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.
he 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 repl
ied, 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,