Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (версия книг TXT) 📗

The Monomatapa strode to his living throne and sat upon Inyosi's naked back.

"Speak first!" Hal breathed from the side of his mouth. "Don't let him give the order for our execution."

"I see you, my brother!" Aboli greeted him, and the courtiers moaned with horror at this breach of protocol. "I see you, Great Lord of the Heavens!"

The Monomatapa showed no sign of having heard.

"I bring you greetings from the ghost of our father, Holomima, who was the Monomatapa before you."

Aboli's brother recoiled visibly, as though a cobra had reared up before his face. "You speak with ghosts?" His voice trembled slightly.

"Our father came to me in the night. He was as tall as a great baobab tree, and his face was terrible with eyes of fire.

His voice was as the thunder of the heavens. He came to me to issue a dire warning." The congregation moaned with superstitious dread.

"What was this warning?" croaked the Monomatapa staring at his brother with awe.

"Our father fears for our lives, yours and mine. Great danger threatens us both." Some of the fat wives screamed, and one fell to the ground in a fit, frothing at the mouth.

"What danger is this, Aboli?" The King glanced around him fearfully, as if seeking an assassin among his courtiers. "Our father warned me that you and I are joined in life as we were in birth. If one of us prospers, then so does the other."

The Monomatapa nodded. "What else did our father say?"

"He said that as we are joined in life, so we will be joined in death. He prophesied that we will die upon the very same day, but that that day is of our own choosing."

The King's face turned a strange greyish tone and glistened with sweat. The elders shrieked and those nearest to where he sat drew small iron knives and slashed their own chests and arms, sprinkling their blood on the earth to protect him from witchcraft.

"I am deeply troubled by these words that our father uttered," Aboli went on. "I wish that I were able to abide with you here in the Land of Heaven, to protect you from this fate. But, alas, my father's shade warned me further that should I stay here another day then I will die and the Monomatapa with me. I must leave at once and never return.

That is the only way in which we can both survive the curse."

"So let it be." The Monomatapa rose to his feet and pointed with a trembling finger. "This very day you must be gone."

"Alas, my beloved brother, I cannot leave here without that boon I came to seek from you."

"Speak, Aboli! What is it that you lack?"

"I must have one hundred and fifty of your finest warriors to protect me, for a dreadful enemy lies in wait for me. Without these soldiers, then I go to certain death, and my death must portend the death of the Monomatapa."

"Choose!" bellowed the Monomatapa. "Choose of my finest Amadoda, and take them with you. They are your slaves, do with them as you wish. But then get you gone this very day, before the setting of the sun. Leave my land for ever."

In the leading pinnace Hal shot the bar and rowed out through the Musela mouth of the delta into the open sea. Big Daniel followed closely, and there lay the Golden Bough at her anchor on the ten fathom shoal where they had left her. Ned Tyler stood the ship to quarters and ran out his guns when he saw them approaching. The pinnaces were so packed with men that they had only an inch or two of freeboard. Riding so low in the water, from afar they resembled war canoes. The glinting spears and waving head-dresses of the Amadoda strengthened this impression and Ned gave the order to fire a warning shot across their bows. As the cannon boomed out and a tall plume of spray erupted from the water half a cable's length ahead of the leading boat, Hal stood up in the bows and waved the croix pott6e.

"Lord love us!" Ned gasped. "Tis the Captain we're shooting at."

"I'll not be in a hurry to forget that greeting you gave me, Mister Tyler," Hal told him sternly, as he came in through the entry port "I rate a four-gun salute, not a single gun."

"Bless you, Captain, I had no idea. I thought you was a bunch of heathen savages, begging your pardon, sir."

"That we are, Mister Tyler. That we are!" And Hal grinned at Ned's confusion as a horde of magnificent warriors swarmed onto the Golden Bough's deck. "Think you'll be able to make seamen of them, Mister Tyler?" soon as he had made his offing, Hal turned the bows into the north once more and sailed up the inland channel between Madagascar and the mainland. He was heading for Zanzibar, the centre of all trade on this coast. There he hoped to have further news of the progress of the Holy War on the Horn and, if he were fortunate, to learn something of the movements of the Gull of Moray.

This was a settling-in time for the Amadoda. Everything aboard the Golden Bough was strange to them. None had ever seen the sea. They had believed the pinnaces to be the largest canoes ever conceived by man, and were overawed by the size of the ship, the height of her masts and the spread of her sails.

Most were immediately smitten by seasickness, and it took many days for them to find their sea-legs. Their bowels were in a turmoil induced by the diet of biscuit and pickled meat. They hungered for their pots of millet porridge and their gourds of blood and milk. They had never been confined in such a small space and they pined for the wide savannah.

They suffered from the cold, for even in this tropical sea the trade winds were cool and the warm Mozambique current many degrees below the temperature of the sun-scorched plains of the savannah. Hal ordered Althuda, who was in charge of the ship's stores, to issue bolts of sail canvas to them and Aboli showed them how to stitch petticoats and tarpaulin jackets for themselves.