Brotherband 4: Slaves of Socorro (18 page)

Hal smiled in return. ‘I’ll try not to,’ he said, making a mental note not to chase smugglers and to make lots of demands on the village. William pushed his chair back and stood, although he had to remain stooped over.

‘Well, that’s about it. Oh, we do have a meeting every week on first-day, to let one another know what’s been going on. Aside from that, welcome to Araluen and we’re pleased to have you here.’ He nodded in Jurgen’s direction. ‘And sorry to lose you and your men, Jurgen. You’ve been good guests.’

Jurgen shook his hand as the headman offered it. ‘You’ve looked after us well. But we’re all keen to be getting home. I’ll take Hal and his crew out to show them the surrounding bays and sandbars. I imagine some of my men will be visiting the village this afternoon, to say goodbye to . . . special friends.’ He made his farewells to the other two councillors, then gestured for Hal and Thorn to precede him to the door.

As they reached the steep, winding path to the beach, Jurgen glanced back at the village with a sigh.

‘We’ve had a good year here,’ he said. ‘They’re good people and they’ll look after you. Make sure you don’t let them down.’

Hal nodded. In spite of Jurgen’s claim to be glad to be going home, it was obvious that he would miss Cresthaven and its people. Then the older skirl shook off his momentary melancholy and rubbed his hands briskly together.

‘Now let’s get going!’ he said. ‘I want to see if this ship of yours lives up to its reputation!’

Heron
certainly did that as they took her to sea and Jurgen familiarised them with local landmarks, sandbanks, narrows, channels and shallows. They cruised several leagues north and south of the bay, getting the feel for the area. He showed them where the tide race built up over semi-submerged reefs, where the bottom rose sharply, ready to strand an unwary navigator. And he pointed out distinguishing features on the land, giving them their local names.

‘Handy to know the local names in case someone wants to tell you where they’ve seen a slave ship,’ he said.

‘Or a smuggler?’ Hal said, keeping a straight face.

Jurgen grinned at him. ‘I doubt anyone will want to tell you that,’ he said. ‘But I think you’d already guessed that.’

For his part, Jurgen was suitably impressed with
Heron
’s upwind performance, and the speed with which she went about from one tack to another. The fin keel fascinated him as he saw how it reduced the ship’s down wind drift. Although, like every other wolfship skirl, he raised his eyebrows in disbelief when he saw how the fin passed through the bottom of the ship.

‘You cut a hole in her bottom?’ he said incredulously, then shook his head. ‘Can’t say I think that’s too smart.’

Like all the others, he was also mystified by the fact that
Heron
didn’t simply fill up and sink. ‘Luck,’ he was heard to mutter. ‘Just beginner’s luck.’

They ran in close to a long beach that stretched along the coastline and they demonstrated the Mangler for him. Hal took over the big weapon. He wanted to impress
Wolfspear
’s skipper with its power and accuracy, and Stig and Lydia weren’t fully trained on the weapon yet.

He shot three bolts at a target set up on the beach and demolished it. Jurgen drew in his breath as he watched the missiles slamming into the wood and canvas target, sending splinters flying. He could obviously imagine the effect those massive bolts would have on a ship.

Finally, as an experiment, Hal shot one of the new pottery-tipped bolts, aiming at a rock at the end of the beach. The result was everything he had hoped for and there was a collective intake of breath from the Herons as the clay head shattered, sending a hail of fragments and shards in all directions, tearing down the small bushes that surrounded the rock, and sending sand fountaining into the air.

‘Remind me never to get on the wrong side of you lot in a sea fight,’ Jurgen said. He was half joking – but only half. He looked at the youthful crew with new respect. They were young, he thought, but they definitely weren’t boys. They had been hardened in battle and they knew how to fight.

Hal offered him the tiller as they cruised back up the coast to Cresthaven. Jurgen had a sure hand on the tiller and he enjoyed the
Heron
’s instant response to his movements of the helm and her speed on a beam reach. He also noted the skill and precision with which her crew handled the sails, bringing one down and sending the other up as they tacked, then sheeting home to send the little ship surging through the water.

‘You’ve got them well trained,’ he said to Hal in an aside.

Hal couldn’t help feeling a glow of pride at the words. ‘They’re a good crew,’ he replied.

‘A crew is only as good as their captain,’ Jurgen said, looking at the young man with increased respect. Hal went a little red around the ears, but said nothing.

That night, there was a farewell for
Wolfspear
and her crew in the village. The Herons were invited, but they declined.

‘This is your night,’ Hal told Jurgen and his crew. ‘They want to say goodbye and we’d just be in the way.’

They were rolled up in their blankets when the other crew returned late that night. They were obviously trying to be quiet, but the idea of a Skandian wolfship crew being quiet after an evening of feasting and ale drinking was a totally foreign concept.

As a gesture to their sleeping countrymen, the staggering, stumbling, singing crewmen tried to stagger, stumble and sing in a whisper – with the inevitable result. They fell, they crashed into items of furniture that appeared to move in front of them without warning, and their whispered singing sounded like a chorus of huge snakes hissing and whistling.

The Herons sighed, rolled over and pulled their blankets over their heads.

The following morning, the bleary-eyed crew departed. An equally bleary-eyed group came down from the village to farewell them. Several attractive girls were openly weeping as they waved goodbye. Hal and the Herons stood by on the jetty and cast off the mooring lines, fending the ship away from the jetty with long poles.

The rowing crew raised their oars vertically. It was a manouevre normally done with precision and panache, the oars moving as one. This time, they moved as seventeen or eighteen. They came down to the horizontal jerkily and there was a series of muffled thuds and rattles as the oars were placed in their oarlocks.

Jurgen called the stroke, instantly raising a hand to his forehead in a vain attempt to quell the sudden, lancing pain there, and the ship moved out into the bay. The strokes were uneven, with the ship crabbing awkwardly as several oarsmen missed the water altogether and another dug his oar blade too deep and was promptly catapulted off his bench by the butt end.

As
Wolfspear
rounded the point, the watchers could see several of her crew hanging over the rail, doubled at the waist and peering down at the sea as the first rollers lifted her.

‘Looks like they’ve lost something,’ said Edvin.

‘Probably their breakfast,’ Stefan replied.

F
or the next ten days, the
Heron
cruised the waters north and south of Cresthaven, exploring bays and inlets, at times venturing up creeks and small rivers that opened into the Narrow Sea. On more than one occasion, they found old burnt-out fireplaces and scraps of rubbish.

‘Someone’s camped here,’ Lydia said, traversing one of the old camp sites – although her skill at tracking and recognising signs wasn’t needed to see the fact.

‘How long ago?’ Hal asked. Lydia’s skills were more valuable in assessing how old the traces were. She shrugged, sucked in her cheeks and reached down to stir the ashes of a long-dead fire with her fingers.

‘Not recently,’ she said. ‘Two weeks, maybe a month ago.’

Thorn had been walking the sandy bank of the small river, searching above the high tide mark.

‘They beached a ship here,’ he called and the others went to inspect the deep groove cut by a ship’s keel in the sand. Hal and Stig assessed the mark.

‘Not very big,’ Stig said.

‘Smugglers don’t have to be big,’ Hal replied. ‘They have to be fast.’

Stefan and Edvin were searching the fringe of the woods that bordered the little river beach. They returned with the remnants of a small keg – missing its top, but virtually intact apart from that. Hal sniffed the inside of the staves and wrinkled his nose.

‘Brandy,’ he said, passing the broken keg to Thorn for confirmation. ‘So I’d say they were smugglers all right, and they sampled some of their own wares.’

Thorn sniffed the cask in his turn and grinned. ‘Time was, that smell would have set my pulse racing,’ he said. ‘More likely they were giving their customers a sample of the goods. It’s an old smuggler’s trick. You have one cask of superior product and you let them try it. The rest of the cargo is much cheaper stuff.’

Jesper cocked his head to one side curiously. ‘And the customers never wise up to the trick?’

Thorn snorted derisively. ‘Of course they do. But if they let on, they’ll never get to sample the good stuff. They simply adjust the price they pay accordingly. That way, both sides think they’re fooling the other.’

‘And that’s the basis of a good negotiation,’ Edvin said seriously.

Thorn looked at him appreciatively. ‘Always said you had a head on your shoulders,’ he remarked.

‘We’ll keep an eye on this location,’ Hal said. ‘If they’ve used it once, they might well use it again.’

‘William did imply that we should leave the smugglers alone,’ Stig reminded him.

Hal thrust out his bottom lip. ‘Yes. So he did. But if we ignore them completely, they’ll get out of control. I think we should nab one of them every so often – just so they know we know what they’re up to.’

A smile spread slowly over Stig’s face. ‘I see what you mean. We’ve got to keep them honest.’

‘As honest as smugglers can be,’ Hal agreed. ‘Let’s get back to the ship.’

They interspersed their cruising with practice sessions on the Mangler for Stig and Lydia. Both of them were highly competitive by nature and Stig, like young men all over the world, had no intention of letting a girl beat him – even a girl as accomplished and capable as Lydia might be.

The two of them sledged each other unmercifully and the crew quickly took sides, betting on their favourite. Jesper held the bets and set the odds, which varied from day to day as either Stig or Lydia moved ahead in the aggregate score.

‘It’s not a competition!’ Hal said in frustration, as Stig crouched behind the Mangler, while Lydia, who was one shot ahead of him on the day, poured a stream of criticism and insults at him. Included were the words ‘cross-eyed, hamfisted clod who couldn’t hit the side of a barn from inside the barn’.

As Hal spoke, both Stig and Lydia turned to look at him in disbelief.

‘Of course it is,’ they said in unison. And the crew voiced their agreement. Hal, for once unable to assert his authority, shrugged in defeat.

‘All right. It is a competition. But are the rest of you mad?’ he continued. ‘You’re letting Jesper hold the bets and set the odds. You do know that he was a thief, don’t you?’

‘That’s a long way behind me, Hal,’ said Jesper, looking suitably aggrieved. ‘I’m shocked and deeply hurt that you would throw up my past in my face like that.’ All the same, he made a mental note to return half the coins he had been skimming as a commission from the bets left in his care.