Birds of Prey (71 page)

Llewellyn threw back his head and gazed up the mainmast at the tiny figures that spread out along the high yard and wrestled with the reefed canvas. He recognized Vincent easily by his lean
athletic form and his dark hair whipping in the wind.

‘Bravely done thus far,’ Llewellyn whispered, ‘but hurry, lad. Give me a scrap of canvas to steer her by.’

As he said it the studding-sail flew out and filled with a crack like a musket shot. For a dreadful moment Llewellyn thought the canvas might be shredded in the gale, but it filled and held and
immediately he felt the ship’s motion change.

‘Sweet Mother Mary! We might make it yet!’ he croaked, through a throat scoured and rough with salt. ‘Hard over!’ he called to the helm, and the
Golden Bough
answered willingly and put her bows across the wind.

Like an arrow from a longbow, she drove straight at the western headland as though to hurl herself ashore, but her hull slid away through the water and the angle of her bows altered. The passage
opened full before her, and as she passed into the lee of the land she steadied, darted between the heads, caught the tide, which was at full flow, and sped upon it through the channel into the
quiet lagoon where she was protected from the full force of the storm.

Llewellyn gazed at the green forested shores in wonder and relief. Then he started and pointed ahead. ‘There’s another ship at anchor here already!’

Beside him Schreuder shaded his eyes from the slashing gusts of wind that eddied around the cliffs.

‘I know that vessel!’ he cried. ‘I know her well. ’Tis Lord Cumbrae’s ship. ’Tis the
Gull of Moray
!’

‘E
land!’ whispered Althuda softly, and Hal recognized the Dutch name for elk, but these creatures were unlike any of the great red
deer of the north that he had ever seen. They were enormous, larger even than the cattle that his uncle Thomas had raised on the High Weald estate.

The three of them, Hal, Althuda and Aboli, lay belly down in a small hollow filled with rank grass. The herd was strung out among the open grove of sweet-thorn trees ahead. Hal counted fifty-two
bulls, cows and calves together. The bulls were ponderous and fat so that, as they walked, their dewlaps swung from side to side and the flesh on their bellies and quarters quivered like that of a
jellyfish. At each pace there came a strange clicking sound like breaking twigs.

‘It is their knees that make that noise,’ Aboli explained in Hal’s ear. ‘The Nkulu Kulu, the great god of all things, punished them when they boasted of being the
greatest of all the antelope. He gave them this affliction so that the hunter would always hear them from afar.’

Hal smiled at the quaint belief, but then Aboli told him something else that turned off that smile. ‘I know these creatures, they were highly prized by the hunters of my tribe, for a bull
such as that one at the front of the herd carries a mass of white fat around his heart that two men cannot carry.’ For months now none of them had tasted fat, for all the game they had
managed to kill was devoid of it. They all craved it, and Sukeena had warned Hal that for lack of it they must soon sicken and fall prey to disease.

Hal studied the herd bull as he browsed on one of the sweet-thorn trees, hooking down the higher branches with his massive spiralling horns. Unlike his cows, who were a soft and velvet brown,
striped with white across their shoulders, the bull had turned grey-blue with age and there was a tuft of darker hair on his forehead between the bases of his great horns.

‘Leave the bull,’ Aboli told Hal. ‘His flesh will be coarse and tough. See that cow behind him? She will be sweet and tender as a virgin, and her fat will turn to honey in your
mouth.’ Against Aboli’s advice, which Hal knew was always the best available, he felt the urge of the hunter attract him to the great bull.

‘If we are to cross the river safely, then we need as much meat as we can carry. Each of us will fire at his own animal,’ he decided. ‘I will take the bull, you and Althuda
pick younger animals.’ He began to snake forward on his belly, and the other two followed him.

In these last days since they had descended the escarpment they had found that the game upon these plains had little fear of man. It seemed that the dreaded upright bipod silhouette he presented
had no especial terrors for them, and they allowed the hunters to approach within certain musket shot before moving away.

Thus it must have been in Eden before the Fall, Hal thought, as he closed with the herd bull. The soft breeze favoured him, and the tendrils of blue smoke from their slow-match drifted away from
the herd.

He was so close now that he could make out the individual eyelashes that framed the huge liquid dark eyes of the bull, and the red and gold legs of the ticks that clung in bunches to the soft
skin between his forelegs. The bull fed, delicately wiping the young green leaves from the twigs between the thorns with its blue tongue.

On each side of him two of his young cows fed from the same thorn tree. One had a calf at heel while the other was full-bellied and gravid. Hal turned his head slowly and looked at the men who
lay beside him. He indicated the cows to them with a slow movement of his eyes, and Aboli nodded and raised his musket.

Once more Hal concentrated all his attention on the great bull, and traced the line of the scapula beneath the skin that covered the shoulder, fixing a spot in all that broad expanse of smooth
blue-grey hide at which to aim. He raised the musket and held the butt into the notch of his shoulder, sensing the men on either side of him do the same.

As the bull took another pace forward he held his fire. It stopped again and raised its head, on the thick dewlapped neck, to full stretch, laying the massive twisted horns across its back,
reaching up over two fathoms high to the topmost sprigs of the thorn tree where the sweetest bunches of lacy green leaves grew.

Hal fired, and heard the detonation of the other muskets on either side of him blend with the concussion of his own weapon. A swirling screen of white gunsmoke blotted out his forward view. He
let the musket drop, sprang to his feet and raced out to his side to get a clear view around the smoke bank. He saw that one of the cows was down, kicking and struggling as her lifeblood spurted
from the wound in her throat, while the other was staggering away, her near front leg swinging loosely from the broken bone. Already Aboli was running after her, his drawn cutlass in his right
hand.

The rest of the herd was rushing away in a tight brown mass down the valley, the calves falling behind their dams. However, the bull had left the herd, sure sign that the lead ball had struck
him grievously. He was striding away up the gentle slope of the low, grass-covered hillock ahead. But his gait was short and hampered, and as he changed direction, exposing his great shoulder to
Hal’s view, the blood that poured down his flank was red as a banner in the sunlight and bubbling with the air from his punctured lungs.

Hal started to run, speeding away over the tussocked grass. The injury to his leg was by now only a perfectly healed scar, glossy blue and ridged. The long trek over the mountains and plains had
strengthened that limb so that his stride was full and lithe. A cable’s length or more ahead, the bull was drawing away from him, leaving a haze of fine red dust hanging in the air, but then
its wound began to tell and the spilling blood painted a glistening trail on the silver grass to mark his passing.

Hal closed the gap until he was only a dozen strides behind the mountainous beast. It sensed his pursuit and turned at bay. Hal expected a furious charge, a lowering of the great tufted head and
a levelling of those spiral horns. He came up short, facing the antelope, and whipped his cutlass from the scabbard, prepared to defend himself.

The bull looked at him with huge puzzled eyes, dark and swimming with the agony of its approaching death. Blood dripped from its nostrils and the soft blue tongue lolled from the side of its
mouth. It made no move to attack him, or to defend itself, and Hal saw no malice or anger in its gaze.

‘Forgive me,’ he whispered, as he circled the beast, waiting for an opening, and felt the slow, sad waves of remorse break over his heart to watch the agony he had inflicted upon
this magnificent animal. Suddenly he rushed forward and thrust with the steel. The stroke of the expert swordsman buried the blade full length in the bull’s flesh, and it bucked and whirled
away, snatching the hilt out of Hal’s hand. But the steel had found the heart and, its legs folded gently under it, the bull sagged wearily onto its knees. With one low groan it toppled over
onto its side and died.

Hal took hold of the cutlass hilt and withdrew the long, smeared blade, then chose a rock near the carcass and went to sit there. He felt sad yet strangely elated. He was puzzled and confused by
these contrary emotions, and he dwelt on the beauty and majesty of the beast that he had reduced to this sad heap of dead flesh in the grass.

A hand was laid on his shoulder, and Aboli rumbled softly, ‘Only the true hunter knows this anguish of the kill, Gundwane. That is why my tribe, who are hunters, sing and dance to give
thanks to propitiate the spirits of the game they have slain.’

‘Teach me to sing me this song and to dance this dance, Aboli,’ Hal said, and Aboli began to chant in his deep and beautiful voice. When he had picked up the rhythm Hal joined in the
repetitive chorus, praising the beauty and the grace of the prey and thanking it for dying so that the hunter and his tribe might live.

Aboli began to dance, shuffling, stamping and singing in a circle about the great carcass, and Hal danced with him. His chest was choked and his eyes were blurred when, at last, the song ended
and they sat together in the slanting yellow sunlight to watch the tiny column of fugitives, led by Sukeena, coming towards them from far across the plain.

B
efore darkness fell Hal set them to building the stockade, and he checked carefully to make certain that the gaps in the breastwork were closed
with branches of sweet-thorn.

They carried the quarters and shoulders of eland meat and stacked them in the stockade where scavengers could not plunder them. They left only the scraps and the offal, the severed hoofs and
heads, the mounds of guts and intestines stuffed with the pulp of half-digested leaves and grass. As they moved away the vultures hopped in or sailed down on great pinions, and the hyena and jackal
rushed forward to gobble and howl and squabble over this charnel array.

After they had all eaten their fill of succulent eland steaks, Hal allocated to Sukeena and himself the middle watch that started at midnight. Though it was the most onerous, for it was the time
when man’s vitality was at its lowest ebb, they loved to have the night to themselves.

While the rest of their band slept, they huddled at the entrance to the stockade under a single fur kaross, with a musket laid close to Hal’s right hand. After they had made soft and
silent love so as not to disturb the others, they watched the sky and spoke in whispers as the stars made their remote and ancient circuits high above.

‘Tell me true, my love, what have you read in those stars? What lies ahead for you and me? How many sons will you bear me?’ Her hand, cupped in his, lay still, and he felt her whole
body stiffen. She did not reply and he had to ask her again. ‘Why will you never tell me what you see in the future? I know you have drawn our horoscopes, for often when you thought I was
sleeping I have seen you studying and writing in your little blue book.’

She laid her fingers on his lips. ‘Be quiet, my lord. There are many things in this existence that are best hidden from us. For this night and tomorrow let us love each other with all our
hearts and all our strength. Let us draw the most from every day that God grants us.’

‘You trouble me, my sweet. Will there be no sons, then?’

She was silent again as they watched a shooting star leave its brief fiery trail though the heavens and at last perish before their eyes. Then she sighed, and whispered, ‘Yes, I will give
you a son but—’ She bit off the other words that rose to her tongue.

‘There is great sadness in your voice.’ His tone was disquieted. ‘And, yet, the thought that you will bear my son gives me joy.’

‘The stars can be malevolent,’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes they fulfil their promises in a manner that we do not expect, or relish. Of one thing alone I am certain, that the
fates have selected for you a labour of great consequence. It has been ordained thus from the day of your birth.’

‘My father spoke to me of this same task.’ Hal brooded on the old prophecy. ‘I am willing to face my destiny, but I need you to help and sustain me as you have done so often
already.’

She did not answer his plea, but said, ‘The task they have set for you involves a vow and a talisman of mystery and power.’

‘Will you be with me, you and our son?’ he insisted.

‘If I can guide you in the direction you must go, I will do so with all my heart and all my strength.’

‘But will you come with me?’ he pleaded.

‘I will come with you as far as the stars will permit it,’ she promised. ‘More than that I do not know and cannot say.’

‘But—’ he started, but she reached up with her mouth and covered his lips with her own to stop him speaking.

‘No more! You must ask no more,’ she warned him. ‘Now join your body with mine once again and leave the business of the stars to the stars alone.’

Towards the end of their watch, when the Seven Sisters had sunk below the hills and the Bull stood high and proud, they lay in each other’s arms, still talking softly to fight off the
drowsiness that crept upon them. They had become accustomed to the night sounds of the wilderness, from the liquid warble of night birds and the yapping, yodelling chorus of the little red jackals
to the hideous shrieking and cackling of the hyena packs at the remains of the carcasses, but suddenly there came a sound that chilled them to the depths of their souls.

It was the sound of all the devils of hell, a monstrous roaring and grunting that stilled all lesser creation, rolled against the hills and came back to them in a hundred echoes. Involuntarily
Sukeena clung to him and cried aloud, ‘Oh, Gundwane, what terrible creature is that?’