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

Suddenly his face lightened, he opened his eyes and scribbled another number on the slate. He worked for a nimite longer, translating the angle of the noon sun into degrees of latitude. Then he looked up triumphantly. "Thirty-four degrees forty-two minutes south latitude."

His father took the slate from his hand, checked his figures, then handed it back to him. He inclined his head slightly in agreement. "Close enough, if your sun sight was true. Now what of your longitude?"

The determination of exact longitude was a puzzle that no man had ever solved. There was no timepiece, hourglass or clock that could be carried aboard a ship and still be sufficiently accurate to keep track of the earth's majestic revolutions. Only the traverse board, which hung beside the compass binnacle, could guide Hal's calculation. Now he studied the pegs that the helmsman had placed in the holes about the rose of the compass each time he had altered his heading during the previous watch. Hal added and averaged these values, then plotted them on the chart in his father's cabin. It was only a crude approximation of longitude and, predictably, his father demurred. "I would have given it a touch more of east, for with the weed on her bottom and the water in her bilges she pays off heavily to leeward but mark her so in the log."

Hal looked up in astonishment. This was a momentous day indeed. No other hand but his father's had ever written in the leather-bound log that sat beside the Bible on the lid of the sea-chest.

While his father watched, he opened the log and, for a minute, stared at the pages filled with his father's elegant, flowing script, and the beautiful drawings of men, ships and landfalls that adorned the margins. His father was a gifted artist. With trepidation Hal dipped the quill in the gold inkwell that had once belonged to the captain of the Heerlycke Nacht, one of the Dutch East India Company's galleons that his father had seized. He wiped the superfluous drops from the nib, test they splatter the sacred page. Then he trapped the tip of his tongue between his teeth and wrote with infinite care: "One bell in the afternoon watch, this 3rd day of September in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 1667. Position 34 degrees 42 minutes South, 20 degrees 5 minutes East. African mainland in sight from the masthead bearing due North. "Not daring to add more, and relieved that he had not marred the page with scratchings; or splutterings, he set aside the quill and sanded his well formed letters with pride. He knew his hand was fair though perhaps not as fair as his father's, he conceded as he compared them.

Sir Francis took up the pen he had laid aside and leaning over his shoulder wrote: "This forenoon Ensign Henry Courtney severely wounded in an unseemly brawl." Then, beside the entry he swiftly sketched a telling caricature of Hal with his swollen ear sticking out lopsidedly and the knot of the stitch like a bow in a maiden's hair.

Hal gagged on his own suppressed laughter, but when he looked up he saw the twinkle in his father's green eyes. Sir Francis laid one hand on the boy's shoulder, which was as close as he would ever come to an embrace, and squeezed it as he said, "Ned Tyler will be waiting to instruct you in the lore of rigging and sail trimming. Do not keep him waiting." it was late when Hal made his way forward along the upper deck, it was still light enough for him to pick his way with ease over the sleeping bodies of the off-duty watch. The night sky was filled with stars, such an array as must dazzle the eyes of any northerner. This night Hal had no eyes for them. He was exhausted to the point where he reeled on his feet.

Aboli had kept a place for him in the bows, under the lee of the forward cannon where they were out of the wind. He had spread a straw-filled pallet on the deck and Hal tumbled gratefully onto it. There were no quarters set aside for the crew, and the men slept wherever they could find a space on the open deck. In these warm southern nights they all preferred the topsides to the stuffy lower deck. They lay in rows, shoulder to shoulder, but the proximity of so much stinking humanity was natural to Hal, and even their snoring and mutterings could not keep him long from sleep. He moved a little closer to Aboli. This was how he had slept each night for the last ten years and there was comfort in the huge figure beside him.

"Your father is a great chief among lesser chieftains, Aboli murmured. "He is a warrior and he knows the secrets of the sea and the heavens. The stars are his children."

"I know all this is true," Hal answered, in the same language.

"It was he who bade me take the sword to you this day," Aboli confessed.

Hal raised himself on one elbow, and stared at the dark figure beside him. "My father wanted you to cut me?" he asked incredulously.

"You are not as other lads. If your life is hard now, it will be harder still. You are chosen. One day you must take from his shoulders the great cloak of the red cross. You must be worthy of it."

Hal sank back on his pallet, and stared up at the stars. "What if I do not want this thing?" he asked.

"It is yours. You do not have a choice. The one Nautonnier Knight chooses the Knight to follow him. It has been so for almost four hundred years. Your only escape from it is death."

Hal was silent for so long that Aboli thought sleep had overcome him, but then he whispered, "How do you know these things?"

"From your father."

"Are you also a Knight of our Order?"

Aboli laughed softly. "My skin is too dark and my gods are alien.

I could never be chosen."

"Aboli, I am afraid."

"All men are afraid. It is for those of us of the warrior blood to subdue fear."

"You will never leave me, will you, Aboli?"

"I will stay at your side as long as you need me." "Then I am not so afraid."

Hours later Aboli woke him with a hand on his shoulder from a deep and dreamless sleep. "Eight bells in the middle watch, Gundwane." He used Hal's nickname: in his own language it meant "Bush Rat'. It was not meant pejoratively, but was the affectionate name he had bestowed on the four-year-old who had been placed in his care over a decade before.