"Wilbur Smith - Courtney 03 - Blue Horizon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

The fields and orchards behind the stables were filled with freed slaves gathering in the fresh produce destined for the Meeuu). Most of the bushel baskets were already filled with potatoes and apples, pumpkins and turnips. His father and Mansur were supervising the harvest. Jim left them to it, and went down to the slaughterhouse. In the cavernous cool room, with its thick, windowless walls, dozens of freshly slaughtered sheep carcasses hung from hooks in the ceiling. Jim drew the knife from the sheath on his belt and whipped the blade, with practised strokes, across the whetstone as he went to join his uncle Dorian. To prepare all the produce they needed to supply to the ship, everyone on the estate had to help with the work. Freed slaves dragged in fat-tailed Persian sheep from the holding pen, held them down and pulled back their heads to expose the throats to the stroke of the knife. Other willing hands lifted the dead animals on to the hooks and stripped off the bloody fleeces.

Weeks ago, Carl Otto, the estate butcher, had filled his smoke room with hams and sausages for just such an opportunity. In the kitchens all the women from eldest to youngest were helping Sarah and Yasmini to bottle fruit and pickle vegetables.

Despite their best efforts it was late in the afternoon before the convoy of mule carts was fully loaded and had set off down to the beach. The transfer of the provisions from the carts to the beached bum boats took most of the rest of the night, and it was almost dawn before they were loaded.

Despite Jim's misgivings the wind had not increased in strength and the sea and surf were manageable as the mule teams dragged the heavily laden boats down the sand. The first glimmer of dawn was in the eastern

sky by the time the little convoy was on its way. Jim was at the tiller in the leading boat and Mansur was on the stroke oar.

"What have you got in the bag, Jim?" he asked, between strokes.

"Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies." Jim glanced down at the waterproof canvas bag that lay between his feet. He kept his voice low so that his father did not overhear. Luckily Tom Courtney, who stood in the bows, had fired so many heavy muskets in his long career as a hunter that his hearing was dull.

"Is it a gift for a sweetheart?" Mansur grinned slyly in the darkness, but Jim ignored him. That arrow was too near the bullseye for comfort. Jim had carefully packed into the bag a bundle of salted, sun-dried venison, the ubiquitous biltong of the Cape boers, ten pounds of hard ship's biscuit wrapped in a cloth, a folding knife and a triangular-bladed file that he had pilfered from the estate workshop, a tortoiseshell comb, which belonged to his mother, and a letter written on a single sheet of paper in Dutch.

They came up to the Meeuw, and Tom Courtney hailed her in a bull bellow: "Longboat with supplies. Permission to hook on?"

There was an answering shout from the ship and they rowed in, bumping lightly against the tall hull.

With her long legs folded under her, Louisa Leuven sat on the hard deck in the noisome semi-darkness that was lit only by the feeble light of the fighting-lanterns. Her shoulders were covered with a single thin cotton blanket of the poorest quality. The gun ports were closed and bolted. The guards were taking no chances: with the shore so close, some of the women might take the risk in the cold green currents, undeterred by the possibility of drowning or being devoured by the monstrous sharks that were attracted to these waters by the swarming seal colony on Robben Island. While the women had been on deck that afternoon the cook had thrown overboard a bucket of guts from the red steenbras. The head gaoler had pointed out to his prisoners the triangular fins of the sharks as they sped in to snatch these bloody morsels.

"Don't any of you filthy slatterns get ideas of escape," he cautioned them.

At the beginning of the voyage Louisa had claimed for herself this berth under one of the huge bronze cannon. She was stronger than most of the other wizened undernourished convicts and, of necessity, she had

learned how to protect herself. Life on board was like being in a pack of wild animals: the women around her were every bit as dangerous and merciless as wolves, but shrewder and more cunning. At the beginning Louisa knew she had to procure a weapon so she had managed to prise loose a strip of the bronze beading from under the carriage of the cannon. She had spent long hours of the night stropping this against the cannon barrel until it had a sharp double stiletto edge. She tore a strip of canvas from the hem of her shift and wrapped it round the hilt to make a handle. She carried the dagger, day and night, in the pouch she wore strapped around her waist under the canvas shift. So far she had been forced to cut only one of the other women.

Nedda was a Frieslander, with heavy thighs and bottom, fat arms and a pudding face covered with freckles. She had once been a notorious whore-mistress for the nobility. She had specialized in procuring young children for her rich clients, until she became too greedy and tried to blackmail one. On a hot, tropical night as the ship lay becalmed a few degrees south of the equator, Big Nedda had crept up on Louisa in the night, and pinned her down under her suffocating weight. None of the gaolers or any of the women had come to Louisa's rescue as she screamed and struggled. Instead they had giggled and egged Nedda on. "Give it to the high and mighty bitch." "Listen to her squealing for it. She loves it." "Go on, Big Nedda. Shove your fist up that prim royal poesje." When Louisa felt the woman prise her legs apart with a fat knee, she reached down, slipped the blade out of its pouch and slashed Nedda's chubby red cheek. Nedda howled and rolled off her, clutching the deep, spurting wound. Then she crept away, sobbing and moaning, into the darkness. During the next few weeks the wound had festered, and Nedda had crouched like a bear in the darkest recess of the gundeck, her face swollen to double its size, pus leaking out through the dirty bandage, dripping yellow and thick as cream from her chin. Since then Nedda had kept well clear of Louisa, and the other women had learned from her example. They left her well alone.

For Louisa this dreadful voyage seemed to have lasted all her life. Even during this respite from the open sea, while the Meeuw lay at anchor in Table Bay, the magnitude of the ordeal she had undergone still haunted her. She cowered further into her refuge under the cannon and shuddered as each of the separate memories pricked her like thorns. The throng of humanity was pressed close about her. They were packed so tightly into every inch of the deck that it was almost impossible to escape the touch of other filthy bodies crawling with lice. In rough weather the latrine buckets slopped over, and the sewage ran down the

crowded deck. It soaked the women's clothing and their thin cotton blankets where they lay. During the occasional spells of calm weather the crew pumped seawater down the hatches and the women went down on their knees to scrub the planks with the coarse holystones. It was in vain, for during the next storm the filth splashed over them again. In the dawn when the hatches were taken off the companionways, they took turns to carry the reeking wooden buckets up the ladders to the deck and empty them over the side while the crew and the guards jeered at them.

Every Sunday, in any kind of weather, the prisoners were mustered on deck while the guards stood over them with loaded muskets. The women, in their leg irons and ragged canvas shifts, shivered and hugged themselves with their thin arms, their skin blue and pimpled with the cold, while the Dutch Reform dominie harangued them for their sins. When this ordeal was over the crew set up canvas screens on the foredeck, and in groups the prisoners were forced behind them while streams of seawater were sprayed over them from the ship's pumps. Louisa and some of the more fastidious women stripped off their shifts and tried as best they could to wash off the filth. The screens fluttered in the wind and afforded them almost no privacy, and the seamen on the pumps or in the rigging overhead whistled and called ribald comments.

"Look at the dugs on that cow!"

"You could sail a ship-of-the-line up that great hairy harbour."

Louisa learned to use her wet shift to cover herself, as she crouched low, screening herself behind the other women. The few hours of cleanliness were worth the humiliation, but as soon as her shift dried and the warmth of her body hatched the next batch of nits she began to scratch again. With her bronze blade she whittled a splinter of wood into a fine-tooth comb and spent hours each day under the gun carriage combing the nits out of her long, golden hair, and from the tufts of her body hair. Her pathetic attempts at bodily hygiene seemed to highlight the slovenliness of the other women, which infuriated them.

"Look at her royal bloody highness, at it again. Combing her poesje hairs."

"She's better than the rest of us. Going to marry the Governor of Batavia when we get there, didn't you know?"

"You going to invite us to the wedding, Princess?"

"Nedda here will be your bridesmaid, won't you, Nedda lievelingT The livid scar down Nedda's fat cheek twisted into a grotesque grin, but her eyes were filled with hatred in the dim lantern-light.