He remained still for an hour, but he dared wait no longer for fear that the guards would be relieved. He imagined it was somewhere around two in the morning. That was a good time. Defenses were down at that hour, watchfulness at a low ebb.
He rolled over with a groan, sat up. He saw the guard straighten, reacting to the first movement in an hour or more.
“Got to piss,” Yancy said.
The guard nodded. For a moment he was silent, and Yancy knew he was debating whether or not his charge needed accompaniment in that task. Finally he said, “Out that door there. Just piss in the bush. And come right back.”
Yancy nodded and stood. The guard did not realize that his decision had bought him at least four more minutes to live.
Yancy walked slowly, awkwardly, to the door, as if his muscles were sore and aching. But once outside and beyond the guard’s view, he picked up his pace, racing around the familiar north end of the building, down a flight of stone steps and along the dark back side of the big house. He could see nothing beyond vague shapes, the outline of the house against the stars, the blackness that was the stockade fence. But that did not matter. He was lord of the place, and he knew every inch of the grounds.
To his left, thirty feet beyond the stone wall of the house, there was a hump of dirt with a small door set in it. Yancy made a move in that direction, then stopped. He heard the crunch of shoes on gravel, a guard patrolling the perimeter.
Son of a whore, he thought. He did not have too long before the idiot in the kitchen came looking for him or raised an alarm.
Yancy waited for long maddening seconds, crouched in the blackness by the wall, as the guard came closer. He heard the man stop, pause, then head back the way he had come. Yancy waited another minute, until he could no longer hear the footfalls, then left the shadows’ protection, racing across the ground in a crouch, making for that well-hidden door set in the mound of earth.
With a dozen strides he was there, feeling along the ground until his hands fell on the heavy bar that was set across the door, preventing anyone from opening it from the inside.
He lifted the bar, put it aside, and swung the door open. Movement from the darkness within, and then Henry Nagel, hunched nearly double, emerged from the tunnel. He straightened with a stifled groan, stepped aside, and then another man followed him and another and another. More and more men-big men, bearded, with weapons hanging off them-poured out of the secret entrance and spread out on the lawn, crouching down, waiting in silence.
“How many are we?” Yancy breathed the words.
“Fifty, all told.”
Yancy nodded. They were the men from the compound, the original Terrors, his loyal core. Nagel had augmented their numbers with men from the town, pirates who were temporarily on the beach or who had made their homes on St. Mary’s. They were always ready for a good fight and eager to join in on the side most likely to win. Nagel had convinced them that it was Yancy.
“Good. Let’s go.” He turned and headed back the way he had come, and behind him the sound of fifty big, armed men following, being as quiet as they could, which was not overly quiet.
Along the dark perimeter of the building and up the stone steps. Yancy guessed he had been gone five minutes at least, enough for the guard to become concerned. He hoped the man would try to find his charge by himself, rather than raise the alarm and admit he had let Yancy leave unescorted.
He moved cautiously toward the edge of the kitchen building, slowing his pace, listening.
“Benner? Benner, you son of a bitch, where are you?” he heard the guard hiss. Trying to cover his mistake.
Yancy stepped around the corner of the kitchen and stopped, twenty feet from the guard. He could just make out the man’s dark shape. “Here!” he called softly. “Come and see this, you will not believe it!”
He slipped the ten-inch stiletto blade out of his shirt, held it easily at his side.
“Get over here, you bastard!” the guard said in a loud whisper.
“No, truly, you must see this. You will not believe it!” Yancy called out. He heard the sounds of the guard approaching, just audible as he stepped over the soft ground, heard him muttering.
The man’s dark form loomed up in front of him, and Yancy said, “Here.”
They stepped around the edge of the building and stopped in the face of the fifty pirates waiting there. The guard’s mouth fell open, and he was about to say something-to yell, perhaps-when Yancy grabbed his hair and jerked his head back and with one fluid motion cut his throat, clean through to the vertebrae.
The guard made a gasping, gurgling sound and crumpled to his knees. Yancy felt a stream of hot blood lash across his cheek, and he thought of his daily pig killing.
“There. I told you you would not believe it,” Yancy said to the dying man, then waved his men forward and led them on to the open door to the kitchen.
There he stopped them again and went in himself, calling to the one remaining guard. “I think your friend has need of your help,” he said. “He sent me back for you.”
The second guard was a cautious man, and he held Yancy at musket point and made him lead the way. But for all his caution he was not ready for Henry Nagel, waiting by the edge of the door, who grabbed him by the mouth as he walked past and jerked the gun from his hand. The guard screamed into Nagel’s callused palm, thrashed like a fish in the bottom of a boat, but he could not break Nagel’s grip, and Nagel dispatched him the way Yancy had done his partner.
The fifty crowded into the kitchen and joined their four comrades waiting there. Nagel handed Yancy his sword and shoulder belt, which he draped over his shoulder, and a brace of pistols.
Nagel stuck a bunko-what the Portuguese called a “cheroot”-between his lips and lit it with a lantern, then handed it to Yancy and lit another.
“Very well. Let us go,” Yancy said. He marched out of the kitchen, down the walk, and back into the big house. The need for subtlety was past. They had surprise, and they had sufficient numbers. The men knew what to do.
Down the hallway to the tall doors that opened into the great hall. The sentry, half asleep, jerked up at the sound, turned toward Yancy and his force of men.
“What in hell…? Who the hell…?” was as far as he got before Yancy shot him and then with his second pistol shot the other guard. There was a moment’s pause, a universal holding of breath, save for the ringing echo of the pistol shots.
And then, as Yancy stepped past the slumped, bleeding forms of the guards and into the great hall, panic exploded like a keg of power going off.
Men leaped up from the floor where they slept, arms grabbed for muskets, for swords, for breeches. They were dark ghosts in the light of the three lanterns that illuminated the hall with their weak light. Men shouted in alarm or confusion, shouted questions, shouted orders.
Yancy pulled the cheroot from his mouth, touched the glowing end to the fuse of a hand grenado, tossed it into this thrashing crowd of men. Nagel and three others did likewise.
Yancy watched the path of their flight across the dark room, marked by the fuses that glowed and hissed. He was watching one of them bounce at the far end of the hall when the first exploded, then the second and the third and in the same instant the final two.
The howls of confusion turned to shrieks of agony, screams of terror, and then Yancy stepped farther into the room, and the men behind him followed and spread out, and they began to empty their pistols and muskets into the crowd.
From the darkness a few muskets answered back, and behind him Yancy heard more gunfire, and he knew that the officers, who would have been sleeping in the upstairs rooms, had come rushing to the sound of the fight and had run into the twenty men he had dispatched to lie in wait for them.
The gunfire made a relentless noise, a grand orchestra of priming and powder, so that no one shot was distinguishable from another. Then through that din came the first cry of “Quarter! Quarter!”
“Hold!” Yancy shouted, and the gu
nfire ceased abruptly. Nearly all of the guns would be expended by now, and there was no need to engage in fighting with cold steel if it was not necessary.
“Lay down your arms!” Yancy shouted. He did not know at whom he was shouting. The brilliant light of flash in the pans and at the muzzle ends had ruined his eyes for seeing in the dark. He was aware only of the dim shapes of the high windows in the great hall, and in the circles of light thrown off from the lanterns he could see dead men and living men and pools of blood.
From the dark came the clatter of muskets hitting the stone floor. The gunfire behind him had ceased. Yancy was once again lord of St. Mary’s.
He wondered what horror the dawn would reveal, once he was able to see the results of his slaughter. He wondered, but he did not care very much, and it was only a vague sort of curiosity. There were prisoners enough to clean up the mess and burn the dead.
For him it was just more preparation. He felt suddenly very weary, overcome with the strain of it all. He was ready to kill Press and be done with it.
Or rather, he was ready for Press and Marlowe to sail back into his arms so that he might begin the protracted process of killing them both.
Chapter 21
FORTUN A FORTES fauct… Marlowe thought. Fortune favors the brave. But still he felt uneasy.
He wondered about the nature of luck. Had he been lucky to escape from Press in London? Real luck would have been never meeting with Press in the first place. On the balance was he lucky or not?
He had been lucky to get himself and Elizabeth out of St. Mary’s alive. But did that count as luck when set against the very ill fortune of crossing paths with the lunatic Yancy?
Must see what Bickerstaff thinks about all this.
This internal debate, as philosophical as Marlowe was wont to get, took place, as such debates so often did, high aloft, as Marlowe stared out at the horizon.
The horizon always made Marlowe thoughtful. It was the edge of mystery, the unknown in any direction. At sea one’s fortunes, be they in the form of prizes or enemies, landfalls or foul weather, came up over the horizon. Staring at the horizon was like trying to peer into the future.
In this case it was a wild ride. The Elizabeth Galley was lying to under bare poles to make her top hamper more invisible to any vessel that might come up over that sharp blue line in the distance. There was a moderate swell running with the ten or so knots of wind, and without the steadying pressure of the sails the Galley was rolling hard in the sea. Standing on the main topmast crosstrees, Marlowe and the lookout were swinging through great arcs as the ship rocked back and forth.
It was a motion that would have made most landsmen, and not a few seamen, sick, and even climbing aloft in that swaying top hamper would have seemed a daunting task to one not bred to the sea, but Marlowe did not give it a thought. With the cry of “Sail, ho!” and the report that this new ship’s bearing meant she was coming down the Bab el Mandeb from the Red Sea, the motion became nothing more than an annoyance as he raced up the shrouds, thinking only of identifying the ship, preparing to take it, dreaming of the riches in her hold.
They had been on station, waiting, for two days. South of them the dry headland of Ras Bir was visible from the masthead. To the north of their position the topgallants of the Bloody Revenge flirted with the horizon, sometimes appearing, sometimes dropping below the blue line. From his masthead Billy Bird should be able to see the coast to the north of his position. Between the two vessels they could watch every inch of the passage from the Red Sea.
The Bloody Revenge was not visible now, nor had it been for the past five hours.
Billy Bird, you son of a bitch, now where are you off to? Marlowe wondered as he once more scanned the horizon for some sign of the brig. He speculated that perhaps the Bloody Revenges had spotted a vessel to the north and headed off to take her alone, deciding in the end to deny the Elizabeth Galleys their part of the booty. Quite possible.
It was also possible that the brig was just below the horizon, perhaps, like the Elizabeth Galley, under bare poles and thus invisible to Marlowe and his glass. If that were the case, then they would certainly hear the gunfire from the battle that Marlowe guessed would commence in an hour or so. Gunfire would draw the pirates like sharks along a bloody trail in the sea.
He shifted his glass back to the approaching ship, hull up now. A great, fat lumbering thing, flying the colorful flags of some Moorish state that Marlowe did not recognize. She threw off bright glints of light as the sun beat down on gold trim, silver helmets and halberds, and brass cannon barrels. She was under a full press of sail, but still she wallowed, her high poop deck swaying back and forth, back and forth, like a stout woman doing her best to hurry.
Marlowe tried to temper his excitement, no simple task with the men on the deck below buzzing like the cicadas back home as they stared and pointed and counted up the riches in their heads-or out loud. This was the one. If she was not the treasure ship of the Great Mogul, then she was near enough.
He slung his telescope over his shoulder, climbed back down to the deck. “Mr. Flanders, the Bloody Revenge is not in sight. Let us give her the cannon signal, then get ready to go after this bloody great bastard! Hands aloft to loosen sail!”
He could not resist the dramatic flourish in that last statement, so taken was he with the high energy on deck. The men cheered, howled, banged the flats of their swords against the bulwarks. The sail looseners swarmed up the rigging, and also some who were not sail looseners but who wanted to see the sails set with all the alacrity the ship could manage. Flanders hurried forward, conferred with the gunners on the starboard side.
The sails spilled off the yards, and the guns went off, two in quick succession, a pause, and then a third. It was their prearranged signal, and it meant “Prize in sight, close with us.” And if that did not bring them, then the broadsides that would soon follow should. This treasure ship would have to fight now; she could not outrun the Elizabeth Galley.
And if he does not come, then that is his damned hard luck, Marlowe thought. If Billy Bird were off chasing some other ship, to which he had failed to alert his newfound partners, than that was his business, and a sorry bastard he would be.
The Moorish ship was a good mile off at least when she began to fire. Pathetic, Marlowe thought as he saw the puffs of smoke from her ample sides, the black streaks of the balls’ trajectories, the spouts of water as the round shot plunged into the sea in a wild and random pattern, and at the same time the flat rumble of the gunfire, just catching up with the shot.
Pathetic. None of the shots had hit, of course, but none of them were even in line with the Elizabeth Galley. They fell into a patch of water at least an acre wide.
She was a big one, too, bigger even than Marlowe had first suspected. By his best guess, for he was too far to see with any certainty, she mounted sixty guns. And they would be big ones, thirty-twopounders at least. The Moors did not play around with popguns.
He was likewise too far away still to see the number of people aboard her, but he imagined that her complement was massive.
The Moors lacked nearly all of the Europeans’ traditional naval skills. They were not practiced gunners or skilled seamen. Their ships were not nimble or well handled. What they were was big. The Great Mogul and those who sent tribute to him and those who carried pilgrims to Mecca tried to compensate for a lack of naval tradition with overwhelming size-in their ships, in their guns, in their crews.
Generally it did not work. Marlowe’s thoughts naturally turned to Thomas Tew, who had first stood on the deck of an English privateer and watched one of those fat ships roll down on him, just as he, Marlowe, was doing now. The ship Tew had attacked was even bigger than this one, over one hundred guns, if Marlowe remembered correctly. Three hundred soldiers.
Tew had told his men that despite all her guns and men, the Moors were wanting two things: skill and courage. They took her in fifteen minutes of fighting, with never a one of the Amity’s me
n even injured.
Marlowe imagined that the Moors were wanting a third thing, and that was motivation. It was not easy to conjure much enthusiasm for dying in defense of a tyrant’s treasure, not a sou of which you would ever see. Put up against the highly motivated Roundsmen, the Moors were at a great disadvantage indeed, despite their numbers.
Another broadside exploded silently from the big ship’s side, and again the jets of water, shooting up over a great span of sea, were accompanied by the rumble of the guns.
How long between those ragged and ill-coordinated broadsides? Marlowe wished he had timed it. It was a few minutes at least. He did not need to time their rate of fire to gauge their ineptitude.
He thought of Tew again. He had not been so lucky the second time around, his belly shot away by a cannonball, his men surrendering with no further resistance. What a hell the rest of their short lives must have been, enslaved by the Moors. Marlowe wondered to what brutal work the Great Mogul would have put his Christian slaves. Christian slaves who had tried to rob him of his tribute, no less.
Tew got off easy. Marlowe wondered what it was like to hold in your guts with your hand. He realized that his palm was pressing against his midriff, as if he were practicing the stance.
“On deck! Sail, ho! One point abaft the starboard beam! Reckon she’s the Bloody Revenge!”
Damn. Marlowe frowned, looked to the northward. This bloody complicates things, he thought.
If they had taken the Mogul’s ship with no help from Billy Bird, then the matter was clear: the Bloody Revenges had no claim to the treasure. If they had taken her with Billy’s help, then it was equally clear: the treasure would be divided between the two ships.
But now what? What if they took her in sight of the Bloody Revenge but without their help? Would Billy Bird and his men expect their part? Would the Elizabeth Galleys agree? Would the two pirate crews go at one another?
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