too close to him, and they looked at him in such a way that Hal instinctively knew that this was the executioner of whom they had been warned. He felt his flesh crawl as he looked into those faded eyes.
'Why do you think that they call him Slow John?' he asked Aboli, from the side of his mouth.
'Let us hope we never have to find out,' Aboli replied! as they passed where the tall, cadaverous figure stood.
Small boys, both brown and white, danced beside the column of chained men, jeering and pelting them with pebbles and filth from the open gutters that carried the sewage from the town down to the sea front. Encouraged by this example a pack of mongrel dogs snapped at their heels. The adults in the crowd were turned out in their best clothes for such an unusual occasion and laughed at the antics of the children. Some of the women held sachets of herbs to their noses when they smelt the bedraggled file of prisoners, shuddering in horrified fascination.
'Oh! What dreadful creatures!'
'Look at those cruel and savage faces.'
'I have heard that they feed those Negroes on human flesh.'
Aboli contorted his face and rolled his eyes at them. The tattoos on his cheeks stood proud, and his great white teeth were bared in a fearsome grin. The women squealed with delicious terror, and their little daughters hid their faces in their mothers' skirts as he passed.
At the rear of the crowd, hanging back from the company of their betters, taking no part in the sport of baiting the captives, were those men and women who, Hal guessed, must be the domestic slaves of the burghers. The slaves in the crowd ranged in colour from the anthracite black of Africa to the amber and gold skins of the Orient. Most were simply dressed in the cast-off clothing of their owners, although some of the prettier women wore the flamboyant finery that marked them as the favourite playthings of their masters.
They looked on quietly as the seamen trudged past in their clanking chains, and there was no sound of laughter among them. Rather, Hal sensed a certain empathy behind their closed impassive expressions for they were captives also. Just before they entered the gate to the fort, Hal noticed one girl in particular at the back of the crowd. She had climbed up on a pile of masonry blocks for a better view and stood higher than the intervening ranks of spectators. This was not the only reason why Hal had singled her out.
She was more beautiful than he had ever expected any woman to be. She was a flower of a girl, with thick glossy black hair and dark eyes that seemed too large for her delicate oval face. For one moment their eyes met over the heads of the crowd, and it seemed to Hal that she tried to pass him some message that he was unable to grasp. He knew only that she felt compassion for him, and that she shared in his suffering. Then he lost sight of her as they were marched through the gateway into the courtyard of the fort.
The image of her stayed with him over the dreadful days that followed. Gradually it began to supersede the memory of Katinka, and in the nights sometimes returned to give him the strength he needed to endure. He felt that if there were but one person of such loveliness and tenderness out there, beyond the gaunt stone walls, who cared for his abject condition, then it was worth fighting on.
In the courtyard of the fort, a military armourer struck off their shackles. A shore party under the command of Sam Bowles stood by to collect the discarded chains to take back aboard the Gull. 'I will miss you all, my shipmates.' Sam grinned. The lower decks of the old Gull will be empty and lonely without your smiling faces and your good cheer.' He gave them a salute from the gateway as he led his shore party away. 'I hope they look after you as well as your good friend Sam Bowles did. But, never fear, I'll be at the Parade when you give your last performance there.'
When Sam was gone, Hal looked around the courtyard. He saw that the fortress had been designed on a substantial scale. As part of his training his father had made him study the science of land fortifications, so he recognized the tlassical defensive layout of the stone walls and redoubts. He realized that once these works were completed, it would take an army equipped with a full siege train to reduce them.
However, the work was less than half finished, and on the landward side of the fort or, as their new gaolers referred to it, bet kasteel, the castle, there were merely open foundations from which the massive stone walls would one day rise. Yet it was clear that the work was being hastened along. Almost certainly the two recent Anglo-Dutch wars had imparted this impetus. Both Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, during the interregnum, and King Charles, son of the man he had beheaded, could claim some credit for the frenzy of construction that was going on around them. They had forcibly reminded the Dutch of the vulnerability of their far-flung colonies. The half-finished walls swarmed with hundreds of workmen, and the courtyard in which they stood was piled with building timber and blocks of dressed masonry hewn from the mountain that loomed over it all.
As dangerous captives they were kept apart from the other prisoners. They were marched from the courtyard down the short spiral staircase below the south wall of the fort. The stone blocks that lined floor, vaulted roof and walls glistened with moisture that had seeped in from the surrounding waterlogged soil. Even on such a sunny day in autumn the temperature in these dank forbidding surroundings made them shiver.
At the foot of the first flight of stairs Sir Francis Courtney was dragged out of the file by his gaolers and thrust into a small cell just large enough to hold one man. It was one in a row of half a dozen or so identical cells, whose doors were of solid timber studded with iron bolts and the tiny barred peep-hole in each was shuttered and closed. They had no sight of the other inmates. 'Special quarters for you, Sir Pirate,' the burly Dutch gaoler told him as he slammed the door on Sir Francis and turned the lock with a huge iron key from the bunch on his belt. 'We are putting you in the Skellum's Den, with all the really bad ones, the murderers and rebels and robbers. You will feel at home here, of that I'm sure.'
The rest of the prisoners were herded down to the next level of the dungeon. The sergeant gaoler unlocked the grille door at the end of the tunnel and they were shoved into a long narrow cell. Once the grille was locked behind them there was barely room for them all to stretch out on the thin layer of damp straw that covered the cobblestoned floor. A single latrine bucket stood in one corner, but murmurs of pleasure from all the men greeted the sight of the large water cistern beside the grille gate. At least this meant they were no longer on shipboard water rations.
There were four small windows set in the top of one wall and, once they had inspected their surroundings, Hal looked up at them. Aboli hoisted him onto his shoulders and he was able to reach one of these narrow openings. It was heavily barred, like the others, but Hal tried the gratings with his bare hands. They were set rock-firm, and he was forced to put out of his mind any notion of escaping this way.
Hanging on the grating, he drew himself up and peered through it. He found that his eyes were a foot or so above ground level, and from' there he had a view of part of the interior courtyard of the castle. He could see the entrance gateway and the grand portals of what he guessed must be the Company offices and the Governor's suite. To one side, through the gap where the walls had not yet been raised, he could see a portion of the cliffs of the table-topped mountain, and above them the sky. Against the cloudless blue sailed a flock of white gulls.
Hal lowered himself and pushed his way through the throng of seamen, stepping over the bodies of the sick and wounded. When he reached the grille he looked up the staircase but could not see the door to his father's cell. - 'Father!' he called tentatively, expecting a rebuke from one of the gaolers, but when there was no response he raised his voice and shouted again.
'I hear you, Hal, his father called back.
'Do you have any orders for us, Father?'
'I expect they'll leave us in peace for a day or two, at least until they have convened a tribunal. We will have to wait it out. Tell the men to be of good heart.'
At that a strange voice intervened, speaking in English but with an unfamiliar accent. 'Are you the English pirates we have heard so much about?'
'We are honest sailors, falsely accused,' Sir Francis shouted back. 'Who and what are you?'
'I am your neighbour in the Skellum's Den, two cells down from you. I am condemned to die, as you are.'
'We are not yet condemned,' Sir Francis protested.
'It is only a matter of time. I hear from the gaolers, that you soon will be.'
'What is your name?' Hal joined in the exchange. He was not interested in the stranger, but this conversation served to pass the time and divert them from their own predicament. 'What is your crime?'
'I am Althuda, and my crime is that I strive to be free and to set other men free.'
'Then we are brothers, Althuda, you and I and every man here. We all strive for freedom.'
There was a ragged chorus of assent, and when it subsided Althuda spoke again. 'I led a revolt of the Company slaves. Some were recaptured. Those Stadige Jan burned alive, but most of us escaped into the mountains. Many times they sent soldiers after us, but we fought and drove them off and they could not enslave us again.' His was a vital young voice, proud and strong, and even before Hal had seen his face he found himself drawn to this
