St. "Mary's milk, Master John, but you must like the taste of sand."
Hal placed one bare foot on his backside and sent him sprawling head first on to the beach once more.
"You grow too clever and cocky, Master Hal!" Big Daniel strode up to him, frowning, and his voice was gruff as he tried to hide his delight at his pupil's performance. "Next time I'll give you a harder match. And don't let the captain hear that milky blasphemy of yours or more than good clean beach sand you'll be tasting yourself."
Still laughing, delighting in Daniel's ill-concealed approbation and in the hoots of encouragement from the other wrestlers, Hal swaggered to the lagoon's edge and scooped up a double handful of water to wash the blood from his upper lip.
"Joseph and Mary, but he loves to win." Daniel grinned behind his back. "Try as he will, Captain Franky will not break that one down. The old dog has sired a puppy of his own blood."
"How old do you think he is?" Katinka asked her maid, in a reflective tone.
"I'm sure I don't know," said Zelda primly. "He's just a child."
Katinka shook her head, smiling, remembering him standing naked in the stern of the pinnace. "Ask our blackamoor watch-dog."
Obediently Zelda looked back at Aboli, and asked in English, "How old is the boy?"
"Old enough for what she wants from him," Aboli grunted in his own language, a puzzled frown on his face as he pretended not to understand. These last few days, while he guarded her, he had studied this woman with sun coloured hair. He had recognized the bright, predatory glimmer in the depths of those demure violet eyes. She watched a man the way a mongoose watches a plump chicken, and she carried her head in an affectation of innocence that was belied by the wanton swing of her hips beneath the layers of bright silks and gossamer lace. "A whore is still a whore, whatever the colour of her hair and no matter if she lives in a beehive hut or a governor's palace." The deep cadence of his voice was punctuated by the staccato clicks of his tribal speech.
Zelda turned away from him with a flounce. "Stupid animal. He understands nothing."
Hal left the water's edge and came up into the trees. He reached up to the branch on which hung his discarded shirt. His hair was still wet and his naked chest and shoulders were blotched red with the rough contact of the wrestling. A smear of blood was still streaked across his cheek.
His hand raised towards his shirt, he looked up. His eyes met Katinka's level violet regard. Until that moment he had been unaware of her presence. Instantly his arrogant swagger evaporated, and he stepped back as though she had slapped him unexpectedly. Now a dark blush spread over his face, obliterating the lighter blotches left by his opponent's blows.
Coolly Katinka looked down at his bare chest. He folded his arms across it, as if ashamed.
"You were right, Zelda," she said, with a dismissive flick of her hand. "Just a grubby child," she added in Latin, to make certain that he understood. Hal stared after her miserably as she gathered her skirts and, followed by Aboli and her maid, sailed regally down the beach to the waiting pinnace.
That night, as he lay on the lumpy straw pallet on his narrow bunk, he heard movement, soft voices and laughter from the cabin next door. He propped himself up on one elbow. Then he recalled the insult she had thrown at him so disdainfully. "I will not think of her ever again," he promised himself, as he sank back onto the pallet and placed his hands over his ears to block out the lilting cadence of her voice. In an attempt to drive her from his mind, he repeated softly, "In Arcadia habito." But it was long before weariness allowed him at last to fall into a deep black dreamless sleep. The head of the lagoon, almost two miles from where the Resolution lay at anchor, a stream of clear sweet water tumbled down through a narrow gorge to mingle with the brackish waters below. As the two longboats moved slowly against the current into the mouth of the gorge, they startled the flocks of water birds from the shallows into the air.
They rose in a cacophony of honks, quacks and cackles, twenty different varieties of ducks and geese unlike any they knew from the north. There were other species, too, with strangely shaped bills or disproportionately long legs trailing, and herons, curlews and egrets that were not quite the same as their English counterparts, bigger or brighter in plumage. The sky was darkened with their numbers, and the men rested for a minute upon their oars to gaze in astonishment at these multitudes.
"It's a land of marvels, Sir Francis murmured, staring up at this wild display. "Yet we have explored only a trivial part of it. What other wonders lie beyond this threshold, deep in the hinterland, that no man has ever laid eyes upon?"
His father's words excited Hal's imagination, and conjured up once more the images of dragons and monsters that decorated the charts he had studied.
"Heave away!" his father ordered, and they bent to the long sweeps again. The two were alone in the leading boat. Sir Francis pulled the starboard oar with a long powerful stroke that matched Hal's tirelessly. Between them stood the empty water casks, the refilling of which was the ostensible purpose of this expedition to the head of the lagoon. The real reason, however, lay on the floorboards at Sir Francis's feet. During the night Aboli and Big Daniel had carried the canvas sacks of coin and the chests of gold ingots down from the cabin and had hidden them under the tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat. In the bows they had stacked five kegs of powder and an array of weapons, captured along with the treasure from the galleon, cutlass, pistol and musket, and leather bags of lead shot.
Ned Tyler, Big Daniel and Aboli followed closely in the second boat, the three men in his crew whom Sir Francis trusted above all others. Their boat, too, was loaded with water casks.
Once they were well into the mouth of the stream, Sir Francis stopped rowing and leaned over the side to scoop a mugful of water and taste it. He nodded with satisfaction.
"Pure and sweet." He called across to Ned Tyler, "Do you begin to refill here. Hal and I will go on upstream."