Vengeance, page 1
Praise for
‘Best Historical Novelist – I say Wilbur Smith, with his swashbuckling novels of Africa. The bodices rip and the blood flows. You can get lost in Wilbur Smith and misplace all of August’
STEPHEN KING
‘A thundering good read is virtually the only way of describing Wilbur Smith’s books’
IRISH TIMES
‘Wilbur Smith . . . writes as forcefully as his tough characters act’
EVENING STANDARD
‘Wilbur Smith has arguably the best sense of place of any adventure writer since John Buchan’
THE GUARDIAN
‘Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared’
THE TIMES
‘I don’t believe I have ever read an author whose work I loved as much’
CONN IGGULDEN
‘Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he is the master’
WASHINGTON POST
‘A master storyteller’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘Smith will take you on an exciting, taut and thrilling journey you will never forget’
THE SUN
‘No one does adventure quite like Smith’
DAILY MIRROR
‘With Wilbur Smith the action is never further than the turn of a page’
THE INDEPENDENT
‘When it comes to writing the adventure novel, Wilbur Smith is the master; a 21st century H. Rider Haggard’
VANITY FAIR
I dedicate this novel to my precious wife and cherished companion, Niso. I never really knew what happiness was until I met you. Now you fill every day of mine with love, laughter and happiness.
With you by my side I scorn to change my state with Kings.
This novel, like all of those published after his passing, originated from an unfinished work by Wilbur Smith. Wilbur worked closely with each of his co-authors on storylines that met his rigorous standards. Wilbur’s wife, Niso Smith, his long-standing literary agent, Kevin Conroy Scott, and the Wilbur Smith Estate’s in-house editor, James Woodhouse, continue to work tirelessly to ensure that the body of work that Wilbur left behind reflects his vision in his absence.
CONTENTS
The Courtney Family in Vengeance
Part I
Part II
Part III
About the Author
Other books in the Birds of Prey Sequence
Also by Wilbur Smith
Readers’ Club
Copyright
Find out more about the Courtneys and see the Courtney family tree in full at www.wilbursmithbooks.com/courtney-family-tree
I
INDIAN OCEAN, 1820
T
he jolly boat crept unseen towards the Tiger.
The night was calm. The new moon visible only as a black absence in the star-filled sky. The ocean waves surged on – powerfully, relentlessly.
Ralph Courtney crouched in the boat’s stern and stared ahead at the silhouette on the silvered water, where the brigantine rode under her topsails. This was the moment he had waited almost half his life for, and he wanted to savour every second of it. He pressed his thumb against one of the tines on the grapnel he carried, feeling the sharp metal draw blood, letting the pain dance in his veins.
He wiped his thumb on his face, leaving a dark streak across his cheek. The man in front of him grinned as he leaned on his oar. ‘Plenty more blood, soon enough,’ he said.
Chuckles sounded around the jolly boat. The crew had come from every corner of the oceans – lascars, Chinamen, Americans, Frenchmen. In daylight you could see they shared a rough brotherhood; at night, all you saw was the violence glittering in their eyes.
‘Quiet!’ Ralph hissed. They were coming close to the brig now and the captain would have posted lookouts. But the jolly boat’s crew had sensed the danger. They worked their oars carefully, so that they barely left a ripple on the heaving surface. They had done this many times before.
Ralph checked his weapons. Both pistols were loaded and primed, with rags wrapped around the locks to keep the salt water out. A sword hung at his belt, a dagger on his hip and another in his boot. He was ready.
They eased towards the brig’s bow. She ran without lanterns – even the binnacle was dark – but by the starlight you could read the name painted in white letters along the side of her bow: Tiger. It made Ralph think of a poem his tutor had made him memorise years earlier.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
What had happened to the boy who had stood reciting that poem in the garden in Holkar, under the neem trees, the cool morning air filled with the promise of the heat to come and the cries of peacocks? Ralph shook the thought off angrily, pressing his thumb against the grapnel again, driving the point home. What I am about to do now is all that matters.
Even under short sails, the Tiger was making good headway. She was a fine ship and aptly named: she had the speed and agility of a cat. She could outsail heavier vessels and fight off anything short of a ship of the line. With her shallow draft, she could slip into bays and inlets where most ships would not dare to venture.
But sleek and nimble as she was, the Tiger still looked enormous from a small boat in the belly of a wave, and Ralph was so close now that he could feel the spray thrown up by her bow as she cut through the water.
Aboard the brig was the man who had killed his father. Ralph would not let this moment pass. He stood, bracing against the swell, and spun the grapnel at the end of its rope. Faster, faster – then he let fly.
He had weighted it to perfection. The grapnel sailed up into the space between the jolly boat and the brig and dropped over the bow. He felt the rope go taut as the flukes bit into the ship’s gunwale.
‘What was that?’
In the quiet of the night, the voice on deck came clearly down to the water. Ralph froze. If the lookout found the grapnel – when he found it – the Tiger’s crew would have his boat at their mercy.
Ralph had seconds to make a decision. He could let go of the rope, drift away into the darkness and hope the Tiger did not give chase. But if he did that, he might never have this chance again.
He leaped, thudding into the brig’s side, the impact slamming the breath out of his body. Driven by the knowledge that to fail was to die, he quickly hauled himself up the rope, hand over hand. The thump of the bow against the water, the hiss of spray and the blood pounding in his ears drowned out any noise from above.
Reaching the gunwale, Ralph gripped the rail with both hands, pulling himself up and over like an acrobat. He landed on the balls of his feet, dropping into a crouch as his hand went to his sword. There was a figure ahead, and the gleam of steel in the starlight.
Ralph had to stop the lookout from sounding the alarm. Leaping forward and drawing his sword in one fluid motion, he caught the sailor across the jaw with the pommel of his weapon. The blow carried enough force to knock the man senseless, and as the sailor reeled from the impact, Ralph grabbed him by his neckerchief and threw him back towards the rail. The lookout’s momentum took him over, head first, without a sound.
‘Jack?’ Another voice came from the darkness. A second watchman.
Ralph crouched behind the capstan. With luck, the second sailor would walk straight past him, and Ralph could leap on him from behind.
But this sailor was experienced. He kept his distance.
‘Jack?’ he called again.
‘Over here,’ Ralph grunted.
It did not fool the watchman. ‘Who’s there?’ He edged forward, keeping well away from the capstan.
Ralph unwrapped the cloth from one of his pistols and pulled back the hammer as quietly as he could. Still, not quietly enough. The watchman stopped.
‘Come out and let me see you,’ he called.
Ralph was trapped. Jamming the pistol in his waistband, he lifted his hands and rose slowly, arms wide.
If the watchman was surprised to see a strange man appear on his ship in the middle of the night, he did not show it.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, pulling his own pistol from his waistband.
‘I sailed on the Lady Dorothy out of Bombay. I fell overboard.’ Ralph spoke softly and quickly, desperate to keep the man’s attention. ‘Thank God, your ship was passing and I was able to climb aboard.’
The watchman shook his head, his face hardening. ‘Where’s Jack?’
‘He fainted at the sight of me. He’s over here, behind—’
The creak of a plank cut Ralph off. The watchman spun about. Distracted by Ralph, he had not heard the jolly boat being brought alongside and the men climbing the brig’s ladder behind him. They were on deck now. A few more steps and they would have slit his throat.
A flash like lightning split the darkness as the watchman pulled the trigger. Instinctively, Ralph closed his eyes against the blinding light, but he was too slow. When he opened them, his night vision had gone. All he could make out was a huddle of figures, and two dark shapes writhing on the deck. With the stroke of a cutlass, one of them stopped moving.
‘Get the lantern lit,’ Ralph ordered. ‘Block the hatches.’
He could already hear commotion below as the pistol shot sent men tumbling out of their hammocks and scrambling for their weapons. The boarding party had little time.
The Tiger had been sailing without lights, but there was a storm lantern hanging from a hook on the mainmast. One of Ral ph’s men took a burning slow match out of a tin and touched it to the wick. The lantern flared, illuminating the deck. Four of his men ran aft to the main hatch and began to drag the cover across it. If they could lock the crew in their quarters, the ship would be theirs.
They had it halfway shut when a volley of gunfire exploded from the deck below. Bullets and splinters flew out of the hatchway. The men who had been standing over it reeled back, clutching their faces. Then the cover was thrown back, and sailors poured out on deck.
Ralph had known the Tiger’s crew would react quickly. He had counted on surprise. Now the odds had flipped in an instant. Of his eight men aboard, five were already wounded or dead. The survivors clustered together around Ralph by the mainmast, but they were heavily outnumbered. The Tiger’s crew surrounded them.
A man pushed his way to the front. He must have been in bed: his wiry black hair stuck out at all angles, his shirt was only half buttoned and he had not even had time to put on his boots. He had grown older since the last time Ralph had seen him. Lines had been etched into the coffee-coloured skin of his face, and there were flecks of grey in his hair. But the light in his green eyes was as fierce and strong as ever.
Adam Courtney.
He glared at Ralph in the glow provided by lantern. ‘Who the hell are you?’
His voice, accustomed to command, carried easily across the deck. He had once been a promising young captain in the Royal Navy, in the years when Britain’s ships were the first line of defence against the tyranny of Napoleon.
Which of us has fallen further? Ralph wondered. He stepped forward, so that the lamplight fell on his face: the smooth cheeks, crooked mouth and bright blue eyes.
‘Do you not remember me?’
‘Should I?’
‘Perhaps not. I daresay there are many men whose fathers you murdered.’
Adam peered more closely. Ralph held his gaze, challenging him to remember. Even with a dozen blades pointed at his heart, this was the moment he had longed for. He watched Adam’s face like a sailor reading wind over water. Ignorance, then confusion, then the snap of realisation, eyes widening and pupils contracting. Memory, certainty, terror.
‘Ralph . . .?’ He spoke the name almost silently.
‘I have been looking for you for a long time,’ Ralph said.
Adam went pale. His hand clenched three times around the hilt of his sword. Perhaps he was remembering the small boy with whom he had thrown a cricket ball in that garden in India. The boy whose mother he had seduced, and whose father he had killed. ‘I do not want to fight you,’ he said quietly.
Ralph shook his head. ‘You made your choice fourteen years ago.’
A woman wearing a white nightgown pushed through the crowd of sailors and came up beside Adam. She had pulled a shawl over her shoulders, and her honey-coloured hair was twisted in a loose chignon. She carried a sleeping baby cradled against her chest. ‘What is happening?
‘Stay back, Lizzie,’ Adam said, not taking his eyes from Ralph. And though a score of men surrounded them, in the circle of lamplight, to Ralph it seemed that they were the only people who existed.
The creak of wood and rope broke the silence. It was the sound of a yard straining as the wind shifted, as commonplace on a ship at sea as the lap of waves or the slap of bare feet on planks. No one paid it any heed.
Except that it had not come from the Tiger. It came from the darkness off her starboard side, out on the water where the lamplight did not reach.
The crew realised it too late. The long point of a bowsprit nosed into view even as one of the men snatched the lantern from the mast and ran to the rail, holding it aloft to illuminate the ship emerging from the night. She was under sail, moving fast.
Adam looked up as if woken from a dream. ‘What—?’
The two ships’ yards clattered together with a rattling aloft, a moment before the hulls struck. Everyone on deck was knocked to their knees. The man with the lantern was thrown back as the deck became a mess of tumbling bodies and confusion.
No one saw as the oil spilled from the shattered lantern and seeped into the pile of ropes coiled at the foot of the mainmast.
Ralph was first to stand. His ship, the Jessica, was smaller than the Tiger. She would never have been able to come alongside under normal circumstances – the Tiger’s crew were too watchful, her guns too deadly. Instead, he had distracted them, all the while waiting for the lantern on the mainmast to guide the Jessica in.
Even so, the Tiger’s crew outnumbered Ralph’s. He had caught them off guard and had them off balance, but they were well drilled. As Ralph’s men poured over the side, brandishing their axes and pikes, the Tiger’s crew rose to meet them. Ralph knew that the fighting would be fierce, and he could not tell which side would prevail. It did not matter. There was only one man he cared about.
Ralph had lost sight of Adam when the lantern had gone out, but it was easy enough to find his wife. Her nightdress was luminous in the dark, and the collision had jolted the baby awake – he was screaming his lungs out.
Fighting raged across the deck. Ralph battered his way through the melee. He shouldered one man aside, thumped another in the teeth with the guard of his sword, then drew his pistol and shot a third who blocked his way. As he advanced, his men following like a pack of wolves, the Tiger’s crew retreated towards the stern, rallying around their captain.
Suddenly, light flared on deck. A burning piece of pistol wadding had landed by the broken lantern, in the oil-soaked ropes at the foot of the mainmast. In an instant, flames were licking up towards the brailed canvas on the lower yards.
The battle halted. Every man stared in horror at the one enemy that could unite – or doom – all of them.
Every man but one. ‘What are you waiting for?’ Ralph screamed. By the light of the fire he could see Adam clearly now, standing in front of his wife by the ship’s wheel. Ralph had his prize within his grasp; he would not let it go.
A man grabbed his shoulder, and almost received Ralph’s sword through his throat. Just in time, Ralph recognised his own first mate, a Chinese sailor named Wu Zixu.
‘Leave them,’ Wu said. The fire had taken hold of the sails now, spreading along the yards, turning both the masts into giant crosses burning against the sky. With the two ships’ spars locked together, it would spread to the Jessica in moments. ‘We must cut away or burn.’
‘No.’
Wu looked at Ralph as if he was insane. ‘What about our cargo?’
Stowed in the Jessica’s hold was a hoard of gold, silver and precious stones – several lifetimes worth of fortunes. It would be madness to risk it.
Ralph tore free from Wu’s grasp. ‘This is what I came to do.’
Behind him, men were trying to raise the pumps to put out the fire, while some of the Jessica’s crew clambered into her rigging with axes to chop their ship free. Ralph strode on, feeling the heat of the fire on his back. Now there was only one man ahead of him, shielding the woman and the screaming baby.
The two men faced each other on the quarterdeck in the blood-red glow of the burning ship.
Ralph had imagined this moment for years. So many nights he had lain awake, whispering the words he would say when he finally confronted his father’s killer. Yet now he was here, a great weariness seemed to come over him. All he wanted was for it to end.
He lunged forward. Adam was a fine swordsman, but Ralph was younger, stronger. His first stroke was so powerful it knocked the sword clean out of Adam’s hand. It flew across the deck and landed by the binnacle – out of Adam’s reach.
So easy, Ralph thought.
Adam stepped back, spreading his arms to shield his family. ‘At least will you spare my wife and child?’
Fire roared and crackled across the deck. Smoke choked the air, and the deck shuddered as pieces of burning cordage rained down over it. A smouldering glow lit the water, as if the ocean itself was about to erupt in flames.
‘You left my father’s son alive to avenge him. I will not make that mistake.’
The woman with the honey-coloured hair stepped out from Adam’s shadow, the firelight reflecting in her eyes, a golden crucifix gleaming at her throat. ‘You will damn yourself to hell,’ she said.
