The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  “There’s broken tools up here,” said Perkin. “And the track’s getting wider.”

  “Are we getting near the mine?” said Captain Stalwin.

  “Maybe,” said Perkin. He hacked away a few palm-fronds and stared hard through the gloom. “There’s something like a shaft. Phew!” He shook his head. “Something stinks.”

  He hurriedly took his strip of sailcloth and tied it across his face, maskwise, and the others all did likewise except for John, whose strip wasn’t long enough. He pressed it to his nose, praying the smell was only a dead pig somewhere. They proceeded with care and in a moment came out in the clearing where the mine-shaft was.

  There were no footprints visible; the open sand had long ago been smoothed flat by wind and rain. There were a couple of broken barrels and some baskets, falling to pieces, that the Indians had used to carry dirt. And something in the mouth of the shaft…

  Captain Stalwin paced forward warily, his cutlass up, looking from side to side. He got as far as the mouth of the shaft, and no rosary beads came snaking out of anywhere to strangle him. He looked down at what was in the mouth of the shaft—it was a basket, John could see that now—and began to laugh.

  “Now, by God!” he cried. “Has my luck changed, or hasn’t it?” He bent to the basket and dipped up a big rock that had emeralds sprouting from it like fingers from a hand. The rest of them rushed forward at that, and saw the basket full of rough emeralds, poking out where the sides of the basket had rotted away. Nor was it the only basket; there were others lined up beside it, going back into the shaft, brimful of rough green gems under a thin layer of dead leaves and dust.

  John’s eyes went wide. He grabbed with all the rest, stuffing emeralds in his pocket, shoving others aside who got in his way. Jessup tried to pick up a basket and it came apart, spilling emeralds across the floor, and Perkin dropped to his knees and snatched them where they scattered. “Look!” he said, pointing down the shaft.

  There, just beyond some piled debris, lay another basket. It seemed this was where the choicest stones had been sorted; they were a richer green, they were bigger, and something about the way the dim light glinted on them promised clarity and perfection beyond anything John had yet seen.

  Perkin scrambled forward on hands and knees. Cooper vaulted over him so as to get to them first, and in his haste tumbled against the debris that was piled in the way. His knee struck one end of a beam, concealed there. The beam swiveled. Its other end struck smartly on one of the timber baulks that held up the roof of the mine, and knocked it out of true. There was a creak, and dirt and stones fell from above as the baulk tottered—

  What happened next John didn’t see, for he was running for daylight as hard as he could. He made it, and so did Captain Stalwin, and so did Jessup. Here came Beason and Collyer, sprinting just ahead of the roiling cloud of dirt that belched from the mine shaft, and the muffled roar as the roof fell in.

  John was just thinking that Perkin wouldn’t get his two shares after all when he and Cooper came staggering from the mouth of the shaft, choking and coughing, brown all over as though they’d rolled in mud. When they had been properly laughed at, there was a general idea of gutting Cooper, for being so stupid as to spring another trap and lose them the best of the emeralds. Captain Stalwin, though, lifted his cutlass between Cooper and the rest.

  “Belay that. We’ve filled our pockets, ain’t we? And not a man lost when that roof fell in. It’s my luck, plain as plain!” He pointed with the tip of the blade at the emeralds lying all about, that they’d dropped in their flight. “Now pick them up, and it’s back to the ship with us. We’ll come back tomorrow with a shovel or two and see if we can’t dig out some more.”

  John obeyed like the rest, crouching over to collect the scattered emeralds. He was just reflecting on what a pleasant thing it was to be a pirate, picking jewels as though they were strawberries in a meadow, when he saw a bonny green gem lying amidst what he took to be little dry sticks. He reached for the emerald and that was when he saw the arm-bones. He looked along them to the blind gaping skull beyond.

  “Here’s a dead man!” he cried.

  Captain Stalwin and the others came to see. “Why, it’s the priest,” said Captain Stalwin, pointing at the shreds of brown robe. “Look here, here’s his beads. Ha! He died before he could go lie down in his grave. Well, there’s an end to the mystery.”

  “No,” said Jessup, almost whispering. “Who shot him?”

  They all fell silent then, staring at the skull, which did indeed have a round hole in it. Beason reached with the tip of his cutlass and tilted it, and a musket-ball rolled out of one of the eye sockets.

  “And another thing,” Jessup went on, keeping his voice low. “He’s rotted away long since. What is it that stinks so now?”

  Now, for all the sweat and heat of the day, John felt cold. Beason wetted a finger and held it up, and turned to look at the bit of jungle from which the wind was blowing.

  “Don’t smell like carrion by itself, though,” he murmured.

  “Carrion or cabbage, I’ve no wish to meet it any closer,” said Captain Stalwin. “We’ll just creep off the way we came, shall we? Quick march, boys, and quiet. My luck will get us back safe.”

  So saying, he turned; and the shot rang out and dropped him in his tracks, with a little explosion of blood at his buttonhole like a red rose worn there.

  John just had a glimpse of someone ducking down, before he threw himself flat. More shots came, as it seemed from some three or four snipers, and all of them in the jungle through which they had just come. Beason yelled some orders, and John dodged through the jungle back of the friar’s bones and fell flat behind a log, where Beason had already taken shelter. Jessup and Perkin were behind a log a few feet away, and Collyer came running, clutching his arm where a musket-ball had stuck. They didn’t see Cooper again.

  Beason already had his musket loaded by the time John rolled over. He laid the barrel of it against the log and fired across the clearing. John loaded his own musket and did the same, as did Collyer and Perkin, and for some few minutes it was hot work there. Musket balls tore through the green leaves all around them.

  “That fucking Spaniard was a liar,” said Beason, as he reloaded. “Didn’t I say it? Who’d listen to me, eh?”

  Jessup crawled over and jerked his thumb at the trees behind them. “We retreat through that, we can get to the other side of the island! Make our way around to the anchorage again!”

  Beason aimed, fired, and then looked where Jessup was pointing. “Ay,” he said. So they retreated, firing as they went. In a moment they came out of the jungle on the other side and there was the blue sea, all right, but before them was a sheer drop down a cliff. Beason looked to and fro distractedly, as a shot or two came zipping out of the jungle behind them; then John spotted a little track that ran across the cliff’s edge.

  “Where’s that go?” he cried.

  “But that was where—” said Beason, before a musket ball cracked into a boulder and sent rock shards flying in every direction. He ducked and they ran, with Collyer cursing because one of the shards had hit his thigh, along the little track. It did get them out of the line of fire from the jungle pretty quick, putting the shoulder of the hill between them, but it rose, too. In another moment they were climbing, all exposed, where the trail switchbacked

  up the flank of the hill and vanished over a ridge.

  By great good fortune their pursuers did not follow to pick them off like flies on a wall. Over the top of the ridge they hurtled, all together, and down through a little maze of bushes and then—

  John halted, and the others ran into him as into a wall.

  They had emerged into a clearing, and here was the source of the smell. Three or four huts stood around a central fire-pit. The stink was compounded of smoke, and the camp’s latrine, which was brimful noisome, and a mountain of clam and mussel shells and fish bones; all that, and the crucified man that dried in the sun at the c
liff’s edge.

  Even so, the place had a peaceful air. The sea-wind blew through the dead man’s hair, and the sea broke softly on the rocks below, and a little stream bubbled down to one side…and there was a rhythmic thump-thump-thump that suggested someone in no particular hurry. An Indian woman sat at the door of one of the huts, pounding roots in a mortar.

  John and the rest stood petrified, for it was surely only a matter of seconds before she looked up and saw them. Now, she raised her head…

  And did not see them. She had no eyes. She had barely any face.

  “Jesus,” said Jessup faintly. “The Black Pox.”

  John groped for his bit of vinegar-soaked rag, and plastered it over his nose and mouth. Another woman came out of one of the huts. Maybe she’d been beautiful once, with her hair black as a raven’s wing and lustrous; but she groped her way by touch along the side of the hut to the stream, for where her eyes had been were two pink masses of scars. As she bent—quite close to them—to fill her gourd with water, John saw that her nose and lips had been eaten off by the smallpox too, as though she’d been in a fire.

  John looked away, and as quickly looked for somewhere else to look; but he’d seen enough of the poor crucified bugger to tell that he’d been a black-bearded fellow, and that they’d stripped him down to a loin-rag before they’d stuck him up there. A gull had been busy pecking at the face…

  He ain’t been up there any seven years, John realized. The friar had been dry bones long since picked clean, but this was fresher meat.

  “They can’t see us,” said Beason, no louder than a breath. “We can walk through. Come on. Quick and quiet.”

  They stepped forward, walking soft as they could, and must pass one by one under the cross, stepping gingerly around the bits and odds that lay there. John spotted a glint of gold and green; Beason noticed it too, and dove on it quicker than John could. He held it up on its bit of broken chain to stare. It was a crucifix, as might be twin to the one they’d taken off the Spaniard on the galleon.

  “Now I’ll tell you what,” Beason whispered, “This will be that bastard’s own brother, and they did come back, but they was caught—”

  A dog leaped up from where it had been sleeping, and barked furiously at them. The woman pounding roots took no notice, seemingly deaf as well as blind, but the woman with the water-gourd turned inquiringly, and two other women came to the doormouths. They too were blind, were horribly disfigured. They caught up sticks and came forward tentatively, waving them, groping with their free hands outstretched. The dog growled and leaped, running from the women to the Martin Luther’s men and back, trying to guide them. It ought to have been funny but it wasn’t; John’s hair was fair standing up, and he was more afraid of the blind women than of anything he’d seen since he’d been transported.

  “Oh Christ,” said Beason, and shot the dog. “Run for it.”

  John ran, out in front of the others. He bounded like a goat along the track, that continued on the other side of the village, in its narrow way between the clifftops and the hillside. He could hear the panting breaths of the others as they followed him, knocking pebbles that clattered down the cliff to the shingle-beaches below. Soon he could hear shots as well, though they came from ahead and not behind. Then there was the echoing roar of one of the Martin Luther’s guns.

  “Those sons of bitches!” yelled Beason, panting. “Move, you great ox!”

  He pushed past John. They rounded the side of the hill where it came down and found themselves looking into the anchorage from the other side. There was the back of the ruined chapel; there was their longboat, halfway to the Martin Luther and full of armed men. There was only Cullman and Jobson on deck to fight them off, and Cullman’s left arm had been no use since taking the galleon. They were crouched behind the great gun in the waist, trying to get off another shot at the longboat without catching any musket-balls.

  Beason ran close enough for range, reloading as he went. As one fellow went up on one knee in the bow to aim at Jobson, Beason dropped him with the sweetest shot John had ever seen. John attempted to load on the run but made a mess of it, spilling black powder everywhere. By this time Jessup and Perkin had reached them, with Collyer limping close behind. They took positions behind the gravestones and commenced firing at the longboat’s crew, only praying that Cullman and Jobson had the sense not to sink the longboat with an eight-pound ball.

  It was over in a minute more, for the men in the longboat had to cover two targets at once, and couldn’t do it. When the shooting stopped, there was no more damage to the Martin Luther’s crew than Collyer’s right ear, which was mainly clipped away by a ball from the longboat. He crouched, bleeding like a stuck pig and swearing most vile, as John peered out from behind Brother Casildo’s gravestone.

  “There’s nobody moving on the longboat,” he said.

  “What about that bugger hanging over the gunwale?”

  “I see three shot-holes in him,” John replied. He got up cautiously and walked out on the beach. One by one the others rose and followed him. Cullman and Jobson hallooed from the ship, waving their hats.

  “How do we get the boat back?” said Perkin.

  “Anyone know how to swim?”

  “Me,” said John, and regretted it at once, thinking of Dooley’s sorry end.

  “Out you go, then,” said Beason.

  So John prayed as though it was a Sunday, and for all he knew it might have been, as he stripped off his coat and hat, and kicked off his shoes. The water was bright and clear as he waded out, nothing like sorry old Hackney Brook, and a beautiful blue except for the crimson place where the dead man hanging over the gunwale had bled into the water. And the Lord must have listened to John’s prayers and nodded approvingly, for John made the side of the boat in safety, pocked up in splinters and musket-balls as it was, though he had to haul the dead man out as he scrambled in.

  Now he saw that there were two other dead men floating a little ways off, face down. Three more were lying in the bottom of the boat, all shot to pieces except for one pockfaced lout who was lolling back with open eyes and bared teeth and a knife clenched in his fist—

  With a scream the fellow sat up, and John screamed too and caught him by the wrist, and they struggled together a long moment, with the thwart cutting into John’s shins something cruel. Shots rang out from the beach, but hummed past like bees; at last John broke the bugger’s arm. He got the knife away from him and ran it into him twice, just where he supposed the heart might be, and the man gasped once and died. John pitched him out of the boat and sat there shivering, for all the heat of the sun.

  When he’d done puking over the side, he rowed back to shore.

  ***

  John did wonder what had become of Captain Stalwin’s luck, that was supposed to have changed. They all puzzled over it, after they’d elected Beason captain and were sailing away from there; and Perkin’s idea made the most sense, which was that the luck under consideration was their luck, which was to say the whole crew’s. Changing for the better, therefore, had included getting rid of a sorry bastard like Stalwin.

  The other tale was what had really happened on the island, and they worked out several different stories for that, sitting under the stars as they drank their rum. Captain Beason’s story seemed the likeliest, viz.: that the overseers had been left on the island with the Indians, but, being hardier, had survived the disease; and that they’d taken the Indian women, foul-faced or no, and murdered Brother Casildo. So they lived until the brothers Claveria Martinez came back, in seven years’ time.

  The brothers must have come ashore armed, not expecting anyone to have survived. One of the brothers must have been taken alive, with all he brought ashore, including fresh arms and ammunition. The other must have gotten away, back to Cartagena, and in course of time took passage on the galleon that ran afoul of the Martin Luther.

  ***

  The Martin Luther’s crew debated what they ought to do next. There was some tal
k of going to Port Royal, but that was a chancy business; if the wind of diplomacy was blowing the wrong way, a poor hard-working captain might find a lot of Royal Marines demanding to see his privateer’s commission, and confiscating his spoils, and indeed he might just be hanged to soothe Spanish feelings.

  So in the end they went to Tortuga, where there were always folk willing to do business. The galleon’s cargo was disposed of, a buyer found for the emeralds, and every last penny of the profits counted out and divided up in fair shares amongst the crew. John and Jessup walked away from the Martin Luther rich men, at least as far as John was concerned. His pockets were like to burst for the weight of his money.

  “What’ll you do with your share?” he asked Jessup, as they walked along. There were yellow lights beckoning through the trees, and a smell of good food and drink, and music. Jessup shook his head.

  “Get myself a new name, and put this business as far behind me as ever I can,” he said. “Go somewhere no one knows my face. Set up in business, live quiet and die rich in my bed. You’ll do the same, boy, if you’ve any wit.”

  “I reckon I will, ay,” said John.

  They parted. John considered Jessup’s advice, and knew it was good advice, and heard the voice of his mother in his ear telling him it was good advice too. He fully intended to follow it; but the yellow lights beckoned so, and he could hear women laughing, and he thought he’d just go celebrate his good fortune first.

  He met a pretty French whore, who showed him where the best turtle stew was to be had, and where the best rum was served. They had a pleasant evening indeed, or at least what John could remember of it afterward, and she showed him a great many other things too.

  Next morning the sun was too bright, and John wandered queasy and penniless along the waterfront, squinting at all the sleek rakish craft moored there. He was hoping to find some of the Martin Luther’s crew, as might be willing to oblige an old shipmate with a loan. He didn’t; but before long he came to a ship taking on kegs of powder, and some men were talking there, with a look about them of cutlasses, and smoke, and easy money.