across to steer her into the southern bank and moor her to the identical rock which his father had used for the same purpose. Hal sat for a moment in silent homage to the man who had given him birth and had prepared him so meticulously for the hard life on the ocean wave. When he roused himself and looked up, Aboli was watching him. They exchanged glances and Hal nodded at his friend and companion of the years; both men in total accord.

Hal stood up and looped two coils of hempen rope over his shoulders so they crossed over his chest. ‘I’ll go first, you next,’ he told Aboli. ‘Daniel, keep four men with you to load the boats with whatever we lower down to you. The rest of you, light your match and keep your eyes wide open.’

Hal jumped onto the narrow ledge below the rock wall and began to climb.

‘Go carefully, Gundwane,’ Aboli called after him. ‘There is no hurry.’

Hal ignored him, for he was suddenly in a dreadful hurry. Had the treasure lain undisturbed all these years or had it been discovered by one of the many who were hunting for it? Was the cave barren or was it glutted with gold?

Even though there was no obvious route up the rock face, he never paused, climbing with speed and fearless agility until he swung himself onto the narrow ledge that was invisible to those in the longboats far below. The stones blocking the cave’s narrow entrance were stacked as neatly as he and Aboli had left them so long ago. And his heart started to sing and rejoice, as he removed them one by one, and set them aside.

When the hole was large enough he crawled inside then stood up carefully, for the roof was low and uneven. He waited while his eyes adjusted to the thin shaft of daylight that probed through the opening he had made, but the depths of the cave were shrouded in darkness.

He reached up head-high to the stone ledge on the wall beside him, and his groping fingers came upon the articles that his father had placed there on their last visit. He hugged them to his chest and sank to his knees. On the rock floor of the cave he set out the two tallow candles, and then he struck a shower of sparks from the flint with the steel. The oakum tinder was dry as the Sahara, it flared into flames and Hal lit both candles from it. Then he sat back and with hope and dread equally mingled he raised his eyes and peered into the depths of the cave.

It was all still there. It was untouched. Every keg, barrel, sack and chest was stacked just as he and his father had left it. The silver plate and gold ingots stood in neat piles. The precious metals were bright and unsullied.

He sank back on his knees and remembered the words of his father.

Every one of us owes God a death. When the time comes for me to pay my debt I want this to be my legacy to you
, his father had said.

‘It is far too much, Father. What do you want me to do with such riches?’ Hal spoke aloud, and another voice answered him immediately.

‘Just for a start you could pay Viscount Winterton what you still owe him for the
Golden Bough
. Then you could find yourself a few thousand acres of prime land on England’s green and glorious shores and a mansion to fill with a lovely woman and a dozen squealing infants.’

Startled, Hal jumped to his feet and turned to find Aboli behind him. He was breathing heavily from the exertions of his climb up the cliff. Hal clasped his shoulder, and the two of them stood in silence for a while, as if in homage to the man who had won this mighty fortune for his son, and paid for it with his life.

They remembered the agony he had suffered at the hands of Slow John, the torturer and executioner who did his terrible work on the orders of van de Velde, the governor of the Dutch colony of the Cape of Good Hope.

‘Was it worth it, Aboli?’ Hal broke the silence at last.

‘Your father believed it was.’ Aboli shrugged. ‘He gave his life for this, so now it is your duty to accept it, lest his sacrifice be in vain.’

‘Thank you,’ Hal said softly, but sincerely. ‘Without that sound advice I might have spurned my father’s legacy and spent the rest of my life suffering for it.’

They spent the next two days swaying this tremendous weight of metal and precious stones down the cliff face and packing it into the two longboats. By the time they had completed the transfer and the loading there was very little free-board remaining on either boat. Hal ordered most of the men ashore with ropes to tow the boats along the bank, while he and Aboli steered them with the tillers. It was slow going and they had to camp the first night on the river bank. Before sunrise the next morning they set off again.

They had another half a league to go to reach the head of the lagoon where the
Golden Bough
was anchored when there was a rumble in the sky ahead of them, like distant thunder. Every one of them paused in their labours and looked up at the sky in surprise. However, though the clouds were dense and dark, there was no other sign of an approaching storm.

‘Thunder?’ hazarded Daniel.

‘No!’ Aboli yelled from the leading boat. ‘That was not thunder; that was a cannon shot!’

‘Like as not, a distress signal from the
Golden Bough
!’ Hal cried. ‘She must be under attack.’

He was not the Buzzard, damn all of them who thought it. He was and had always been Angus Cochran, Earl of Cumbrae and a Nautonnier Knight of the Temple of the Order of St George and the Holy Grail, just as was Hal Courtney and his father before him.

The only difference between them was that they made a great fuss about honour and dignity and the battle for Christ and the Holy Grail, whereas he had always known that they were meaningless medieval claptrap. They had sought to mock him by calling him the Buzzard, just as Prince Jahan had tried to humiliate and enslave him by locking him into this bloody mask.

But now the mask empowered him. It had brought him back from the edge of fiery death. It had covered his ruined face and converted him into a creature of mystery. It struck terror into the hearts of his enemies. He was strong once more. He was again a warrior fierce and pitiless.

He had set his snare and caught young Hal Courtney in it; with his breeks around his ankles and his arse flapping in the wind.

Cochran might have lost an arm, an eye and most of his cock, but his brain was still in perfect working order, and the sword in his right hand was still deadly.

For the last three days, ever since the arrival of the
Golden Bough
at Elephant Lagoon, the
Madre de Deus
had been ready for immediate action. Now her topmastmen were at their stations, ready to unfurl every scrap of canvas she could carry, and the gun crews were standing by their cannons which were shotted and loaded.

The Buzzard’s spies had seen the two pinnaces leave the
Golden Bough
and row up to the top end of the lagoon, where they entered the stream of fresh water, and disappeared around the first bend in the river heading up through the valley towards the inland plateau. Through their telescopes they had even been able to recognize Hal Courtney and his black henchman, Aboli. But they had not seen them return. Of course they might have done so after nightfall, when the lookouts would not have spotted them, but they could not escape from the lagoon without him knowing about it.

Thus before dawn on the fourth day of waiting, the Buzzard decided finally to close the trap on Hal Courtney. With his crew at their battle stations he sailed in through the heads that guarded the entrance to Elephant Lagoon from the Indian Ocean. He stood in the bows of the
Madre de Deus
with his telescope tucked under his arm, and his single eye glaring out through the hole in his leather mask across the waters of the lagoon. He saw that the
Golden Bough
was lying at her anchorage deeper in the lagoon, with her gun ports closed and her masts and yards bare of canvas. Her decks were empty, and there was only a single lookout at the masthead.

One of her pinnaces was beached near the head of the lagoon. Her crew had very obviously been filling the water barrels from the sweet water stream. The second pinnace was on the far side of the lagoon from the
Bough
. Her crew were busy loading bundles of cut firewood into her. But this early in the morning both crews were gathered around the fires on the beaches, swigging coffee and tea and guzzling their breakfast.

It was obvious that Hal Courtney was preparing for the long voyage home around the Cape of Good Hope and then back up the Atlantic Ocean to the British Isles. But his crews were separated from his ship, and oblivious to the sudden and silent appearance of a three-masted fighting ship in the mouth of the lagoon.

The Buzzard turned and called back to Captain Barros on the poop deck. ‘Give them a gun shot to wake these apes out of their trance, please, Captain.’ Although distorted by his speaking hole, his voice was clearly understandable to the officers on the poop deck.

Barros snapped an order to the master gunner on the deck below him, and a single cannon shot thundered out across the waters, and echoed off the hills that surrounded this wide body of water.

The British crews looked up in total astonishment as the
Madre de Deus
appeared miraculously before them in full battle array.

‘Steer for the
Golden Bough
,’ the Buzzard gave his next order. ‘She will be easy pickings, for she is isolated from her men.’ He cleared his damaged throat, and spat a lump of yellow phlegm over the rail. ‘I want Courtney, do you hear. But if he is not aboard, then I want his woman.’

Judith Nazet was in the cabin of the
Golden Bough
that she and Hal shared; she was sitting at the small writing desk below the stern windows. There was a timid knock on the cabin door and Mossie stuck his curly mop of hair around the jamb.

‘Good morning to you, my kind mistress. I have coffee for you; no milk and no sugar.’

‘Thank you, Mossie, how did you know that is just how I like it?’

‘Because that’s how you always have it,’ he said with a wide white grin. This was an on-going ritual of theirs. He came in and closed the door carefully behind him and stood on tiptoe to set the silver mug on the desk before her.

‘Should I blow out the lamps for you, my lovely mistress?’ He reached out a hand to the lantern in its bracket on the bulkhead above her head. There were half-a-dozen of these identical lamps hanging from the ceiling above the double bunk, and at other odd points around the cabin.