Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (версия книг TXT) 📗
"God bless you, Captain," Ned Tyler called out. "You were as good a man as ever hoisted sail!" There was a hoarse and ragged cheer from the others, and one of Hugo Barnard's huge black hounds bayed mournfully, a strangely harrowing sound.
Out on the Parade the crowd waited around the gibbet in tense and expectant silence. Every living soul in the colony seemed to have answered the summons. Above their heads Slow John waited high on the platform. He wore his leather apron, and his head was covered with the mask of his office, the mask of death. His eyes and his mouth were all that showed through the slits in the black cloth.
Led by the drummer the procession marched with slow and measured tread towards him, and Slow John waited with his arms folded over his chest. Even he turned his head as the Governor's carriage came down the avenue through the gardens, and crossed the Parade. Slow John bowed to the Governor and his wife as Aboli guided the six grey horses to the foot of the scaffold and brought the vehicle to a halt.
Slow John's yellow eyes met those of Katinka through the slits in his black head cloth He bowed again, this time to her directly. She knew, without words being spoken, that he was dedicating the sacrifice to her, to his Goddess Kali.
"He has no reason to act so grand. The oaf has made a botch of the job so far," van de Velde said grumpily. "He has killed the man without getting a word out of him. I don't know what your father and the other members of the Seventeen are going to say when they hear that the cargo is lost. They are going to blame me, of course. They always do."
"As always you will have me to protect you, my darling husband" she said, and stood up in the carriage to have a better view. The escort stopped at the foot of the gallows and the litter with the still figure upon it was lifted high and placed at Slow John's feet. A low growl went up from the watchers as the executioner knelt beside it to begin his grisly task.
A little later when the crowd gave forth a lusty roar, made up of excitement and horror and obscene glee, the grey horses shied and fidgeted nervously in the traces at the sound and smell of fresh human blood. With an impassive face and gentle hands on the reins Aboli checked them and brought them back under control. Slowly he turned away his head from the dreadful spectacle taking place before his eyes and looked towards the unfinished walls of the castle.
He recognized the figure of Hal among the other convicts. He stood almost as tall as Big Daniel now, and he had the shape and set of a fully mature man. But he has a boy's heart still. He should not look upon this thing. No man or boy should ever have to watch his father die. Aboli's own great heart felt that it might burst in the barrel of his chest, but his face was still impassive beneath the cicatrice of tattoos. He looked back at the scaffold as Sir Francis Courtney's body rose slowly in the air and the crowd bellowed again. Slow John's pressure on the rope was gentle and sure as he lifted Sir Francis from the litter by his neck. It required a delicate touch not to snap the vertebrae, and end" it all too soon. It was a matter of pride to him that the last spark of life must not be snuffed out of that broken husk until after the drawing out of the viscera.
Firmly Aboli turned away his eyes and looked again to the bereft and tragic figure of Hal Courtney on the castle walls. We should not mourn for him, Gundwane. He was a man and he lived the life of a man. He sailed every ocean, and fought as a warrior must fight. He knew the stars and the ways of men. He called no man master, and turned aside from no enemy. No, Gundwane, we should not mourn him, you and I. He will never die while he lives on in our hearts.
For four days Sir Francis Courtney's dismembered body remained on public display. Every morning as the light strengthened, Hal looked down from the walls and saw it still hanging there. The gulls came from the beach in a shrieking cloud of black and white wings and squabbled raucously over the feast. When they had gorged, they perched on the railing of the gibbet and whitewashed the planks with their liquid dung.
For once Hal hated the clarity of his own eyesight, that spared him no detail of the terrible transformation that was taking place as he watched. By the third day the birds had picked the flesh from his father's skull so that it grinned at the sky with empty eye-sockets. The burghers crossing the open Parade on their way to the castle walked well downwind of the scaffold on which he hung, and the ladies held sachets of dried herbs to their faces as they passed.
However, on the dawning of the fifth day when Hal looked down upon it, the gibbet was empty. His father's pathetic remains no longer hung there, and the seagulls had gone back to the beach.
"Thank the merciful Lord," Ned Tyler whispered to Daniel. "Now young Hal can begin to heal."
"Yet it is passing strange that they have taken the corpse away so soon." Daniel was puzzled. "I would not have thought that van de Velde could be so compassionate."
Sukeena had shown him how to slip the grating on one of the small back windows of the slave'S quarters and squeeze his great body through. The night guard at the residence had become lax over the years, and Aboli had little difficulty in evading the watch. For three consecutive nights he escaped from the slave quarters. Sukeena had warned him that he must return at least two hours before dawn for at that hour the watch would rouse themselves and put on a show of vigilance to impress the awakening household.
Once he had escaped over the walls it took Aboli less than an hour to run through the darkness to the boundary of the colony, marked by a hedge of bitter almond bushes planted at the order of the Governor. Although the hedge was still scraggy and there were more gaps than barriers in its length, it was the line over which no burgher might pass without the Governor's permission. On the other hand, none of the scattered Hottentot tribes that inhabited the limitless wilderness of plain, mountain and forest beyond were allowed to cross the hedge and enter the colony. On the orders of the Company, they were to be shot or hanged if they transgressed the boundary. The VOC was no longer prepared to tolerate the savages" treachery, their sly thieving ways or their drunkenness when they were able to get their hands on spirits. The wanton whoring of their women, who would lift their short leather skirts for a handful of beads or a trifling trinket, was a threat to the morals of the God-fearing burghers of the colony. Selected tribesmen, who might be useful as soldiers and servants, were allowed to remain in the colony but the rest had been driven out into the wilderness where they belonged.
