The first battery fired together in one smoking, thunderous discharge and every shot struck home. The base of the mast was blown away in a storm of white wood splinters and her riggings crashed down to hang over side in an untidy tangle of rope and canvas. The old man at the tiller disappeared, as though turned to air by a wizard's spell. He left only a red smear on the torn planking.
"Avast firing!" Hal bellowed, to make himself heard in the ear-numbing aftermath of the gunfire. The dhow was crippled. her bows were already swinging away before the wind, the tiller shot away and her mast gone overboard. The Golden Bough left her rolling in her wake.
"Hold your course, Mister Tyler." The Golden Bough tore straight at the flotilla of small craft strewn across the blue waters ahead. These had seen the merciless treatment of the first dhow and the Imperial colours flying at the frigate's masthead, and now every one put his helm hard up and came around before the wind. Goose-winged, they fled before the Golden Bough's charge.
"Steer for the vessel dead ahead!" said Hal quietly, and Ned Tyler brought the frigate around a point. The dhow Hal had chosen was one of the largest in sight, and its open deck was crowded with men. There must be at least three hundred packed into her, Hal estimated. It was a short voyage across the narrow sea, and her captain had taken a risk. she was carrying far more troops than was prudent.
A thin shout of defiance reached Hal's ears as they closed the range. "Allah Akbar! God is great!" Steel war helmets glinted on the heads of the Omani troops, and they brandished their long, curved scimitars. There came an untidy volley of musket fire, aimed at the frigate, the popping of the jezails and puffs of gunsmoke along the dhow's side. A lead ball thudded into the mast above Hal's head.
"Every man aboard her is a soldier," Hal said aloud. He did not have to add that if they were allowed to reach the western shore of the sea they would march against Judith Nazet. "Give her a volley of ball.
Sink her, Master Daniel!"
The heavy iron cannonballs raked the troopship from deck to keel and split her like kindling under the axe. The sea rushed in through her torn belly. She capsized and the water was suddenly filled with the bobbing heads of struggling, drowning men.
"Steer for that vessel with the silver pennant." Hal did not look back but tore through the fleet like a barracuda into a shoal of flying fish. Not one could outrun him. With her mountain of white sails driving her, the Golden Bough flew upon them as if they were at anchor, and her guns crashed out in flame and smoke. Some of the little ships burst open and sank, others were left in the frigate's wake with mast snapped away and sails dragging alongside. Some of the sailors threw themselves overboard at the moment that the culver ins came to beat upon them. They preferred the sharks to the blast of guns.
Several ran for the nearest island and tried to anchor in the shoal waters where the Golden Bough could not follow. Others deliberately ran aground, and their crews dived overboard to swim and wade to the beach.
Only those ships furthest to the east and closest to the Arabian coast had the head start to run from the frigate's charge. Hal looked asterric and saw the water behind him dotted with the floundering hulls of those he had overtaken. Every mile he chased the survivors eastwards was a mile further from Mitsiwa.
"None of those will come back in a hurry!" he said grimly, as he watched them fly in confusion. "Mister Tyler, please be good enough to wear the ship around and lay her close hauled on the starboard tack."
This was the Golden Bough's best point of sailing. "There is no dhow built in all Arabia that can point higher into the wind than my darling can," Hal said aloud, as he saw twenty sail to windward trying to escape by beating up into the west. The Golden Bough tore back into the scattered fleet, and now some of the dhows dropped their wide triangular main sail as they saw him coming and screamed to Allah for mercy.
Hal checked the frigate as he came alongside each of these, bringing her head to the wind as he launched a boat and sent a prize crew, comprising one white seaman and six of his Amadoda, to board the surrendered ship. "If there is nothing of value in her cargo, take off her crew and put a torch to her."
By late that afternoon, Hal had five large dhows on tow behind the Golden Bough, and another seven sailing in company with him, under jury-rigging and with his prize crews aboard, as they headed back towards Mitsiwa. Every one of the captured vessels was heavily laden with vital provisions of war. Behind him, the sky was dulled with the smoke of the burning hulls and the sea was littered with the wreckage.
General Nazet sat on her black Arabian stallion and watched from the cliff tops as this untidy flotilla straggled into Mitsiwa Roads. At last she closed her telescope and remarked to Admiral Senec beside her, "I see why you call him El Tazar! This Englishman is a barracuda, indeed." Then she turned away her face so that he could not see the thoughtful smile that softened her handsome features. El Tazar. It is a good name for him, she thought, and then, irrelevantly, another notion occurred to her. I wonder if he is as fierce a lover as he is a warrior. It was the first time since God had chosen her to lead his legions against the pagan that she had looked at any man through a woman's eyes.
Colonel Cornelius Schreuder dismounted in front of the spreading tent of shimmering red &C and yellow silk. A groom took his horse and he paused to look around the encampment. The royal tent stood on a small knoll overlooking Adulis Bay. Up here the sea breeze cooled the air and made it possible to breathe. On the plain below, where the army of Islam was bivouacked around the port of ZuIla, the stones crackled in the heat and shimmered in the mirage.
The bay was crowded with shipping, but the tall masts of the Gull of Moray dominated all others. The Earl of Cumbrae's ship had come in during the night, and now Schreuder heard his voice raised in argument within the silken tent. His lips twitched in a smile that lacked humour, and he adjusted the hang of the golden sword at his side before he strode to the flap of the tent. A tall subahdar bowed to him. All the troops of Islam had come to know him well. in the short time he had served with them, Schreuder's feats of daring had become legend in the Mogul's army. The officer ushered him into the royal presence.
The interior of the tent was commodious and sumptuously furnished.
The entire floor was thickly covered with gorgeously coloured silk carpets and silken draperies formed a double skin that kept out the sun's heat. The low tables were of ivory and rare wood, and the vessels upon them were of solid gold.
The Great Mogul's brother, the Maharajah Sadiq Khan Jahan, sat in the centre on a pile of silk cushions. He wore a tunic of padded yellow silk and striped pantaloons of red and gold. The slippers on his feet were scarlet with long, curling toes and buckles of gold. His turban was yellow and secured above his brow by an emerald the size of a walnut. He was close-shaven, with only a kohl line of fine moustache upon his petulant upper lip. Across his lap was a scimitar in a scabbard so richly encrusted with jewels that the sparkle of them pricked the eye. On one gloved hand he held a falcon, a magnificent Saker of the desert. He lifted the bird and kissed its beak as tenderly as if it had been a beautiful woman or rather, Schreuder thought bleakly, as if it were one of his pretty dancing boys.