"Why have you left your post?"
"I could not hail you from the masthead they are too close. They might have heard me also."
"What are you babbling about, boy?" His father came angrily to his feet. "Speak plainly."
"Father, do you not smell it?" He shook his father's arm urgently.
"What is it?" His father took the pipe stern from his mouth. "What is it that you smell?"
"Spice!" said Hal. "The air is full of the perfume of spice."
They moved swiftly down the deck, Ned Tyler, Aboli and Hal, shaking the off-duty watch awake, cautioning each man to silence as they shoved him towards his battle stations. There was no drum to beat to quarters. Their excitement was infectious. The waiting was over. The Dutchman was out there somewhere close, to windward in the darkness. They could all smell his fabulous cargo now.
Sir Francis extinguished the candle in the binnacle so that the ship showed no lights, then passed the keys of the arms chests to his boatswains. They were kept locked until the chase was in sight for the dread of mutiny was always in the back of every captain's mind. At other times only the petty officers carried cutlasses.
In haste the chests were opened and the weapons passed from hand to hand. The cutlasses were of good Sheffield steel, with plain wooden hilts and basket guards. The pikes had six-foot shafts of English oak and heavy hexagonal iron heads. Those of the crew who lacked skill with the sword chose either these robust spears or the boarding axes that could lop a man's head from his shoulders at a stroke.
The muskets were racked in the black powder magazine. They were brought up, and Hal helped the gunners load them with a handful of lead pellets on top of a handful of powder. They were clumsy, inaccurate weapons, with an effective range of only twenty or thirty yards. After the lock was triggered, and the burning match mechanically applied, the weapon fired in a cloud of smoke, but then had to be reloaded. This operation took two or three vital minutes, during which the musketeer was at the mercy of his foes.
Hal preferred the bow; the famous English longbow that had decimated the French knights at Agincourt. He could loose a dozen shafts in the time it took to reload a musket. The longbow carried fifty paces with the accuracy to strike a foe in the centre of the chest and with the power to spit him to the backbone, even though he wore a breastplate. He already had two bundles of arrows lashed to the sides of the crow's nest, ready to hand.
Sir Francis and some of his petty officers strapped on their half armour, light cavalry cuitasses and steel pot helmets. Sea salt had rusted them and they were dented and battered from other actions.
In short order the ship was readied for battle, and the crew armed and armoured. However, the gun ports were closed and the demi-culver ins were not run out. Most of the men were hustled below by Ned and the other boatswains, while the rest were ordered to lie flat on the deck concealed below the bulwarks. No slow-match was lit the glow and smoke might alert the chase to her danger. However, charcoal braziers smouldered at the foot of each mast, and the wedges were knocked out of the gun ports with muffled wooden mallets so that the sound of the blows would not carry.
Aboli pushed his way through the scurrying figures to where Hal stood at the foot of the mast. Around his bald head he wore a scarlet cloth whose tail hung down his back, and thrust into his sash was a cutlass. Under one arm he carried a rolled bundle of coloured silk. "From your father." He thrust the bundle into Hal's arms. "You know what to do with them!" He gave Hal's pigtail a tug. "Your father says that you are to remain at the masthead no matter which way the fight goes. Do you hear now?"
He turned and hurried back towards the bows. Hal grimaced rebelliously at his broad back, but climbed dutifully into the shrouds. When he reached the masthead he scanned the darkness swiftly, but as yet there was nothing to see. Even the aroma of spice had evaporated. He felt a stab of concern that he might only have imagined it, "It is only that the chase has come out of our wind," he reassured himself. "She is probably abeam of us by now."
He attached the banner Aboli had given him to the signal halyard, ready to fly it at his father's order. Then he removed the cover from the pan of the falconer. He checked the tension of the string before setting his longbow into the rack beside the bundles of yard-long arrows. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Below him the ship was unnaturally quiet, not even a bell to mark the passage of the hours, only the soft song of the sails and the muted accompaniment of the rigging.
The day came upon them with the suddenness that in these African seas he had come to know so well. Out of the dying night rose a tall bright tower, shining and translucent as an ice-covered alp. a great ship under a mass of gleaming canvas, her masts so tall they seemed to rake the last pale stars from the sky.
"Sail ho!" he pitched his voice so that it would carry to the deck below but not to the strange ship that lay, a full league away, across the dark waters. "Fine on the larboard beam!"
His father's voice floated back to him. "Masthead! Break out the colours!" Hal heaved on the signal halyard, and the silken bundle soared to the masthead. There it burst open and the tricolour of the Dutch Republic streamed out on the southeaster, orange and snowy white and blue, Within moments the other banners and long pennants burst out from the head of the mizzen and the foremast, one emblazoned with the cipher of the VOC, die Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United East India Company. The regalia was authentic, captured only four months previously from the Heerlycke Nacht. Even the standard of the Council of Seventeen was genuine. There would scarce have been time for the captain of the galleon to have learned of the capture of his sister ship and so to question the credentials of this strange caravel.
The two ships were on converging courses even in darkness Sir Francis had judged well his interception. There was no call for him to alter course and alarm the Dutch captain. But within minutes it was clear that the Lady Edwina, despite her worm-riddled hull, was faster through the water than the galleon. She must soon begin to overtake the other ship, which he must avoid at all costs.
Sir Francis watched her through the lens of his telescope, and at once he saw why the galleon was so slow and ungainly: her mainmast was jury-rigged, and there was much other evidence of damage to her other masts and rigging. He realized that she must have been caught in some terrible storm in the eastern oceans which would also account for her belated arrival off her landfall on the Agulhas Cape. He knew that he could not alter sail without alarming the Dutch captain, but he had to pass across her stern. He had prepared for this. he signed to the carpenter, at the rail, who with his mate lifted a huge canvas drogue and dropped it over the stern. Like the curb on a head, strong stallion it bit deep in the water and pulled up the Lady Edwina sharply. Again Sir Francis judged the disparate speeds of the two vessels, and nodded with satisfaction.
Then he looked down his own deck. The majority of the men were concealed below decks or lying under the bulwarks where they were invisible even to the lookouts at the galleon's masthead. There was no weapon in sight, all the guns hidden behind their ports. When Sir Francis had captured this caravel she had been a Dutch trader, operating off the west African coast. In converting her to a privateer, he had been at pains to preserve her innocent air and prosaic lines. Only a dozen or so men were visible on the decks and in the rigging, which would be normal for a sluggish merchantman.