they had no choice but to fight or die, but they were cut down where they stood and the rest of Tromp’s boarding party dropped to their knees and hoisted their swords and boarding axes above their heads.
‘It is over, Captain,’ Aboli said, stooping to saw his blade across the throat of Judith’s would-be captor who now sat slumped against the Bough’s side, his gut ropes lying in a glistening, bloody mess between his legs.
The knowledge that Judith had been in danger, and the guilty awareness of how close he had come to surrendering his boat and with it his honour combined to drive Hal into a state of barely controlled fury. He was striding forward, ready to cut Tromp down, but Aboli gripped his shoulder with a big hand.
‘It is over,’ he said again. The bloodlust abated and Hal stood for a moment letting the tremble work through his arms and the big muscles in his legs. Then he walked over to Judith and Captain Tromp, who held out his sword hilt first. Judith was still holding the point of the kaskara at his throat.
‘You have my surrender, Captain Courtney,’ the Dutchman said, looking down his nose at Hal because he dared not move his head.
‘Not too soon,’ Hal snarled at him, snatching the sword from his hand and passing it to Aboli behind him. ‘You were a damned fool to think you could take my ship.’
Hal looked at Judith, who gave him a quick nod of the head to signal that she and her child were unhurt. There would be a time for them to hold one another tightly, to kiss and to celebrate their survival in the act of love, but this was not it.
Tromp was watching the personal dramas being played out before him, noting the connections between the big African and his captain, and between the captain and the woman who appeared so perfectly feminine and yet could fight like the fiercest trained warrior.
‘I am an ambitious man, Captain Courtney,’ he said, almost casually, as though ambition rather than hunger had driven him to attempt a reckless assault on a larger, better armed vessel with a much more numerous crew.
‘Your ambition has cost you dear, sir,’ Hal said, trying to keep a rein on his fury. In victory a true warrior must show forbearance, his father had once said. He must not give in to the base instinct for revenge. He must summon that forbearance required to show clemency. Yet even the noblest warrior was not expected to ignore wrongdoing when he saw it. ‘You have broken the truce between our two countries, Captain Tromp,’ Hal said, making a show of calmly pulling his sword through a handkerchief to clean the blood off it.
‘There is a truce?’ Tromp said, doing a passable job of seeming surprised, for the truce by now was over a year old.
‘You lying cheese-head!’ one of Hal’s men yelled from the mainmast shrouds up which he had climbed to get a clear view of proceedings.
‘Well you are not alone in wishing that there were no truce, Captain Tromp,’ Hal admitted. ‘I would gladly hunt Dutchmen below the Line, above the Line, and to the very gates of hell, if I only had a damned Letter of Marque. I would be the scourge of the Dutch as my father was. And I would have run you down when I first laid eyes on your ensign two days ago.’
‘Then I admit I am relieved that our two countries have put aside their differences,’ Tromp said with an easy-going, roguish smile that Hal suspected had put many a pretty girl deeply in his thrall.
Tromp’s face was haggard with starvation, yet Hal could see that he was a handsome man, with sand-coloured hair and mariner’s eyes the colour of the Indian Ocean itself. Hal was now almost certain that Aboli had been right. Tromp would have never killed Judith. The man had rolled the dice and he had lost, and now he was Hal’s prisoner and by the law of the sea his ship, the Delft, now belonged to Hal also.
The Dutchmen had come in two pinnaces and when he examined them Hal recalled the brief whiff of tar he had smelt on the air, for they had tarred their sails black to conceal them against the night. It had been a bold move on Tromp’s part and Hal almost admired the man for fighting from the front rather than sending another to lead the boarding party. They might have succeeded in capturing the Golden Bough by stealth, too, had the Amadoda tribesmen not leapt up from their beds on the deck and fought like panthers in the face of all that pistol fire. And then there had been Judith. If not for her bravery and martial skill Hal would have given Tromp the Bough, and now his heart was bursting with pride in her.
That pride only grew when he looked at his crew and saw the way they regarded Judith. They already loved her, and admired her reputation, but now that they had witnessed what she was capable of with their own eyes, she had earned their profound respect and perhaps to an extent their fear. Few of them had seen a woman fight the way she had done and word was coming up from the captain’s cabin of the havoc she had wreaked upon her assailants down there, also.
‘Go and rest, my love,’ Hal told her while Big Daniel and Aboli oversaw the binding of Tromp and his surviving men, and another boatswain, William Stanley, had the Bough’s crew gather up the dead from both sides.
‘I’d prayed that I would never have to kill again,’ Judith said, placing a bloody hand on the swell of her belly as though she feared that their unborn child was now somehow tainted by her own actions.
‘You saved the ship, my heart,’ Hal said softly.
‘I feared that I had lost it,’ she replied. Then she looked at the Dutch prisoners, who were now being led away towards the Bough’s lowest decks and laid a gentle hand on Hal before she said, ‘Do not harm them.’
‘There will be no more killing today,’ he assured her, looking to the east where the sun was a blazing orb rising above a bank of grey cloud to flood the ocean with molten gold and blood. ‘Not if this Captain Tromp gives me his ship.’
‘Which he will do, ma’am, don’t you worry, unless he wants us to feed slices of his raw bumfiddle to the sharks,’ Big Daniel said, shoving Tromp towards the steps that ran down to the bowels of the ship.
Aboli watched the defeated captain’s head disappear and then, speaking in his native tongue so that the others would not hear him question their leader, asked Hal, ‘What if the crew of his ship put up a fight, Gundwane? We have lost enough men today. Is she worth the loss of any more? And this wind is weaker than a warthog’s fart. If she knows we are coming after her and runs it will take us a day or more to overhaul her.’
‘Hmm …’ Hal grunted, noting what Aboli had to say. But he was a predator, born, bred and raised to hunt the seas for maritime prey and he could no more turn down the prize of a ship and its cargo than a hungry lion could resist the chance of fresh meat.
‘Mister Moone, strike the colours if you please!’ Hal called. Then he turned to Aboli. ‘I have an idea,’ he said with a wolf’s grin, speaking in plain English so that his crew could hear their captain and take strength from his confidence. ‘Tell Daniel to bring Tromp back here. I think we’ll need him topsides after all.’
Aboli, who was as pleased as anyone else on the ship to know that he had his captain back and ripe and ready for the next scrap, nodded and went to fetch the Dutchman.
They were crouching under the forecastle bulwarks, Hal with his flintlock primed and his sword, only recently cleansed of the blood it had gathered earlier in the morning, in his right hand.
‘Aye,