Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur - Страница 39

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"This is your punishment, you dirty, shameless boy."

She could hear his fingernails scratching at the wood, as her hand began to fly back and forth along the full length of him as though she were working the shuttle of a weaver's loom.

It happened sooner than she had expected. The hot glutinous spurting against her sensitive breasts was so powerful that it startled her, but she did not pull away.

After a time, she said, "Do not think that I have forgiven you yet for what you have done to me. Your penitence has only just begun. Do you understand?"

"Yes." His voice was ragged and hoarse.

"You must make a secret opening in this wall." She tapped the bulkhead softly with her knuckle. "Loosen this panel so that you can come through to me, and I can punish you more severely. Do you understandT "Yes, he panted.

"You must conceal the opening. No one else must know."

"It is my observation," Sir Francis told Hal, "that filth and sickness have a peculiar affinity, one for the other. I know not why this should be, but it is so."

He was responding to his son's cautious enquiry as to why it was necessary to go through the onerous and odious business of fumigating the ship. With all the cargo out of her and most of the crew billeted ashore Sir Francis was determined to try to rid the hull of vermin. It seemed that every crack in the woodwork swarmed with lice, and the holds were overrun with rats. The galley was littered with the black pellets of their droppings, and Ned Tyler had reported finding some of the stinking bloated carcasses rotting in the water casks.

Since the day of their arrival in the lagoon a shore party had been burning cordwood and leaching the ashes to obtain the lye, and Sir Francis had sent Aboli into the forest to search for those special herbs that his tribe used to keep their huts clear of the loathsome vermin. Now a party of seamen waited on the foredeck, armed with buckets of the caustic substance.

"I want every crack and joint of the hull scrubbed out, but be careful," Sir Francis warned them. "The corrosive fluid will burn the skin from your hands-" He broke off abruptly. Every head on board turned towards the distant rocky heads, and every man upon the beach paused in what he was doing and cocked his head to listen.

The flat boom of a cannon shot echoed from the cliffs at the entrance to the lagoon and reverberated across the still waters of the wide bay.

"It's the alarm signal from the lookout on the heads, Captain," shouted Ned Tyler, and pointed across the water to where a puff of white gunsmoke still hung over one of the emplacements that guarded the entrance. As they stared, a tiny black ball soared to the top of the makeshift flag-pole on the crest of the western headland then unfurled into a red swallow-tail. It was the general alarm signal, and could only mean that a strange sail was in sight.

"Beat to quarters, Master Daniel!" Sir Francis ordered crisply. "Unlock the weapons chests and arm the crew. I am going across to the entrance. Four men to row the longboat and the rest take up their battle stations ashore."

Although his face remained expressionless, inwardly he was furious that he should have allowed himself to be surprised like this, with the masts un stepped and all the cannon out of the hull. He turned to Ned Tyler. "I want the prisoners taken ashore and placed under your strictest guard, well away from the beach. If they learn that there is a strange ship off the coast, it might give them the notion to try to attract attention."

Oliver rushed up the companionway with Sir Francis's cloak over his arm. While he spread it over his master's shoulders, Sir Francis finished issuing his orders. Then he turned and strode to the entry port where the longboat lay alongside and Hal was waiting, where his father could not ignore him, fretting that he might not be ordered to join him.

"Very well, then," Sir Francis snapped. "Come with me. I might have need of those eyes of yours." And Hal slid down the mooring line ahead, and cast off the moment his father stepped into the boat.

"Pull till you burst your guts!" Sir Francis told the men at the oars and the boat skittered across the lagoon. Sir Francis sprang over the side and waded ashore below the cliff with the water slopping over the tops of his high boots. Hal had to run to catch up with him on the elephant path.

They came out on the top, three hundred feet above the lagoon, looking out over the ocean. Although the wind that buffeted them on the heights had kicked the sea into a welter of breaking waves, Hal's sharp eyes picked out the brighter flecks that persisted among the ephemeral whitecaps ever before the lookout could point them out to him.

Sir Francis stared through his telescope. "What do you make of her? "he demanded of Hal.

"There are two ships," Hal told him.

"I see but one no, wait! You are right. There is another, a little further to the east. Is she a frigate, do you think?" "Three masts," Hal shaded his eyes, "and full rigged. Yes, I'd say she's a frigate. The other vessel is too far off. I cannot tell her type." It pained Hal to admit it, and he strained his eyes for some other detail. "Both ships are standing in directly towards us."

"If they are intending to head for Good Hope, then they must go about very soon," Sir Francis murmured, never lowering the telescope. They watched anxiously.

"They could be a pair of Dutch East Indiamen still making their we stings Hal hazarded hopefully.

"Then why are they pushing so close into a lee shore?" Sir Francis asked. "No, it looks very much as though they are headed straight for the entrance." He snapped the telescope closed. "Come along!" At a trot he led the way back down the path to where the longboat waited on the beach. "Master Daniel, row across to the batteries on the far side. Take command there. Do not open fire until I do They watched the longboat move swiftly over the lagoon and Daniel's men drag it into a narrow cove where it was concealed from view. Then Sir Francis strode along the gun emplacements in the cliff and gave a curt set of orders to the men who crouched over the culver ins with the burning slow-match.

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