Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur. Страница 2

Start up! Lothar's voice was husky with excitement, and the boy flung his mug onto the chart-table, the last few drops of coffee splashing, and dived down the ladder-way to the engine-room below.

Lothar flipped on the switches and set the throttle as below him the boy stooped to the crank-handle.

Swing it! Lothar shouted down and the boy braced himself and heaved against the compression of all four cylinders.

He was not quite thirteen years old but already he was almost as strong as a man, and there was bulging muscle in his back as he worked.

Now! Lothar closed the valves, and the engine, still warm from the run out from the harbour, fired and caught and roared. There was a belch of oily black smoke from the exhaust port in the side of the hull and then she settled to a regular beat.

The boy scrambled up the ladder and shot out onto the deck, racing up into the bows beside Da Silva.

Lothar swung the bows over and they ran down on the current line. The fog blew away, and they saw the other boats. They, too, had been lying quietly in the fog-bank, waiting for the first rays of the sun, but now they were running down eagerly on the current line, their wakes cutting long rippling Vs across the placid surface and the bow waves creaming and flashing in the new sunlight. Along each rail the crews craned out to peer ahead, and the jabber of their excited voices carried above the beat of the engines.

From the glassed wheelhouse Lothar had an all-round view over the working areas of the fifty-foot trawler and he made one final check of the preparations. The long net was laid out down the starboard rail, the corkline coiled into meticulous spirals. The dry weight of the net was seven and a half tons, wet it would weigh many times heavier. It was five hundred feet long and in the water hung down from the cork floats like a gauzy curtain seventy feet deep. It had cost Lothar over five thousand pounds, more money than an ordinary fisherman would earn in twenty years of unremitting toil, and each of his other three boats was so equipped. From the stern, secured by a heavy painter, each trawler towed its bucky an eighteen-foot-long clinker-built dinghy.

With one long hard glance, Lothar satisfied himself that all was ready for the throw, and then looked ahead just as another fish jumped.

This time it was so close that he could see the dark lateral lines along its gleaming flank, and the colour difference, ethereal green above the line and hard gleaming silver below. Then it plopped back, leaving a dark dimple on the surface.

As though it was a signal, instantly the ocean came alive.

The waters turned dark as though suddenly shaded by heavy cloud, but this cloud was from below, rising up from the depths, and the waters roiled as though a monster moved beneath them.

,Wild fish! screamed Da Silva, turning his weathered and creased brown face back over his shoulder towards Lothar, and at the same time spreading his arms to take in the sweep of ocean which moved with fish.

A mile wide and so deep that its far edge was hidden in the lingering fog-banks, a single dark shoal lay before them.

In all the years as a hunter, Lothar had never seen such an accumulation of life, such a multitude of a single species.

Beside this the locusts that could curtain and block off the African noon sun and the flocks of tiny quelea birds whose combined weight broke the boughs from the great trees on which they roosted, were insignificant. Even the crews of which the racing trawlers fell silent and stared in awe as the shoal broke the surface and the waters turned white and sparkled like a snow bank; countless millions of tiny scaly bodies Caught the sunlight as they were lifted clear of the water by the press of an infinity of their own kind beneath them.

Da Silva was the first to rouse himself. He turned and ran back down the deck, quick and agile as a youth, passing only at the door of the wheelhouse. Maria, Mother of God, grant we still have a net when this day ends. It was a poignant warning and then the old mail ran to the stern and scrambled over the gunwale into the trailing dinghy while at his example the rest of the crew roused themselves and hurried to their stations.

Manfred! Lothar called his son, and the boy who had stood mesmerized in the bows bobbed his head obediently and ran back to his father.

Take the wheel. It was an enormous responsibility for one so young, but Manfred had Proved himself so many times before that Lothar felt no misgiving as he ducked out of the wheelhouse. In the bows he signalled without looking over his shoulder and he felt the deck cant beneath his feet as Manfred spun the wheel, following his father's signal to begin a wide circle around the shoal.

So much fish, Lothar whispered. As his eyes estimated distance and wind and current, old Da Silva's warning was in the forefront of his calculations: the trawler and its net could handle 150 tons of these nimble silver pilchards, with skill and luck perhaps 200 tons.

Before him lay a shoal of millions of tons of fish. An injudicious throw could fill the net with ten or twenty thousand tons whose weight and momentum could rip the mesh to tatters, might even tear the entire net loose, snapping the main cork line or pulling the bollards from the deck and dragging it down into the depths. Worse still, if the fines and bollards held, the trawler might be pulled over by the weight and capsize. Lothar might lose not only a valuable net but the boat and the lives of his crew and his son as well.

Involuntarily he glanced over his shoulder and Manfred grinned at him through the window of the wheelhouse, his face alight with excitement. With his dark amber eyes glowing and white teeth flashing, he was an image of his mother and Lothar felt a bitter pang before he turned back to work.

Those few moments of inattention had nearly undone Lothar. The trawler was rushing down on the shoal within moments it would drive over the mass of fish and they would sound; the entire shoal, moving in that mysterious unison as though it were a single organism, would vanish back into the ocean depths. Sharply he signalled the turn away, and the boy responded instantly. The trawler spun on its heel and they bore down the edge of the shoal, keeping fifty feet off, waiting for the opportunity.

Another quick glance around showed Lothar that his other skippers were warily backing off also, daunted by the sheer mass of pilchards they were circling. Swart Hendrick glared across at him, a huge black bull of a man with his bald head shining like a cannonball in the early sunlight. Companion of war and a hundred desperate endeavours, like Lothar he had readily made the transition from land to sea and now was as skilled a fisherman as once he had been a hunter of ivory and of men. Lothar flashed him the underhand cut-out signal for caution and danger and Swart Hendrick laughed soundlessly and waved an acknowledgement.

Gracefully as dancers, the four boats weaved and pirouetted around the massive shoal as the last shreds of the fog dissolved and blew away on the light breeze. The sun cleared the horizon and the distant dunes of the desert glowed like bronze fresh from the forge, a dramatic backdrop to the developing hunt.

Still the massed fish held its compact formation, and Lothar was becoming desperate. They had been on the surface for over an hour now and that was longer than usual.

At any moment they might sound and vanish, and not one of his boats had thrown a net. They were thwarted by abundance, beggars in the presence of limitless treasure, and Lothar felt a recklessness rising in him. He had waited too long already.

Throw, and be damned! he thought, and signalled Manfred in closer, narrowing his eyes against the glare as they turned into the sun.

Before he could commit himself to folly, he heard Da Silva whistle, and when he looked back the Portuguese was standing on the thwart of the dinghy and gesticulating wildly. Behind them the shoal was beginning to bulge. The solid circular mass was altering shape. Out of it grew a tentacle, a pimple, no, it was more the shape of a head on a thin neck as part of the shoal detached itself from the main body. This was what they had been waiting for.