Birds of Prey

CHAPTER 1 The boy clutched at the rim of the canvas bucket in which he crouched sixty feet above the deck as the ship went about. The mast canted over sharply as she thrust her head through the wind. The ship was a caravel named the Lady Edwina, after the mother whom the boy could barely remember. Far below in the pre-dawn darkness he heard the great bronze culverins slat against their blocks and come up with a thump against their straining tackle. The hull throbbed and resonated to a different impulse as she swung round and went plunging away back into the west. With the southeast wind now astern she was transformed, lighter and more limber, even with sails reefed and with three feet of water in her bilges. It was all so familiar to Hal Courteney. He had greeted the last five and sixty dawns from the masthead in this manner. His young eyes, the keenest in the ship, had been posted there to catch the first gleam of distant sail in the rose of the new day. Even the cold was familiar. He pulled the thick woollen Monmouth cap down over his ears. The wind sliced through his leather jerkin but he was inured to such mild discomfort. He gave it no heed and strained his eyes out into the darkness. "Today the Dutchmen will come," he said aloud, and felt the excitement and dread throb beneath his ribs. High above him the splendour of the stars began to pale and fade, and the firmament was filled with the pearly promise of new day. Now, far below him, he could make out the figures on the deck. He could recognize Ned Tyler, the helmsman, bowed over the whipstaff, holding the ship true; and his own father stooping over the binnacle to read the new course, the lantern lighting his lean dark features and his long locks tangling and whipping in the wind. With a start of guilt Hal looked out into the darkness; he should not be mooning down at the deck in these vital minutes when, at any moment, the enemy might loom close at hand out of the night. By now it was light enough to make out the surface of the sea rushing by the hull. It had the hard iridescent shine of new-cut coal. By now he knew this southern sea so well; this broad highway of the ocean that flowed eternally down the eastern coast of Africa, blue and warm and swarming with life. Under his father's tutelage he had studied it so that he knew the colour, the taste and run of it, each eddy and surge. One day he also would glory in the title of Nautonnier Knight of the Temple of the Order of St George and the Holy Grail. He would be, as his father was, a Navigator of the Order. His father was as determined as Hal himself to bring that about, and, at seventeen years of age, his goal was no longer merely a dream. This current was the highway upon which the Dutchmen must sail to make their westings and their landfall on the mysterious coast that still lay veiled out there in the night. This was the gateway through which all must pass who sought to round that wild cape that divided the Ocean of the Indies from the Southern Atlantic. This was why Sir Francis Courteney, Hal's father, the Navigator, had chosen this position, at 34 degrees 25 minutes south latitude, in which to wait for them. Already they had waited sixty-five tedious days, beating monotonously back and forth, but today the Dutchmen might come, and Hal stared out into the gathering day with parted lips and straining green eyes. A cable's length off the starboard bow he saw the flash of wings high enough in the sky to catch the first rays of the sun, a long flight of gannets coming out from the land, snowy chests and heads of black and yellow. He watched the leading bird dip and turn, breaking the pattern, and twist its head to peer down into the dark waters. He saw the disturbance below it, the shimmer of scales and the seething of the surface as a shoal came up to the light. He watched the bird fold its wings and plunge downwarSmith, Wilbur is the author of 'Birds of Prey' with ISBN 9780312317119 and ISBN 0312317115.