A Falcon Flies (25 page)

‘El Sheetan, the Devil,' using for the first time the name with which, in time, Captain Clinton Codrington would be known throughout the length of the Mozambique channel, and as far north as the great Horn of Africa.

T
he bronze screw under
Black Joke
's counter thrashed out along wide wake behind her. She still had main and jib set, but Codrington would shorten to ‘fighting sail' just as soon as he had made the adjustment to counter the dhow's turn away towards the land.

Zouga and Robyn were on the quarterdeck to watch the chase, infected by the restrained businesslike excitement which gripped the vessel so that Zouga laughed aloud and called, ‘Gone away! Tally-ho!' as the dhow turned, and Clinton glanced at him with a conspiratory grin.

‘She's a slaver. Apart from the stink, that turn-away proves it beyond doubt.'

Robyn strained forward to watch the filthy little vessel, with its discoloured and patched sail, the unpainted timbers of the hull striped with zebra stripes of human excrement and other wastes. It was her first view of a slaver actually carrying on its grisly trade, and she felt herself filled with a new purpose; she had come so far for this moment, and she tried to capture every detail of it all for her journal.

‘Mr Denham, give him a gun, if you please,' ordered Clinton.

The bow-chaser thudded, but the dhow held to her new course.

‘Be ready to round up and send the boat away on the instant.' Clinton's excitement had given way to obvious anxiety. He turned to look across at his boarding party. They had been issued with cutlass and pistol, and waited now in the waist under the command of a young ensign.

Clinton would dearly have liked to command the boarding-party himself but his arm was still in its sling and the stitches still in the wound. To go aboard a dhow in a rough sea, and fight its crew required both hands and the agility which his wound denied him. Reluctantly he had put Ferris in charge of the boarders.

Now he looked back at the dhow, and his expression was grim.

‘He is going to beach.'

They were all silent now, staring ahead, watching the slaver run in towards the land.

‘But there is a coral reef.' Robyn spoke for them all, pointing to the black points that broke the surface a quarter of a mile short of the land itself, they looked like a necklace of sharks' teeth, and the surf broke and swirled about them as it was driven in upon the trade wind.

‘Yes,' Clinton agreed. ‘They will run it up on the coral and escape across the lagoon.'

‘But, what about the slaves?' Robyn asked, horrified, and nobody answered her.

Black Joke
rushed on purposefully, but with the wind almost dead astern the dhow trained her long boom around to go on to her best point of sailing. The boom was longer than the hull itself, and the huge triangular mainsail bulged far out, almost touching the surface of the water as she hurled down upon the reef.

‘We may just cut her off,' Zouga said loudly, but he did not have the seaman's eye for bearing and speed, and Clinton Codrington shook his head angrily.

‘Not this time.'

But it was very finely run. Clinton held his course up until the very last moment, and the dhow passed a mere two hundred yards ahead of his bows. So close that they could clearly make out the features of the helmsman on the vessel's poop deck, a skinny old Arab in long, flowing robe and with the tasselled fez on his head that declared that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. On his belt glittered the gold filigree hilt of the short curved dagger of a sheikh, and his long scraggling white beard fluttered in the wind as he leaned on the long tiller and turned his head to watch the high black hull bearing down on him.

‘I could put a bullet through the bastard,' Zouga growled.

‘It's too late for that,' Clinton told him, for the dhow had passed beneath their bows and the gun boat was as close to the menacing fangs of coral as she dared go. Clinton called to his quartermaster at the gunboat's wheel, ‘Heave to! And bring her head to wind.' Then, spinning on his heel, ‘Away, the boarding-party!'

There was a squeal of davits as the crowded whaler dropped out of sight towards the choppy green sea alongside, but already the dhow was pitching wildly in the lines of seething white surf that guarded the reef.

It was two days since that dead flat calm had broken, and since then the trades had worked up a goodly swell. It came sweeping in across the inshore channel, in low green humps with dark wind-scarred backs, but as soon as they felt the tilt of the land, they peaked up eagerly, the crests turning opaque as green jelly, shivering and wobbling, and then collapsing on themselves and surging in tumultuous white water up on to the black fangs of the reef.

The dhow caught one of the taller swells, threw up her stern and went racing down upon it like a surf boat, with the skinny old Arab at the tiller prancing like a trained monkey on the stick of the tiller to hold her in the wave, but the dhow was not built for this work, and she dug her shoulder rebelliously into the sliding, roaring chute of green water, breaching so fiercely to the wave that the water poured aboard her in a green wall and she wallowed broadside, half swamped before she took the reef with a force that snapped off her single mast at deck level and sent yard and sail and rigging crashing over the side.

In an instant she was transformed into a broken hulk, and clearly the watchers on
Black Joke
's deck could hear the crackle and rending of her bottom timbers.

‘There they go!' Clinton muttered angrily, as the dhow's crew began to abandon her, leaping over the side and using the swells to carry them over the reef into the quieter waters of the lagoon, thrashing and kicking until the beach shelved up beneath them.

They saw the old Arab steersman amongst the survivors. He waded ashore, beard and robe plastered against his body with seawater, and then lifted his robes to his waist, exposing skinny legs and shrunken buttocks as he scampered up the white beach with the agility of a goat and disappeared amongst the palm groves.

Black Joke
's whaler pulled swiftly into the first line of breakers, the Ensign in the stern peering over his shoulder to judge the surf, and then catching his wave taking her in with a rush, swinging sharply into the lee of the dhow's stranded hull where there was calmer water.

They watched the Ensign and four of his men go up over the side, pistols and cutlasses drawn, but by this time the last of the Arab crew were staggering up the beach and into the sanctuary of the palm grove a quarter of a mile away across the lagoon.

The Ensign led his men below decks, and they waited on
Black Joke
's quarterdeck, watching the abandoned dhow through the telescope. A minute passed before the Ensign appeared on deck again. He crossed quickly to the dhow's rail and leaned against it to vomit over the side, then straightened up and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, before shouting an order down to the oarsmen in the whaler.

Immediately the whaler shot out from the lee of the hull, and pulled lustily back through the surf towards
Black Joke
.

The boatswain came in through the entry port, and knuckled his forehead to his captain.

‘Mr Ferris's compliments, sir, and he needs a carpenter to get the slave decks open, and two good men with bolt cutters for the chains.' He had gabbled this out on a single breath, and he paused to refill his lungs. ‘Mr Ferris says as how it's fierce bad below decks, and some of them is trapped – and he needs the doctor—'

‘I'm ready to go,' Robyn cut in.

‘Wait,' Clinton snapped, but Robyn had gathered her skirts and run.

‘If my sister goes, I'm going too.'

‘Very well, then, Ballantyne, I'm obliged for your assistance,' Clinton nodded. ‘Tell Ferris we have an incoming tide, full moon tonight, so it will make springs. There is a twenty-two foot tidal fall on this coast. He will have less than an hour in which to work.'

Robyn appeared on deck again, lugging her black leather valise, and she had exchanged skirts for breeches once more. The seamen on deck gawked at her legs curiously, but she ignored them and hurried to the ship's side. The boatswain gave her a hand and she scrambled down into the whaler with Zouga carrying her valise behind her.

The ride in through the surf was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time; the whaler tilted forward at an alarming angle, the water hissing and creaming alongside, with a belly-swooping rush that ended alongside the dhow's heavily canted side.

The deck was running with water and listed so steeply that Robyn had to crawl up it on her hands and knees, and each time a wave struck the hull, it quivered and shook and more water came streaming down over the deck.

The Ensign and his boarding party had ripped the hatches off the main hold and as she reached them, Robyn gagged and choked with the solid stench that came out of that square opening. She had believed herself hardened to the smell of death and corruption, but never had she experienced anything like this.

‘Did you bring the bolt cutters?' the Ensign demanded, white-faced with nausea and horror.

The bolt cutters were heavy duty shears, used for cutting the shrouds and halyards from a dismasted vessel. Two men wielded them now, as they lifted a bunch of small black bodies through the hatch, all of them fastened together at wrist and ankle by the clanking black steel links. It reminded Robyn of the cut-out paper dolls she had amused herself with as a child, fashioning with scissors a single figure from the folded sheet, and then pulling out a chain of identical dolls. The cutters crunched through the light chain and the limp little bodies fell apart.

‘They are children,' she cried out aloud, and the men around her worked in grim silence, dragging them out of the hatch, cutting them free and dropping them on to the tilted wet deck.

Robyn seized the first of them, a skeletal stick figure, crusted and streaked with dried filth, vomit and faeces, head lolling as she lifted it into her lap.

‘No,' There was no life. The eyeballs had dried already. She let the head drop and a seaman dragged it away.

‘No,' and ‘No,' and ‘No again.' Some of them were already in an advanced state of putrefaction; at a word from the Ensign, the seamen began dropping the wasted corpses over the side, to make room for those still coming up from below.

Robyn found her first live one, there was feeble pulse and fluttering breath, but it did not need a physician's instinct to tell that the hold on life was tenuous. She worked swiftly, apportioning her time to where the chance of life seemed greater.

Another taller wave struck the dhow, and it tilted sharply, the timbers crackled and snapped deep inside her.

‘Tides flooding. Work faster,' shouted the Ensign. They were into the hull now. Robyn could hear the thud of sledge hammers and the rip of irons as they began to tear the slave decks out of her.

Zouga was in there, stripped to the waist, leading the attack on the wooden barricades. He was an officer, with the easy way of command and his natural leadership was swiftly acknowledged by the seamen around him.

The hubbub reminded Robyn of a rookery at sundown, the shrieks of the returning birds and the answering cries from the chicks in the nests. The mass of black girls were aroused from the lethargy of approaching death by the dhow's wild antics, the crash of breaking timbers and the flood of cold salt water into the hold.

Some of those lying in the bilges were already drowning as the hold flooded, and some of them had realized that there was a rescue team aboard, and cried aloud with the last strength of waning hope.

Alongside the slaver, the whaler was moored, and she was almost filled with the wasted bodies in which some life still burned, while on the surface of the lagoon bobbed a hundred or more corpses with gas-swollen bellies like the corks on a fishing-net.

‘Take them to the ship,' the Ensign shouted down to his oarsmen in the whaler, ‘and come back for more.' As he spoke, another white-crested wave struck the dhow solidly and she heeled, but she was pinned down by the spikes of coral driven through her bottom timbers, otherwise she would have turned turtle.

‘Robyn!' Zouga shouted at her from the hatch. ‘We need you!'

For a moment she did not even glance at him, but shook her head at the sailor beside her.

‘No, she's gone.' Expressionlessly the sailor picked up the frail body and dumped it over the side.

Then Robyn scrambled up to the hatch and dropped through it.

It was a descent into the pit, dark after the brilliant noontide, so that she paused for a moment to let her vision adjust.

The tilting deck beneath her feet was slippery with human waste, so that she had to cling for a handhold.

The air was so thick that for a minute she nearly panicked, as though she were being smothered by a stinking damp pillow. She almost fought her way back into the sweet sunlight, but then she forced herself to take a gulp of it, and though her guts heaved and she tasted the bitter flooding into the back of her throat, she kept it down.

Then her own discomfort was forgotten as she made out the chaos about her.

‘That last wave,' Zouga grunted as he steadied her with an arm about her shoulder, ‘the decks have collapsed.'

Like a house of cards they had folded in upon each other, raw splinters of timber thrusting up out of the gloom, baulks crossed like the blades of a scissors, with small dark bodies trapped in the jaws, others crushed by the fallen beams, squashed so that they were no longer recognizable as human, others dangling head down on their ankle-chains, suspended in space, writhing weakly as crippled insects, or hanging quietly, swinging to the dhow's movements.

‘Oh, sweet Mother of God, where to begin,' Robyn whispered. She let go her handhold, starting forward and her feet shot out from under her on the slick coated deck, and she went plunging down into the hold.