Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (полная версия книги .TXT) 📗

"Look more like gypsies and beggars than English pirates to me."

"I'm saving my guilders. I'll not be bidding when that lot go up on the slave block."

"They don't sell pirates, they burn them."

"They don't look much, but at least they'll give us all some sport. We haven't had a really good execution since the slave revolt."

"There's Stadige Jan over there, come to look them over. I'll warrant he'll have a few lessons to teach these corsairs." Hal turned his head in the direction the speaker pointed to where a tall burgher in dark, drab clothing and a puritan Hat stood a head above the crowd. He looked at Hal with pale expressionless yellow eyes.

"What do you think of these beauties, Stadige Jan? Will you be able to get them to sing a pretty tune for us?"

Hal sensed the repulsion and fascination this man held for those around him. None stood too close to him, and they looked at him in such a way that Hal instinctively knew that this was the executioner of whom they had been warned. He felt his flesh crawl as he looked into those faded eyes.

"Why do you think that they call him Slow John?" he asked Aboli, from the side of his mouth.

"Let us hope we never have to find out," Aboli replied! as they passed where the tall, cadaverous figure stood.

Small boys, both brown and white, danced beside the column of chained men, jeering and pelting them with pebbles and filth from the open gutters that carried the sewage from the town down to the sea front. Encouraged by this example a pack of mongrel dogs snapped at their heels. The adults in the crowd were turned out in their best clothes for such an unusual occasion and laughed at the antics of the children. Some of the women held sachets of herbs to their noses when they smelt the bedraggled file of prisoners, shuddering in horrified fascination.

"Oh! What dreadful creatures!"

"Look at those cruel and savage faces."

"I have heard that they feed those Negroes on human flesh."

Aboli contorted his face and rolled his eyes at them. The tattoos on his cheeks stood proud, and his great white teeth were bared in a fearsome grin. The women squealed with delicious terror, and their little daughters hid their faces in their mothers" skirts as he passed.

At the rear of the crowd, hanging back from the company of their betters, taking no part in the sport of baiting the captives, were those men and women who, Hal guessed, must be the domestic slaves of the burghers. The slaves in the crowd ranged in colour from the anthracite black of Africa to the amber and gold skins of the Orient. Most were simply dressed in the cast-off clothing of their owners, although some of the prettier women wore the flamboyant finery that marked them as the favourite playthings of their masters.

They looked on quietly as the seamen trudged past in their clanking chains, and there was no sound of laughter among them. Rather, Hal sensed a certain empathy behind their closed impassive expressions for they were captives also. Just before they entered the gate to the fort, Hal noticed one girl in particular at the back of the crowd. She had climbed up on a pile of masonry blocks for a better view and stood higher than the intervening ranks of spectators. This was not the only reason why Hal had singled her out.

She was more beautiful than he had ever expected any woman to be. She was a flower of a girl, with thick glossy black hair and dark eyes that seemed too large for her delicate oval face. For one moment their eyes met over the heads of the crowd, and it seemed to Hal that she tried to pass him some message that he was unable to grasp. He knew only that she felt compassion for him, and that she shared in his suffering. Then he lost sight of her as they were marched through the gateway into the courtyard of the fort.

The image of her stayed with him over the dreadful days that followed. Gradually it began to supersede the memory of Katinka, and in the nights sometimes returned to give him the strength he needed to endure. He felt that if there were but one person of such loveliness and tenderness out there, beyond the gaunt stone walls, who cared for his abject condition, then it was worth fighting on.

In the courtyard of the fort, a military armourer struck off their shackles. A shore party under the command of Sam Bowles stood by to collect the discarded chains to take back aboard the Gull. "I will miss you all, my shipmates." Sam grinned. The lower decks of the old Gull will be empty and lonely without your smiling faces and your good cheer." He gave them a salute from the gateway as he led his shore party away. "I hope they look after you as well as your good friend Sam Bowles did. But, never fear, I'll be at the Parade when you give your last performance there."

When Sam was gone, Hal looked around the courtyard. He saw that the fortress had been designed on a substantial scale. As part of his training his father had made him study the science of land fortifications, so he recognized the tlassical defensive layout of the stone walls and redoubts. He realized that once these works were completed, it would take an army equipped with a full siege train to reduce them.

However, the work was less than half finished, and on the landward side of the fort or, as their new gaolers referred to it, bet kasteel, the castle, there were merely open foundations from which the massive stone walls would one day rise. Yet it was clear that the work was being hastened along. Almost certainly the two recent Anglo-Dutch wars had imparted this impetus. Both Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, during the interregnum, and King Charles, son of the man he had beheaded, could claim some credit for the frenzy of construction that was going on around them. They had forcibly reminded the Dutch of the vulnerability of their far-flung colonies. The half-finished walls swarmed with hundreds of workmen, and the courtyard in which they stood was piled with building timber and blocks of dressed masonry hewn from the mountain that loomed over it all.

As dangerous captives they were kept apart from the other prisoners. They were marched from the courtyard down the short spiral staircase below the south wall of the fort. The stone blocks that lined floor, vaulted roof and walls glistened with moisture that had seeped in from the surrounding waterlogged soil. Even on such a sunny day in autumn the temperature in these dank forbidding surroundings made them shiver.