'And then he disappeared?' Quilhampton asked.
'Leaving no orders?' added Fraser.
Frey nodded unhappily at Quilhampton and answered the first lieutenant upon whom the imminent burden of command was settling like a sentence of death. 'No, none.'
'Bluidy hell!' Fraser ran the fingers of his right hand through his sandy hair with a gesture of despair. 'Has the man taken leave of his senses?' He sought consolation in the faces of Frey, Quilhampton and the silent Mount. 'This is taking a vendetta too bluidy far ...'
'No,' Mount broke in sharply, his tone cautionary and his eye catching that of Fraser. 'No. I understand your feelings, Fraser, but Captain Drinkwater is not a fool. There is the matter of two captured ships and thirty thousand sterling.'
'And Tregembo,' said Quilhampton.
The four officers were silent for a moment, then Mount went on. 'If Captain Drinkwater issued no orders, then he wants nothing done. Nothing, that is, beyond maintaining our vigilance here.'
Drinkwater stirred and sat up. He was stiff and bruised from the hard thwarts, aware that he had dozed off. His movement rocked the boat and other men stirred, groaning faintly.
'Shhh ...'
Those awake pressed their shipmates into silence and Drinkwater looked enquiringly at Dutfield. The midshipman, left with half the cutter's crew on watch, shook his head. Both 'halves' of the volunteer crew had dossed down in the boat as best they could for an hour or so each. Now the afternoon was far advanced and Drinkwater meditated taking them back into the stream, out of the cover of the mangroves that hung close overhead. They had heard and seen nothing in the period they had rested.
'Splice the mainbrace,' Drinkwater whispered. The raw spirits animated the men and he watched them as they drank or impatiently awaited their turn. Most of the men were members of his own barge crew, strong hefty fellows with some sense of identification with himself. He was glad to see, too, Corporal Grice among the marines. Grice had a wife and family to whom he was said to be devoted and Drinkwater had not expected him to volunteer. He smiled bitterly to himself; he also had a wife and family. Not for the first time he thought that war made fools of men ...
'Muffle your oars now ... perfect silence from now on ...'
They pulled out into the stream. The kites had gone, forsaking their aerial vantage point as the air cooled a little. Or perhaps they had settled themselves on whatever it was that attracted them.
The narrow corridor of green seemed interminable. From time to time the foliage met overhead, shutting out the sky and filtering the increasingly slanting sunlight so that well-defined shafts of it formed illuminated patches, contrasting with the shadowed gloom of the leafy tunnel.
There was a difference in the vegetation now, Drinkwater noticed. No longer was the mangrove ubiquitous; there were an increasing number of nipah palms and heavy trunked trees like beeches, he thought, suggesting a firmer foundation for their roots. His theory found confirmation almost immediately as a low clearing came into view, a semi-circle of ferns and grass that surrounded a low slab of rock. He noticed, too, that about the broken branches that lay in the shallows, the creek ran with a perceptible stream, indicating a faster current than lower down. This was not merely an indented coast, it was indeed, as he had guessed from his masthead observations, fed by rivers. He strained his eyes ahead. Judging by his last sighting of the kites they could not have far to go now. His heart beat crazily in his chest. They had seen no sign, no indication of hostility, of being watched, if one discounted the creeping feeling along the spine.
A bend lay ahead. There was a break in the trees ...
'Oars!' he hissed urgently. The blades rose dripping from the water and waited motionless, the men craned anxiously round. In the bow, muskets ready, two marines nervously fingered their triggers.
Through the break in the trees, brief though it was, he could just see, not more trees as he had expected, but a rising green bluff and the grey, sunlit outcrops of rock. What appeared to be too straight a line for nature ran across the summit of the eminence. This line was nicked by small gaps: an embrasured rampart, its guns commanding the creek up which they now glided.
Had they been seen?
He thought he detected a man's head above the line of the parapet. Then he was sure of it. As the boat silently advanced out of the shadows with the setting sun behind it, the light fell upon the stronghold of the Sea-Dyaks.
Above a wooden jetty, alongside which a number of the heavy praus were moored, numerous huts dotted the hillside and stretched higher upstream in a veritable township. More huts stood out over the river on stilts with another group of praus tied to stakes and smaller dugouts bobbing alongside them. Men and, he guessed, women moved about, the colours of their sarongs a brilliant contrast to the unrelieved green of the jungle. Here and there he spotted the scarlet jackets that he had observed on the attackers of that dawn. The lazy blue of cooking smoke rose from a single fire and a low, mellifluous song was being sung somewhere.
The whole scene was one of tranquil and arresting beauty. The still evening air was now filled with the stridulations of cicadas and the faint scent of roasting meat came to them, stirring the pangs of hunger in their empty, deprived bellies.
'Hold water!'
Jerked from meditation the oars bit the water, arresting the gentle forward motion of the cutter. It slowed to a stop under the last overhanging branches of a gigantic peepul tree, concealed in the growing pool of shadow. Drinkwater could see the place was cunningly fortified. Several batteries of cannon covered the approach, and a palisade of stakes seemed to be arranged in some way that protected the hill itself. Off the river bank he could see the water streaming past the pointed spikes of an estacade. He would need more than a boat gun to force a landing, unless he could take the place by subterfuge.
As he stood making his reconnaissance he was aware of the dull mutters of men being eaten by insects, and the sudden flutter of a giant fruit-bat made him jerk involuntarily. For a moment the boat rocked and Drinkwater expected a shout and the roar of a cannon to signal they had been seen, but nothing happened. He raked the parapet with his telescope and then stopped, feeling his heart leap with shock.
A yellow-robed figure stood against the sky staring through a glass directly at him. They were observed!
For a moment he seemed paralysed, the realisation that the man was Morris slowly dawning on him. As he lowered his glass Drinkwater saw Morris turn and move an arm, giving an obvious signal.
Drinkwater's guts contracted, expecting the well-aimed shot to smash the boat and end his life in a sudden bone-crushing impact. But instead there came a scream, a scream of such intense agony that it made their flesh creep and their very blood run cold.
PART THREE
A Private Revenge
'A man does not have himself killed for a few halfpence a day ... you must speak to the soul in order to electrify the man ...'
CHAPTER 19
The Tripod
It seemed to Quilhampton an act of lese-majeste to be thus conferring in Drinkwater's cabin. Behind him, in silent witness, the portraits of Elizabeth and her children seemed pathetic effects. He was too stunned, too mystified to pay much attention to what Fraser and Mount were saying and he stood obedient to whatever decision they made as, with Dutfield, they bent over the chart laid on the table and the scrap of paper the midshipman had brought back. The group monopolised the candles, leaving Quilhampton and a disconsolate Frey in umbral shadow.