their swords and called down God's blessings upon him. Then they crowded forward and competed fiercely for the honour of bearing the Tabernacle of Mary upon their shoulders. Singing a battle hymn, they wound in procession up the cliff path.
Judith Nazet mounted her black stallion with its golden chest armour and its crest of ostrich feathers. She wheeled the horse and urged him, rearing and prancing, to where Hal stood at the water's edge.
'If the battle goes with us, the pagan will try to escape by sea. Visit the wrath and the vengeance of Almighty God upon him with your fair ship,' she ordered. 'If the battle goes against us, have the Golden Bough waiting here at this place to take the Emperor to safety.'
'I will be here waiting for you, General Nazet.' Hal looked up at her and tried to give the words a special emphasis.
She leaned down from the saddle and her eyes were dark and bright behind the steel nose-piece of her helmet, but he could not be sure whether the brightness was warrior ferocity or the tears of the lost lover.
'I will wish all the days of my life that it could have been otherwise, El Tazar.' She straightened up, wheeled the stallion away and went up the cliff path. The Emperor Iyasu turned in Bishop Fasilides' arms and waved back at Hal. He called something in Geez, and his high, piping voice carried down faintly to where Hal stood at the water's edge, but he understood not a word of it.
He waved back and shouted, 'You too, lad! You too!' The Golden Bough put out to sea and, beyond the fifty-fathom line with their heads bared in the stark African sunlight, they committed their dead to the sea. There were forty-three in those canvas shrouds, men of Wales and Devon and the mysterious lands along the Zambere River, all comrades now for ever.
Then Hal ran the ship back into the shallow protected waters where he put every man to work repairing the battle damage and recharging the powder magazine with the munitions that General Nazet sent out from the shore.
On the third morning he woke in the darkness to the sound of the guns. He went on deck immediately. Aboli was standing by the lee rail. 'It has begun, Gundwane. The General has pitted her army against El Grang in the final battle.'
They stood together at the rail and looked towards the dark shore, where the far hills were lit by the hellish flashes of the battlefield and a vast pall of dust and smoke climbed slowly into the windless sky and billowed out into the anvil shape of a tall tropical thunderhead.
'If El Grang is beaten, he will try to escape with all his army across the sea to Arabia,' Hal told Ned Tyler and Aboli, as they listened to the ceaseless pandemonium of the cannon. 'Weigh anchor and put the ship on a southerly course. We will go down to meet the fugitives as they try to escape from Adulis Bay.'
It was past noon when the Golden Bough took up her station off the mouth of the bay and shortened sail. The sound of the guns never ceased and Hal climbed to the masthead and focused his telescope on the wide plain beyond Zulla where the two great hosts were locked in the death struggle.
Through the curtains of dust and smoke he could make out the tiny shapes of the horsemen as they charged and counter-charged, wraithlike in the dust of their own hoofs. He saw the long flashes of the great guns, pale red in the sunlight, and the snaking regiments of foot-soldiers winding through the red fog like dying serpents, their spearheads glistening like the reptiles' scales.
Slowly the battle rolled towards the shoreline and Hal saw a charge of cavalry sweep along the top of the cliffs and tear into a loose, untidy formation of infantry. The sabres rose and fell and the foot-soldiers scattered before them. Men began to hurl themselves from the cliffs into the sea below.
'Who are they?' Hal fretted. 'Whose horses are those?' And then through the lens he made out the white cross of Ethiopia at the head of the mass of horsemen as they raced on towards Zutla.
'Nazet has beaten them,' said Aboli. 'El Grang's army is in rout!'
'Put a leadsman to take soundings, Mister Tyler. Take us in closer.'
The Golden Bough glided silently into the mouth of the bay, cruising only a cable's length offshore. From the masthead Hal watched the dun clouds of war roll ponderously towards the beach, and the rabble of El Grang's defeated army streaming back before the Ethiopian cavalry squadrons.
They threw down their weapons and stumbled down to the water's edge to find any vessel to take them off, A motley armada of dhows of every size and condition, packed with fugitives, set out from the beaches around the blazing port of Zulla towards the opening of the bay.
'Sweet heavens!' laughed Big Daniel. 'They are so thick upon the water that a man might cross from one side of the bay to the other over their crowded hulls without wetting his feet.'
'Run out your guns, please, Master Daniel, and let us see if we can wet more than their feet for them,' Hal ordered. The Golden Bough ploughed into this vast fleet and the little boats tried to flee, but she overhauled them effortlessly and her guns began to thunder. One after the other they were shattered and capsized, and their cargoes of exhausted, defeated troops hurled into the water. Their armour bore them down swiftly.
It was such a terrible massacre that the gunners no longer cheered as they ran out the guns, but served them in grim silence. Hal walked along the batteries, and spoke to them sternly. 'I know how you feel, lads, but if you spare them now, you may have to fight them again tomorrow, and who can say that they will give you quarter if you ask for it then?'
He, also, was sickened by the slaughter, and longed for the setting of the sun, or any other chance to cease the carnage. That opportunity came from an unlooked-for direction.
Aboli left his station at the starboard battery of cannon and ran back to where Hal paced his quarterdeck. Hal looked up at him sharply, but before he could snap a reprimand, Aboli pointed out over the starboard bow.
'That ship with the red sail. The man in the stern. Do you see him, Gundwane?'
Hal felt the prickle of apprehension on his arms and the cold sweat sliding down his back as he recognized the tall figure standing and leaning back against the tiller arm. He was clean-shaven now, the spiked moustaches were gone. He wore a turban of yellow, and the heavily embroidered dolman of an Islamic grandee over baggy white breeches and soft knee-high boots, but his pale face stood out like a mirror among the dark-bearded men around him. There may have been others with the same wide set of shoulders and tall athletic figure, but none with the same sword upon the hip, in its scabbard of embossed gold.
'Bring the ship about, Mister Tyler. Heave to alongside that dhow with the red sail,' Hal ordered.
Ned looked where he pointed then swore. 'Son of a bawd, that's Schreuder! May the devil damn him to hell.' The Arab crew ran to the side of the dhow as the tall frigate bore down upon them. They jumped overboard and tried to swim back towards the beach, choosing the sabres of the Ethiopian cavalry rather than the gaping culver ins of the Golden Bough's broadside. Schreuder stood alone in the stern and looked up at the frigate with his cold, unrelenting expression. As they drew closer, Hal saw that his face was streaked with dust and powder soot, and that his clothing was torn and soiled with the muck of the battlefield.
Hal strode to the rail and returned his stare. They were so close that Hal had hardly to raise his voice to make himself heard. 'Colonel Schreuder, sir, you have my sword.'
'Then, sir, would you care to come down and take it from me?' Schreuder asked.
'Mister Tyler, you have the con in my absence. Take me closer to the dhow so that I may board her.
'This is madness, Gundwane,'Aboli said softly.
'Make sure neither you nor any man intervenes, Aboli,' Hal said, and went to the entry port As the little dhow bobbed close alongside, he slid down the ladder and jumped across the narrow gap of water, landing lightly on her single deck.
He drew his sword and looked to the stern. Schreuder stepped away from the tiller bar and shrugged out of the stiff dolman tunic.
'You are a 'romantic fool, Henry Courtney,' he murmured, and the blade of the Neptune sword whispered softly from its scabbard.
'To the death?' Hal asked, as he drew his own blade. 'Naturally.' Schreuder nodded gravely. 'For I am going to kill you.'
They came together with the slow grace of two lovers beginning a minuet. Their blades met and flirted as they circled, tap and brush and slither of steel on steel, their feet never still, points held high and eyes locked.
Ned Tyler held the frigate fifty yards off, keeping that interval with deft touches of helm and trim of her shortened sails. The men lined the near rail. They were quiet and attentive. Although few understood the finer points of style and technique, they could not but be aware of the grace and beauty of this deadly ritual.
'An eye for his eyes!' Hal seemed to hear his father's voice in his head. 'Read in them his soul!'
Schreuder's face remained gravel but Hal saw the first shadow in his cold blue eyes. It was not fear, but it was respect. Even with these light touches of their blades, Schreuder had evaluated his man. Remembering their previous encounters, he had not expected to be met with such strength and skill. As for Hal he knew that, if he lived through this, he would never again dance so close to death and smell its breath as he did now.
