I told him simply and briefly something of my survey, the Mazy Zed, the sea-bed diamonds, and finally of Shelborne's directions when the storm blew up. Koeltas's face aped a comic rubber mask when he heard Shelborne's instructions to me. He spoke quickly to the other two in a curious mixture of English, Afrikaans and patois. The three of them rocked with silent laughter.
The little yellow man said, 'Shelborne wants to kill your ship, so he steers you on to this blinder. Every one of us poachers knows this rock lies across the northern entrance. But, by Jesus, it is we who get your ship instead!'
'You mean Shelborne deliberately…?'
My anger flared. I recalled how carefully Shelborne had repeated his directions to me. Why, if he had been so certain about the storm, had he troubled to go to the barometer in the wheelhouse? Was it the barometer he went to see? Minnaar's remark about the compass being slow hit me like a left hook. Had Shelborne deliberately fiddled with the compass to send us to our deaths? Had he concealed something in his sealskin jacket which he had been at such pains to take from the flatboom?
I said thickly, 'Listen, Koeltas, I need a ship. I want your ship. You can have what is left in my whaler. That and Ј500 to sail me where I want to go.'
The cunning eyes were two slits. 'Spencer Bay? Mercury?'
'Yes.'
'I have a good ship,' he replied with a touch of pride. 'Name Malgas — the Mad Goose. You know, the birds that dive for fish in the islands. Schooner. No engines. Not good for seal poaching. I sail her anywhere.'
Koeltas would know every tide, every rip, every rock and blinder along the Sperrgebiet. I meant to get back to Mercury. He was my man.
He went on. 'If Shelborne sees me, he kills me. He knows I steal his seals.'
'I'm chartering you,' I said. 'He can't do a damn about that. I can charter whoever I like. I have the right to prospect this coast.'
I told him about the court ruling giving us the prospecting rights. He seemed puzzled, but I let it go.
'Okay,' he said, breathing a formidable oath against Shelborne. He went on, 'For fifteen years now I sail the Sperrgebiet. Sometime I would like to see Mercury in daylight.'
He signalled Johaar, who heaved me up on his piebald shoulders. We set off for the wreck.
I nodded at the peardrop-shaped rock. 'I crawled up that way. The stern must lie close over there — if it hasn't slipped into deep water.'
The water isn't deep,' Koeltas replied confidently.
Less than thirty feet from the main bulk of the blinder we found what was left of the Praying Mantis. There was no sign of life. Rigging lay in a wild tangle: stays, running gear and cables thumped dismally against the torn plating.
'Fine ship.' Koeltas paused for a moment before jumping nimbly from rock to rock to the hulk. It was as good an epitaph as any, but it did not mitigate my cold rage against Shelborne for his deliberate murder of my team. Minnaar had been tough, likeable and dependable, the crew the pick of the fishing fleet — fine sailors, loyal and attached to me. Kim followed Koeltas, Johaar and I bringing up the rear. On the bridge Koeltas used his torch cautiously. The place was a shambles. Gratings and deck were ripped up; the wheel was intact, but the binnacle was split wide open, probably from the savage jar the rudder had given when she struck.
The Hottentot's eyes almost closed with amusement when he shone the torch into the shattered compass housing. 'Shelborne — the sonofabitch!'
In a fist-sized chunk of rock were two diamonds.
I felt weak, shattered, at this evidence of some new evil, coming hard on the heels of the loss of my crew. With an oath, more to sustain my morale than anything, I bent to look. Koeltas's fingers, hard as a vulture's talon, bit into my shoulder. He stood transfixed. The others froze, listening.
Across the water, from the direction of Mercury, came a weird, reverberating sound. It wasn't music, it wasn't gunfire, it wasn't depth-charges. It sounded hollow, chesty. It rumbled, grew, ebbed. Wonderment, but chiefly fear, was in their faces.
Koeltas's click-clack vowels rattled like a machine-gun. 'Quick, quick! We get the hell out of the bay — now, now, now!'
I hung back. I had to get to the bottom of the binnacle mystery. 'What the hell…?'
His fingers clamped hard. 'Come! The Malgas! Quick!'
That noise…'
He rounded on me. The skin was drawn tight over the high cheekbones. It was ash rather than yellow.
'The Bells of St Mary's,' he whispered.
8
It rolled across the water after our tiny dinghy racing for the schooner. The Bells of St Mary's! They weren't bells; it was a monstrous death-rattle in the wind's breathing, some undefined weirdness choking out its life behind us in the fog. And Mercury lay behind. The rumble ended with a paroxysm, as if boulders had been shaken together for a poker-dice throw. Koeltas shuddered.
'Bells?' I rasped. 'The Bells of St Mary's…?'
His dead panic made the oaths come tumbling from Koeltas's lips. 'The sonofabitch, the bladdy sonofabitch Shelborne! He makes the Bells back there on Mercury. It is his name for them, the Bells of St Mary's. He tells the skipper so. He kills us with them. He knows the Malgas comes…'
I recalled Shelborne's vigilant flag-hoist; he would always be on the alert. Shelborne's attitude towards intruders was pretty rough — there was no doubt now that he had sent the Praying Mantis to her doom — and it would be rougher still towards the likes of Koeltas and the Mad Goose. I wished now I had got more out of Shelborne when he had talked out in the dunes. He'd spoken freely because — I thought grimly — dead men tell no tales. From now on I'd need men of the ruthless calibre of Koeltas, Johaar and Kim. I didn't intend to be so gentle myself when I returned to Mercury.
I tried to quiet Koeltas's fear. 'He can't see any of us, or your ship, in this fog. Pull yourself together, man. These Bells — it's something quite simple, we'll find out.'
Shelborne must have played somehow on the superstitions of the Coloured and Malay fishermen — I had had an example on the passage to Mercury when I found my Malay helmsman changing course against orders to pass to windward of a school of porpoises. They were; he told me, the angels of the sea and to pass to leeward was an insult to the sea-dead. I suspected Shelborne of rigging some sort of loudspeaker gear.
Koeltas snarled, 'Shut your trap! What the hell do you know about the Bells? They'll kill us all if we don't get out quick!'
Fear sharpened his uncanny instinct for the whereabouts of his ship. In a few moments the Malgas was right ahead. She was a schooner of about 150 tons with very long hardpine masts, painted an indeterminate khaki to merge into the dun background — like the disguise of Namib plants whose young leaves exude a stickiness to which blown sand clings and camouflages them with a fine rough-cast which makes them indistinguishable from the desert. The foremast had been stepped right forward into the eyes of the schooner I had a glimpse of her heavy sparring as we vaulted over the low rail. It was enough to tell what the Malgas was: a strandloper of the ocean, the sea-going equivalent of the starving carrion scavengers of the Sperrgebiet beaches.
Johaar left the dinghy to trail astern while he shot below. Half a dozen men, Coloureds and Malays, were hauling on the sheets before they had rubbed the sleep from their eyes. Johaar did not have to spur them on, the Bells did that. The whole operation of running up the fore and mizzen sails, the jib and flying jib above the bowsprit, was done in silence. Each knew he appointed task. No orders were given. Kim took the wheel, came forward to watch the luff of the big mainsail, ochre-coloured like the others. The wind was fluky. Koeltas went over to Kim and spoke in a low voice. They got the foregaff on her as Kim brought her round on to the port tack — her heading struck a chord of fear into me.