Уилбур Смит – Pharaoh (страница 15)

Rameses scoffed at my little fish. ‘Can it also sing an ode to the gods, or fetch me a jug of good wine, or point the way to a pretty girl with a cunny that tastes sweet as honey?’ he wanted to know. I was deaf to such unbecoming levity.

Our first night on the open sea the sky was obscured completely by cloud. There was no sun, moon or stars to guide us. We sailed all night in Stygian darkness with only the going-home stone to show us the way. Long before dawn the two of us went up on deck and sat over the wooden bowl, watching it in the feeble light of a sputtering oil lamp. Rameses passed the time by making more of his little jokes at my expense. He was mortified when the day broke and the clouds cleared to reveal that the Memnon and my little fish were holding the precise course slightly west of north.

‘It really is magic,’ I heard him mutter to himself when this happened the third morning in succession. Then on the fourth morning, as the sun pushed its fiery head above the horizon, the blighted island of Crete lay not more than five leagues dead ahead of our bows.

Many years previously, when I first laid eyes on them, the mountains of Crete had been green and heavily forested. Great cities and ports had marked the island’s shores as the most prosperous in the world. The waters around its coast had teemed with shipping: both men-of-war and cargo ships.

Now both forests and cities had gone, scorched to blackened ashes by the fiery breath of the great god Cronus, who in a fit of pique had destroyed the mountain wherein his own son Zeus had enchained him; blowing it apart in a fiery volcanic eruption. The remains of his singular mountain had sunk beneath the waters, leaving not a trace of its previous existence. We altered course and sailed in as close to the land as seemed safe, but I could recognize no features that had previously existed. Even after all these years the air still reeked of sulphur and the odour of dead things, both animals and fishes. Or perhaps that was really only my vivid imagination and my keen sense of smell. In any event the waters under our keel were devoid of life; the coral reefs had been killed off by the boiling sea. Even Rameses and his crew, who had never known this world, were subdued and appalled by such total destruction.

‘This bears abundant testimony to the fact that all the strivings of man are trivial and insignificant in the face of the gods.’ Rameses spoke in a hushed voice. ‘Let us hurry away from this place and leave it to the apocalyptic anger of the god Cronus.’

So I ordered the helmsman to put the rudder over and increase the beat. We bore away northwards into the Grecian Sea, still sailing a few points west of true north.

For me these were unexplored waters into which we were sailing. Crete was as far north as I had ever ventured. Within a day we had passed out of the area laid waste by the volcano and the sea resumed its friendly and welcoming aspect. Rameses had a quick and enquiring mind. He was eager to learn and I was pleased to accommodate him. He wanted particularly to know all I could tell him about his family history and origins, about which I knew a great deal. I had lived with four generations of Pharaohs at first hand. I was pleased to be able to share my knowledge with him.

But we were not so involved with the history of Egypt that we neglected our duties as commanders of the finest warship afloat. The time that we spent in examining the past was as nothing compared to that we spent preparing for future contingencies. As befitted a ship of its class, the crew had all been handpicked by Rameses and were as fine a bunch of men as I had ever seen in action, but I have always believed in improving upon perfection if it is even remotely possible. Rameses drilled his men pitilessly, and I assisted him in keeping them up to the highest levels of training.

The very best military commanders have an instinct for danger and the presence of an enemy. By noon of the third morning after we had left the island of Crete behind us I began to experience the familiar nameless unease. I spent much of my afternoon surreptitiously searching the horizon not only ahead of the ship but behind us as well. I knew from experience that it was dangerous to ignore these premonitions of mine. Then I saw that I was not alone in my unease. Rameses was becoming restless also, but he could not hide his concern as well as I was able to do so. He was of course much less experienced than I was. In the late afternoon, when the sun was only a hand’s span above the western horizon, he laid his sword and helmet aside and clambered to the top of the mainmast. I watched him staring back over our wake for a while, and then I could contain myself no longer. I also divested myself of my weapons and half-armour and went to the foot of the mast. By this time the crew and especially those taking their turn at the long oars were watching me with interest. I climbed from the main deck to the crow’s nest at the peak without pausing and Rameses made room for me although it was a tight squeeze for the two of us in the bucket of the crow’s nest. He said nothing but regarded me curiously for a while.

‘Have you spotted him yet?’ I broke the silence and he looked startled.

‘Have I spotted whom?’ he asked carefully.

‘Whoever it is that is shadowing us,’ I replied, and he chuckled softly.

‘So you have sensed them also. You are a sly old dog, Taita.’

‘I didn’t get to be an old dog by being stupid, young man.’ I am sensitive to references to my age.

Rameses stopped laughing. ‘Who do you think it is?’ he asked more soberly.

‘This northern sea is the hunting ground of every pirate who ever cut a throat. How could even I pick out one of them?’

We watched the sun sink ponderously into the sea. However, the horizon behind us remained devoid of life, until suddenly we shouted together, ‘There he is!’

Just the instant before the sun was sucked under the waters it shot a golden shaft of light over the darkling waves. We both knew that this was a reflection off the skysail of the ship that was stalking us.

‘I think he’s after our blood, otherwise why is he being so stealthy? He is expecting us to shorten sail or even heave to entirely at the setting of the sun, so he is conforming in order not to overrun us. He wants to creep up on us in the darkness without causing a collision,’ I conjectured. ‘So now we should plan a little surprise for him.’

‘What do you suggest, Taita? I am more accustomed to fighting other ships in the confines of the Nile, not out here in the open ocean. So I yield to your superior knowledge.’

‘I saw that you have a change of sail in the after hold.’

‘Oh, you mean the black sail. It comes in handy for night work, when we don’t want to be discovered by the enemy.’

‘That’s exactly what we need right now,’ I told him.

We waited until the last glimmer of daylight faded into darkness. Then we altered course ninety degrees to port and sailed for what I judged to be roughly a mile. There we hove to and brought down our white sail and replaced it with the black one. This manoeuvre was complicated by the darkness, and it occupied us for longer than I had hoped. At last, under our midnight-black mainsail, we circled back on to our original course, which manoeuvre was made possible by my magic fish and an occasional flash of sheet lightning that lit the clouds briefly.

I was hoping that the other ship was following our original course and in the delay while we changed sail it had passed us and was now sailing along ahead of us, with every member of its crew staring fixedly over the bows. Obviously the captain of the pirate vessel would be piling on all his sail in order to overhaul us; so I ordered Rameses to do the same thing. The Memnon tore along through the darkness with spray coming in over the bows and pelting us like a hailstorm. Every member of our crew was fully armed and ready for a fight, but as time slipped by I began to doubt even my own calculations of the relative positions of the two ships.

Then suddenly the pirate ship seemed to spring at us out of the night. I hardly had time to shout a warning to the helm and there she was dead ahead and broadside on to us, lit up by another fleeting flash of lightning. It seemed that the pirate skipper had given up all hope of coming up astern of us. He had convinced himself that he sailed past us in the darkness, so now he was trying to come on to the opposite tack and beat back to seek us out. He was full in the path of the Memnon and lying like a log in the water. We were charging in on him at attack speed and our axe-sharp bows would have cleaved him through and through, but would themselves have been staved in by the ferocity of the impact.

It was a tribute to Rameses’ maritime skill and the training of his crew that he was able to prevent a head-on collision that would have demolished both vessels and sent them and all of us to the bottom of the ocean. He managed to alter course just enough to present our broadside to that of the stationary ship. Nevertheless the impact was sufficient to throw every member of the pirate crew to the deck, including the captain and the helmsman. They lay there in heaps, most of them hurt or stunned, and even the few of those who were able to regain their feet had lost their weapons and were in no condition to defend themselves.