Conquest

in the wrecking.

‘Tell him we’re starting to search for ’em now.’

With no shortage of lookouts, L’Aurore sailed south and almost immediately sighted a wreck. Stark against the glare of pale sand, it was thrust up near a sand-spit. Lieutenant Bowden was sent to make contact, but returned quickly.

‘Not ship-rigged and looks to be old, sir.’

In the early afternoon another wreck was sighted. This one was at an angle to heavy breakers and still showed mast stumps – it had to be recent or would have been reduced to a grey-ribbed carcass. Careful searching with a telescope, however, showed no sign of life.

‘Give ’em a gun.’ A six-pounder forward banged out. There was no response.

‘Another.’ Nothing.

‘See if our survivor can be carried up on deck to identify it,’ Kydd ordered, eyeing the way in.

There was no mistaking the Dane’s pitiful response and Bowden was sent in once more, this time in the whaler. On his own initiative, Kydd had acquired for L’Aurore a whaling boat: double- ended and sea-kindly, it could be landed through heavy surf, unlike a flat-transomed boat.

He watched its progress. Sped ashore through the final lines of breakers, it grounded and was rapidly hauled clear. The men quickly went to the wreck, disappearing out of view, but after some time they reappeared, and went over the dunes, searching.

After a perilous launch into the surf, with the boat in a demented rearing and bucking, a soaked Bowden reported, ‘It’s the Grethe well enough, sir. And not a soul alive, I’m sorry to say.’

‘None?’

‘There were eight or so bodies in the ’tween decks aft, but I couldn’t make good search as she was breaking up.’ He shuddered. ‘Some African beast had got to them, sir, I – I didn’t look closely.’

‘Your men found nothing?’

‘Not a sign.’

It didn’t make sense. If they’d abandoned the wreck, surely there’d be a camp somewhere close. And lookouts to watch for a rescue vessel. Or had they already been picked up? No – they would have buried their shipmates first. If he now sailed away, he could be dooming thirty-three people to a terrible end.

‘I’m going to see for myself.’ In all conscience, Kydd couldn’t rob them of their only chance of rescue without one more look.

‘It’s fearfully hot, sir,’ Bowden said, ‘and if this swell rises, getting off again in the surf could be hard.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind. Poulden – pick a good crew.’

Kydd stripped off his coat and, with a quick apology, borrowed a seaman’s flat sennit hat before boarding the whaler, taking the steering oar himself. It was a dizzying ride in, and the final rush to the sand was as exhilarating as it was hazardous.

‘Haul in.’

While the boat was dragged clear Kydd looked about him. High sand-hills, a very few small ragged bushes and strangely coloured dunes that stretched away into a limitless distance. A sense of utter desolation beat at him as he trudged towards the dark-timbered bulk of the wreck.

From shoreward it was not difficult to get aboard by the ropes that trailed in the water over the stern. What Bowden had not mentioned was the squeal and barking of tortured timber and the crazy working of the planking as the decks sagged on to each other. Or the stench of putrefaction mingled with bilge and sea smells.

Bent double, Kydd worked his way forward and saw the first body, its parts scattered. In the gloom he caught the flash of eyes – some sort of hyena circling. There were other bodies – now just butcher’s carcasses – that he dimly perceived rolled together in the lower part of the canted deck.

There was nothing to be gained by staying and Kydd made for fresh air, relieved to be away from the cloying fetor of death. He had once been wrecked in the Azores and knew how rapidly a doomed ship turned from having been a neat and trim home for sailors into a crazed death-trap.

The Grethe was not long for this world – in a short while it would be a gaunt, grey- timbered skeleton. But where were her people? There were simply nowhere near enough bodies. It could only be that they had left the wreck and got ashore.

Back on the vast beach he gathered his thoughts. Had they headed inland, hoping to reach some sort of civilisation? The constant wind with its sibilance of rubbing sand-grains had obliterated all tracks – even Bowden’s were now rounded and filled.

Kydd toiled up the face of the highest dune. At the top he looked out on the most parched and bleak desert landscape he had ever seen: endless vari-coloured sand-mountains, some with dark ridges protruding, rising from a flat desert floor and stretching away into a shimmering distance, where several rounded copper mountains lay, all in the torpid stillness of a terrible desert silence – vast, brooding, impenetrable. And not the faintest human trace.

Away from the sea, there was no cooling wind and the heated sand beat mercilessly up at him.

Had there been a fierce attack by a native tribe? Surely nothing could live here in this landscape. The survivors had vanished – and it must remain a mystery for ever.

He turned to go, but stopped. What if they had not accepted their fate and in desperation had struck out to find their own deliverance? It would have been a dreadful decision: to leave the relative comfort and shelter of the wreck for the unknown. Perhaps the bodies were of those who had argued for staying until rescued, while the others had taken their fate in their own hands and started out.

Only a madman would enter the hellish aridity inland when by the sea there was some degree of coolness and hard-packed sand for travelling. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that this was what had