He sat up and pushed Hal away, but there was a new light in his eyes as he looked at the boy, who was a boy no longer. "Go now and do your father's bidding!"
Hal stood up shakily and looked again round the circle of faces, seeing an expression in them that he did not recognize: it was respect mingled with more than a little fear.
"What are you gawking at?" bellowed Ned Tyler. "The play is over. Do you have no work to do? Man those pumps. Those topgallants are luffing. I can find mastheads for all idle hands." There was the thump of bare feet across the deck as the crew rushed guiltily to their duties.
Hal stooped, picked up the cutlass, and handed it back to the boatswain, hilt first.
"Thank you, Ned. I had need of it."
"And you put it to good use. I have never seen that heathen bested, except by your father before you."
Hal tore a handful of rag from the tattered hem of his canvas pantaloons, held it to his ear to staunch the bleeding, and went down to the stern cabin.
Sir Francis looked up from his log-book, his goose quill poised over the page. "Do not look so smug, puppy," he grunted at Hal. "Aboli toyed with you, as he always does. He could have spitted you a dozen times before you turned it with that lucky coup at the end."
When Sir Francis stood up there was hardly room for them both in the tiny cabin. The bulkheads were lined from deck to deck with books, more were stacked about their feet and leather-bound volumes were crammed into the cubby-hole that served his father as a bunk. Hal wondered where he found place to sleep.
His father addressed him in Latin. When they were alone he insisted on speaking the language of the educated and cultivated man. "You will die before you ever make a swordsman, unless you find steel in your heart as well as in your hand. Some hulking Dutchman will cleave you to the teeth at your first encounter." Sir Francis scowled at his son, "Recite the law of the sword."
"An eye for his eyes," Hal mumbled in Latin.
"Speak up, boy!" Sir Francis's hearing had been dulled by the blast of culver ins over the years a thousand broadsides had burst around his head. At the end of an engagement, blood would be seen dripping from the ears of the seamen beside the guns and for days after even the officers on the poop heard heavenly bells ring in their heads.
"An eye for his eyes," Hal repeated roundly, and his father nodded.
"His eyes are the window to his mind. Learn to read in them his intentions before the act. See there the stroke before it is delivered. What else?"
"The other eye for his feet," Hal recited.
"Good." Sir Francis nodded. "His feet will move before his hand.
What else?"
"Keep the point high."
"The cardinal rule. Never lower the point. Keep it aimed at his eyes."
Sir Francis led Hal through the catechism, as he had countless times before. At the end, he said, "Here is one more rule for you. Fight from the first stroke, not just when you are hurt or angry, or you might not survive that first wound."
He glanced up at the hourglass hanging from the deck above his head. "There is yet time for your reading before ship's prayers." He spoke in Latin still. "Take up your Livy and translate from the top of page twenty-six."
For an hour Hal read aloud the history of Rome in the original, translating each verse into English as he went. Then, at last, Sir Francis closed his Livy with a snap. "There is improvement. Now, decline the verb dur are
That his father should choose this one was a mark of his approval.
Hal recited it in a breathless rush, slowing when he came to the future indicative. Vurabo. I shall endure."
That word formed the motto of the Courtney coat-of arms and Sir Francis smiled frostily as Hal voiced it.
"May the Lord grant you that grace." He stood up. "You may go now but do not be late for prayers."
Rejoicing to be free, Hal fled from the cabin and went bounding up the companionway.
Aboli was squatting in the lee of one of the hulking bronze culver ins near the bows. Hal knelt beside him. "I wounded you."
Aboli made an eloquent dismissive gesture. "A chicken scratching in the dust wounds the earth more gravely."
Hal pulled the tarpaulin cloak off Aboli's shoulders, seized the elbow and lifted the thickly muscled arm high to peer at the deep slash across the ribs. "None the less, this little chicken gave you a good pecking," he observed drily, and grinned as Aboli opened his hand and showed him the needle already threaded with sail maker yarn. He reached for it, but Aboli checked him.
"Wash the cut, as I taught you."
"With that long black python of yours you could reach it yourself," Hal suggested, and Aboli emitted his long, rolling laugh, soft and low as distant thunder.
"We will have to make do with a small white worm."
Hal stood and loosed the cord that held up his pantaloons. He let them drop to his knees, and with his right hand drew back his foreskin.
"I christen you Aboli, lord of the chickens!" He imitated his own father's preaching tone faithfully, and directed a stream of yellow urine into the open wound.
Although Hal knew how it stung, for Aboli had done the same many times for him, the black features remained impassive. Hal irrigated the wound with the very last drop and then hoisted his breeches. He knew how efficacious this tribal remedy of Aboli's was. The first time it had been used on him he had been repelled by it, but in all the years since then he had never seen a wound so treated mortify.
He took up the needle and twine, and while Aboli held the lips of the wound together with his left hand, Hal laid neat sail maker stitches across it, digging the needle point through the elastic skin and pulling his knots up tight. When he was done, he reached for the pot of hot tar that Aboli had ready. He smeared the sewn wound thickly and nodded with satisfaction at his handiwork.
Aboli stood up and lifted his canvas petticoats. "Now we will see to your ear," he told Hal, as his own fat penis overflowed his fist by half its length.
Hal recoiled swiftly. "It is but a little scratch, he protested, but Aboli seized his pigtail remorselessly and twisted his face upwards.
At the stroke of the bell the company crowded into the waist of the ship, and stood silent And bare-headed in the sunlight even the black tribesmen, who did not worship exclusively the crucified Lord but other gods also whose abode was the deep dark forests of their homes.
When Sir Francis, great leather-bound Bible in hand, intoned sonorously, "We pray you, Almighty God, deliver the enemy of Christ into our hands that he shall not triumph..." his eyes were the only ones still cast heavenward. Every other eye in the company turned towards the east from where that enemy would come, laden with silver and spices.