Golden Lion - Wilbur Smith

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mind remained calm. Hard-fought experience had taught her that the key to survival was maintaining the ability to concentrate and calculate while others around were letting rage, fear or panic cloud their minds. Examine the enemy. Look him in the eyes. Read his mind.

      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

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