The Mountain of Gold (41 page)

'Amen to that,' said Phineas Musk.

And with that, we turned and began to retrace our steps back to the river. There was time, now, for reflection.

I talked with Francis of the mountain of gold, and how the king might react to the news that he had been duped by O'Dwyer. My old friend was sanguine; Charles Stuart was unreadable, he said, and would either dismiss it with a jest or clap us all in the Tower, depending on how well he had bedded his latest whore that morning. I talked with Kit of our coming voyage downstream, of the hazards to be expected and of what obstacles My Lord Montnoir might attempt to throw in our way. Although O'Dwyer and the chimera of the mountain of gold were as lost to him as they were to us, I had little doubt that the Knight of Malta would not see it that way, and would look for any opportunity to humble Matthew Quinton. And then, as I stood my watch at night upon the African plain, looking up at the moon and listening to the innumerable strange noises of the place, my good-brother Venner Garvey's words came back to me, just as he had spoken them to me that day in the undercroft of Ravensden Abbey.

This mission will not succeed.

Well, Venner, you have had your way. God damn you to Hell for it.

Our return took us less time than our going out; barely a day and a half. Although already exhausted and burned, we were all more willing to forsake rest and sleep in order to get back to our little wooden world than we had been to pursue a long-gone traitor. However, our unexpectedly early return meant that when we arrived in Kasang at dusk on the following evening, the night watch aboard
Seraph
had already been set, and no boat waited at the water side to take us out. By the time the ship responded to our hail, Mamadou had already found a large canoe and a party of his kinsmen willing to row us out, and it was in that condition that I approached my command once again. As we neared the ship, I looked up, and by the dusk-light I saw a peculiar sight upon the deck of the
Seraph:
two Arabs and a near-naked black slave were standing there, watching our approach. I was hot, exhausted, and not thinking clearly. My first reaction was that in my absence, Lindman and my other officers had sold the ship to the Arabs. By the time I hauled my sore body onto the deck to be greeted by the pipe of Lanherne's whistle, I was in thoroughly peevish mood. It took me a moment to realise that every man on the upper deck of the
Seraph
was grinning broadly. Every man but one.

It is a peculiarity of the human senses that we can sometimes look directly at another man that we know well enough, and because we do not expect to see them in some such place, or some such garb, we look straight through them as though they are perfect strangers. Thus it was that evening on the deck of the
Seraph.
It still took me a moment more to recognise the slave as Julian Carvell, Coxswain of the
Seraph,
and the two Arabs as Ali Reis and Brian Doyle O'Dwyer. The latter was manacled.

'What in the name of Heaven—' I spluttered.

All their idea, sir,' said Lanherne. 'Carvell and Ali Reis, between them.'

Even by his standards, the Coxswain's grin was particularly broad. 'Well, sir, we reckoned there was nothing to be lost by trying our luck to the south, to see if the Colonel, here, had gone that way.' The erstwhile officer in question kept his eyes fixed on the deck, and said nothing.

Ah, it was more than luck, Captain,' said Ali Reis. 'I reckoned that if this Omar Ibrahim was seeking to rejoin the Arab race, then he would think as an Arab once again. And an Arab would not make the obvious move expected by infidels—' He bowed his head to me and my fellow officers—'with due respect, of course. After all, sirs,' smiled Ali Reis, 'it was we Arabs who introduced chess to Europe.'

'Besides,' said Carvell, 'Ali here spoke with some of the men of the town, after you'd left. He's picked up enough of their tongues in our time upon this river. They pointed him to an old man who had supplied the renegade with Arab garb, and had seen him going off across the river to the southward.'

'So I studied the pilot's charts, Captain,' said Ali Reis, 'and concluded that our friend here would make his way south and east, then work back up the river to the vicinity of Barraconda, where he was like to meet with a caravan bound for Timbuctoo. He was unlikely to go far from the river, not knowing the land. But the Coxswain, here, perfected the trap.'

Carvell was uncharacteristically bashful. 'Well, Captain, all I reckoned was that this far upstream, an Arab factor and his slave would be less conspicuous than a couple of seamen in old English slop clothes. But it worked better than ever I imagined. He didn't recognise us, y'see, sir. We'd got ahead of him—'

And he approached us,' said Ali Reis triumphantly, 'crying
As-Salamu Alaykam
!'

'That he did,' Carvell laughed, 'until he saw a naked Mandingo level a matchlock pistol at his brow.'

'Well, gentlemen!' I cried. 'I commend you both for your initiative, by God! The king shall hear of this, have no fear.' I shook the hands of both Carvell and Ali Reis. Then I stepped in front of O'Dwyer, and at last, the renegade raised his eyes to meet mine. 'So, Colonel O'Dwyer,' I said, 'or I think Omar Ibrahim is more appropriate again, perhaps? Fleeing back to the corsairs, I see, as I always knew you would—as you would have done when the Rovers came upon us at sea, or else at Tenerife, but for my men—'

Even now, the bravado of the foul rogue was breathtaking. 'Not at all, Captain—I was merely seeking guides to take us to the mountain more directly, and the factors who could provide an advance upon its profits,
as you and I discussed
—'

I raised my hand. 'No, Irishman. Enough. Your silken words won't save you from the noose this time—not with the blood of eleven Englishmen added to all the lies you've told.' The renegade shrugged; eleven deaths were evidently only a little matter in the weighing of Brian Doyle O'Dwyer's conscience. But I had the measure of him now. 'Captain Matthew Quinton will finally execute upon you the justice you should have receive the moment you set foot on the deck of the
Wessex,
I said. And if you think you'll get a chance to mislead my king once again, O'Dwyer, then you're more mistaken than you can possibly conceive.'

I was almost twenty-four years old at that time, and had left childhood behind me long before; civil war and exile are powerful enough aids to maturity, but following the deaths of my father and grandfather, and in the absence of my brother and Uncle Tris, I had effectively become the senior male in the household of Ravensden at the age of five. Even so, I could not restrain a childish glee as I gave two orders in quick succession: one, to chain the traitor O'Dwyer in the hold; two, for the carpenter's crew to demolish the partition in my cabin and return the whole to me.

Twenty-Five

When I addressed a council of the officers of the
Seraph
later the next morning (after a particularly blissful sleep in my sea-bed, whose comforts I had never appreciated so much), I looked out upon the faces of changed men. It was not only the welcome fact that my cabin now reached the entire breadth of the ship, giving all of us ample room to stretch ourselves. It was as though a mighty chain had been cut from all our ankles; even Tom Shish was smiling, for the first time since the discovery of his intended sabotage. It was also one of the briefest and most unanimous councils of that sort I ever experienced. When I put forward the proposition that O'Dwyer's mountain of gold had been exposed as a monstrous fraud, and that I saw our duty as being to return downstream as fast as we could to pursue the other part of our orders, the harrying of the Dutch, every man smiled, cried 'aye!' and pounded his hands upon the table.

Thus it was that four nights after the arrest of O'Dwyer, the
Seraph
dropped anchor once more off Taukorovalle, close to the Courlander
Krokodil.
She was now more nearly shipshape, but God alone knew how good a fist her tiny crew would make of it on the river, let alone out in an Atlantic gale. I proposed to hold another council shortly, for we faced a pressing dilemma under the terms of our orders. There was now nothing to stop us attacking Jakob's Fort on San Andreas in the name of King Charles and old England, but I was reluctant to shed the blood of that good fellow Captain Stiel and his garrison; moreover, Captain Facey and I had seen for ourselves the formidable battery of the fort, and there was no guarantee that we could capture—or even sail past—such an arsenal. Thus I needed to know Stiel's temper and intentions, and crucially, I also needed intelligence of Holmes' actions, for we had received no word of his war-making mission since proceeding upstream.

Consequently, Belem went ashore to glean what he could from the Portugee and half-breed factors of the town. When he returned aboard and presented himself in my cabin, where I was discussing the almost forgotten matter of the Countess Louise with Francis Gale and Phineas Musk, he had a bleak expression upon his ancient face. 'It is as you feared,' he said. 'Word has come of Holmes' capture of Gorée. The garrison on San Andreas has been sent orders to fight you if you attempt to come down river. I am told that your friend Stiel was unwilling to do so—vowed to surrender to you as soon as you came into sight.' The old man frowned. 'But he has been persuaded otherwise, it seems. Persuaded, along with all the rest of his garrison, by a large bribe in gold, provided by—'

'Montnoir,' I said. Belem nodded. 'The gold that the King of Kombo refused has found a home after all, then. So Montnoir now commands the fort, and will turn its guns against us if we attempt to force a passage.'

'A Frenchman commanding Dutch?' cried Musk. 'Well, not Dutch. Those Russians.'

'Courlanders, Musk,' I said. 'Courlanders, not Russians.'

'Same thing. But how's that happen? I mean, since when are the Dutch, or the Russians—Cour—them, friends of the French?'

Francis Gale smiled. 'Since the treaty of mutual defence and alliance between King Louis and their High Mightinesses of the States General was concluded a year or two back, Musk. Now, you and I might fairly say that an alliance between the Most Christian King and a heretical republic is hardly a marriage made in Heaven, and is certain to end in blood one day. But that, Musk my friend, is what the great men of every nation call "diplomacy"'.

'And as he took such delight in telling us,' I said, 'My Lord Montnoir is, after all, an accredited ambassador of King Louis. So put yourself in Captain Stiel's position, Musk. I think that if such a mighty personage, with such impeccable credentials, offered you a very large purse of gold, then even you would fight against your own mother, would you not?'

'Did that
gratis
enough times,' said Musk, 'but I see the justice of the case.'

I summoned the council of my officers in the great cabin of
Seraph.
The assessments of the senior men present, Negus and Facey, were equally bleak. Yes, we could attempt to force a passage past the fort, but its battery was stronger than our own—much stronger, if the garrison moved guns across from the north rampart to the south or vice-versa, depending on whether we chose the south or north channel. They would have ample time to do so, given the uninterrupted view up river that Stiel and his new commanding officer possessed. We could attempt to slip past by night, but the moon was bright, we would of necessity be moving slowly and carefully, with less sail aloft than by day, and there was thus a danger that we would make an even easier target for the fort's gunners. Of course, we could try to take the fort; both Facey and I were confident that it could be captured easily enough, if only we could get close enough to make a breach in its ramparts and get enough men ashore. But that was an almighty
if only,
given the power of the battery ranged against us. We discussed the possibility of getting word to our men aboard
Prospect of Blakeney
and at Charles Island. If they could come upstream to reinforce us, and we could mount an attack on the fort from both sides—This was an attractive proposition, but it was Belem, of all people, who demolished it. It would probably take at least two days to get a message to the mouth of the river, rather longer for the other force to make its way upstream. The pilot's intelligence established that Montnoir already had a score or more of his own Frenchmen in the fort, others were downstream toward the mouth of the river, and could we be certain that the Knight of Malta did not have other reinforcements on their way to him, perhaps overland from Fort Saint Louis in the Senegal? Moreover, by ordering our entire force upstream we would be effectively abandoning the mouth of the river, and nothing was more certain than that Dutch ships would appear at some point to avenge Holmes' depredations. Could we really risk a two-pronged assault on Jakob's Island, only to find the mouth of the Gambia sealed against us by overwhelming force thereafter?

As often happens in such cases, we were soon going in circles, revisiting schemes we had rejected but half a glass earlier. Negus and Facey began to argue, albeit politely, if on no better grounds than that a sailor and a soldier must argue sooner or later. My mind began to wander. I looked out of the stern windows. Beyond the
Krokodil,
a lone elephant cooled itself at the river's edge. I thought of Hannibal taking an army of those beasts over the Alps; I needed such ingenuity now, by God! I searched my memories for stories that I might have read, or heard. As so often, such thoughts resolved themselves into one question:
what might my grandfather have done in such a case?
After all, his legend had been sufficient to get us clear of Tenerife...

I was a child of ten or eleven again, listening to Tris tell the tale of what Earl Matthew had done in command of the
Ark Ravensden
off the Azores in the year ninety-two.

'My father detested Francis Drake, young Matt, as I often told you before. The world was too small for both of them. But he acknowledged Drake as a mightily skilled seaman. So, when faced with that great Spanish galleon off the isle of Graciosa, he recalled how Drake had captured the
Concepcion
on his voyage round the globe...'