Jan went to it and took it up, biting out the cork. The pot left a ring on the table, a corona of the abbot’s blood. He thought better, and set it down, wiping his palm on the leg of his breeches.
“Now you’ve told me your story,” Jan mumbled. “What now? You’d have us join you?”
“No,” said Vigoreaux, shaking his head. “I’m afraid not. You see, except when the length of our voyage forbids it, once a month we weigh anchor at an isle in the tropics so les loups garoux may turn loose their moon madness on the tattooed aborigines that inhabit it. If, during the voyage, we turn up any stouthearted souls among the civilized world, we put them ashore as well. It’s good for the crew’s morale and constitution. They stretch their legs, howl, and bark, and they rend flesh…a sort of friendly competition with your flesh as the prize.”
“So you’ve saved us from the bellies of sharks for the bellies of your cannibal crew?” Jan said.
“On the merit of your spirit, yes.” Vigoreaux nodded. “Badham and the men are easily bored by the babbling natives. These aborigines have come to expect us now, you see. Like the gulls on my island. I don’t know the particulars of their religion, but it seems our monthly visitations have become a part of their culture. They beat a handful of men and women into the jungle for us, but these sacrifices have no mettle. A lot of weepers and bleeders. Do you know, some of them actually kneel and wait to be killed? Still, flesh is flesh, and blood, blood. And when the blood of les loups garoux boils, nothing can stay them.”
Jan retreated from the grisly table to the corner where Timóteo slept a restless, unnatural sleep.
“Well?” Vigoreaux said. “This may be your life’s final valediction. Come now, I would hear your story. Who are you? What have you been? Where have you come from?”
Jan stared at the sagging thing eying him hungrily from the chair at the bloodstained table. This thing was not content to suck him dry of his blood, but of all he was. It thirsted for life itself as a spinster hungers for news of the world. Blood was but a poor substitution. Vigoreaux drank life because he could have none of his own.
To this thing before him, what did it matter how he had come here from Jamestown? What good would it be to tell him of his conscription and his capture by the Spaniards at Cumberland Bay? The War of Jenkins Ear meant as little to Vigoreaux as it did to Jan himself now. Vigoreaux’s was a half-life of endless years untouched and without feeling. He was only curious about Jan in passing, as a diner wonders of the cook who labors to make his food, or the garnish beside his meat. His experiences, his life, were but a salt to make his death savory to this devil’s palate.
Well, he would not make his end a sweetmeat to slide down the bastard’s gullet. If die he must, then he swore then and there he would make this fiend choke as he went.
“My story’s one you won’t soon forget, Old Tick,” he said, lifting Timóteo to his feet. “It’s the end of your own. Now lock us in your hold, and bring us food and water.”
* * * *
Later, when Timóteo awoke, he told of terrible dreams, of his Dominican brothers being cooked upon a black iron spit turned by Captain Vigoreaux as the redhead Thomas Badham cut pieces from them with a long dirk.
The Dominicans were gone, as was the boatswain’s mate. Timóteo’s nightmare was but the attempt of his delirious mind to make sense of all he had seen as Badham led them across the feculent decks and down into the hold. They had slaughtered the priests, and set on them with hatchets. As he bore Timóteo, he had seen the Trivias heave bloody ended limbs onto stacks like kindling. Everything was uniformly divided: the naked torsos in one heap, the legs in a pile, arms in another. At the piles squatted a black-eyed Wampanoag butcher working with cleaver and filet knife, cutting the meat from the bones with the deftness of a practiced hand, tossing feet and hands over the side as if they were fish guts. Some of the idle sailors cracked open the clean bones and sucked the marrow, leering red and black grins at him as he passed, offering him to partake of their vicious meal.
“Your own carcass won’t be so neatly treated, Driftwood,” Badham promised him. “This’ll all be cured and salted for the stores. On you, we’ll feast in the old way. Raw.”
“May you choke upon our bones if you should fare so well as to taste them,” Jan spat.
He prayed he would have a chance to at least strike this villain if he never saw Vigoreaux again. But he doubted God was inclining an eye or an ear over The Trivia.
When Timóteo revived, Jan bade him eat the bread and water Badham had left them but steered him clear of the meat. He related Captain Vigoreaux’s tale and assured him of its veracity.
Timóteo was appalled, but strangely unsurprised. Instead, he grimaced over the tin dish of meat and kicked it violently, scattering its contents across the locked door.
“Loups garoux was the word Vigoreaux used,” Jan said. “Wilkołak, my father called them. Werewolves.”
“Yes.” Timóteo nodded. “Lobos hombres. In Cordova there was once such a beast, killing the children and stealing.”
“And the captain himself…,” Jan began.
Timóteo held up his hand. The priestly mildness was gone from him. His words hissed in the closeness like the rasp of steel from a scabbard. “These things are not unknown to the Church.” Timóteo sighed. “They are abomination, Jan, put upon the earth by the enemies of God. When we are put ashore, we must do all we can to kill them all.”
Chapter 2
Sampari parted the broad fronds with her fingers and the white sand beach and the blue sea stretched before her as though it were a thing contained within the green frame of the jungle.
She saw the sun glowing through the red sails of the big boat on the rolling waves and knew the khakhua would be on the island by nightfall.
They had been coming since she was a little girl. How many times had she snuck out to this same spot and watched the red sails bloom like a poisonous blossom on the horizon? She remembered when the laleo master and his animal men had come into their village one night. The big red-haired monster that plucked her from sleep and so too from the innocence and security of everything before still loomed terrible in her nightmares.
Her father was killed. The old white laleo sucked the blood from his neck like a stinging bat and threw his limp body to his khakhua, who tore it apart before her eyes. There had never been any shelter for her since, not beneath the sun, and never beneath the moon.
So her fat uncle, a selfish and plotting shaman who used talk of the spirits to get what he wanted, made a bargain that spared them, but kept the khakhua returning. Two of the men and boys of the tribe who were his enemies were given to the khakhua as tribute. He also gave them two of the women, one of these his own wife.
The best warriors of the village came under his sway somehow. The weak and fearful thereafter worked to cultivate her uncle’s favor, lest they be given over to the khakhua to be eaten on their return at the new moon. Her uncle took her mother and forced himself upon her, and she bore a fat and spoiled daughter named Mivai who was as much a little bully as his fat and spoiled son, Kilikili.
This was the world in which Sampari lived. Her people had once been honorable and intrepid. They had left the island of skulls, the island of monsters, long ago and come to live in this peaceful place, braving a long, storied voyage over the turbulent sea. Now they were like idle berries waiting to be picked.
In time her uncle taught the people to believe the khakhua were not men at all but angry monsters who had followed them from their ancient home and must be appeased. They ate away the evil from the village so the field would grow and the piglets and the children would not be born dead. He turned them from the worship of their hero ancestors, and kept them fearful. They built their huts in the trees like cowering monkeys, and he lived in the tallest branches, an overripe fruit dangling above them.
Then Kilikili came of age and began to eye Sampari as a blood-relation should not. A few times he tried to corner her as she gathered f
ood, and finally she cut off two of his groping fingers with a boar-bone knife.
Her uncle’s men caught her, and her uncle told her she must marry Kilikili or he would kill her mother, his own wife. Being the lecherous old frog he was, he had begun to tire of her just as he had the first.
For his part, Kilikili did not seem quite so anxious for the coupling as before, but his father insisted.
When her mother learned of this ultimatum, she stepped out of the doorway of the tall tree house she shared with Sampari’s uncle and plummeted, breaking her body on the jungle floor.
Her meaning could not have been more plain had she spoken it into Sampari’s ears, “Run, daughter! Run!”
That very morning her uncle proclaimed her a witch and demanded she be bound to be given over to the khakhua.
So she escaped into the jungle.
She had been on her own for a week, living off the fruit of the trees and stealing cassowary eggs, sucking water from the vines as her mother had taught her, and waiting. Waiting for the coming of the khakhua.
She knew the khakhua sometimes brought other men to hunt down for their own enjoyment, men from islands beyond the sea.
And there they were. Two. Only two. All this waiting and planning, and only two this time.
She saw them in the back of the little boat coming down from the great mother boat, tied and hunched over behind two of the khakhua. One was large and sandy-haired, the other smallish, bearded, and dark.
She hoped they were brave. They must be, if they were to help her free her people from her uncle and the worship of the khakhua.
* * * *
As soon as the launch ground against the bottom, Jan and Timóteo were pushed over the edge to splash in the surf. Their hands had been tied behind them and they fell beneath the few feet of seawater, unable to catch themselves. As they struggled to rise, Badham put a foot on each of their backs and held them there until they came up gasping, lungs searing from the inrush of air.
The big man took hold of their collars and dragged them to the white sand like a pair of wayward kittens. They fell, spluttering, and he took out a dirk and neatly cut their bonds.
He flung the knife down between them and it stuck in the sand.
“I’ll be coming back for this,” he said, straightening.
Jan turned on his side and spat out the dry sand grinding between his teeth. Badham was a bulky silhouette against the sun—a colossus limned in fire he had to squint to make out.
“It’ll be waiting for you.”
Timóteo rose to his hands and knees and vomited the seawater he’d inhaled. Badham put his boot to his hind-end and the coughing Dominican chased the sea with a mouthful of beach sand.
Jan kicked at his ankle, but only succeeded in covering the leg of Badham’s boots with mud.
“See you tonight, Driftwood,” he said, and waded through the surf back to the waiting launch, gesturing for the oarsmen to shove off.
Jan did not watch the little boat contend against the waves as it returned to its whorishly festooned mother, though he heard the oars groan in the locks and the sailors begin a light-hearted chantey as they commenced. He stood and helped Timóteo to his feet, then stooped and got the knife.
“You’ve got to be able to run,” he said, handing him the knife.
“I know.” Timóteo nodded, shrugging out of the heavy black cappa and cutting away his habit at the knees. “Let’s go.”
They’d spoken of what they would do during the voyage to the island, but it was a vague plan. They knew the jungle could provide them with food, and probably water, possibly the means to fashion rude weapons. They’d not hoped for much. The knife was an unexpected boon. With it, they could make spears at least, maybe rig some rudimentary snares to harry the chase. Jan had seen an old pathfinder named Etienne rig a bow and arrows from scratch once, but he doubted he could replicate the process in time.
Now they fled the warm beach. The setting, idyllic in any other time, was only a naked killing ground now. They ran like animals for the shade of the green jungle, and went crashing through the raking fronds and over the twisting roots until the sounds of insects and cawing birds fleeing their loud approach drowned out the surf and the fading song of the Trivias.
After running deep into the jungle for they knew not how long, they slowed to a stop. Each man stood panting with their hands on their knees.
“All right?” Jan asked.
Timóteo nodded.
Jan’s head snapped aright and the two held their breath.
Timóteo questioned him with a look. After a moment, Jan shrugged.
“Some animal, probably,” he said. Then he held his finger to his lips and listened. They heard the chattering of birds, and far off to the right, something else faint and constant.
“We’re in luck,” he said. “Do you hear that? Water. Let’s go.”
They proceeded toward the sound, Jan in the lead, stepping more cautiously this time, and Timóteo being careful to follow in his footsteps.
They walked, stopping now and again to listen and get their bearings, until the sound became a familiar rush and they came through the trees to a place where water fell into a good-sized, marshy pond from a series of rocks. A creek trickled down from a single high, leaf-covered point. The island was formed like a wide-brimmed, peaked hat.
Jan studied the area for a moment, then trudged straight into the water and waded across to the other side. Timóteo followed, and they rushed into the jungle for thirty paces and stopped.
“All right,” Jan said then. “We go back. Step only in the places you stepped before. Careful.”
They began walking backward until they reached the water again, and waded back into the pool, stopping at a point in the center where it was belly deep.
“Take off your shoes,” Jan said, and he reached down and pulled off his marine boots. It was a shame to lose them, but they were in need of a cobbler anyhow. “They won’t be looking for bare feet straight off. Maybe they’ll think our prints belong to natives. It could give us an hour or so.”
“If they’re truly wolves,” Timóteo said, “they may hunt by smell.”
“You’re right,” Jan agreed, taking off his shirt and trousers. “We should climb up there and walk through the stream. If they can smell us, it’ll throw them off.”
“Will we make our stand up there? We might see them all coming from that peak.”
“I don’t think so. No place to go.”
They balled up their clothes around their footwear and Jan went to the little waterfall. He jammed the bundle down beneath the rocks, then started climbing up the slick stones through the rushing water. The handholds were smooth and tricky.
Jan had just reached the edge of the waterfall and pulled himself over when he heard the splash.
Timóteo had slipped and fallen.
His black hair surfaced in a moment, and Jan cursed. The priest’s face was drawn in pain.
“Are you all right?”
“My elbow is hurt,” Timóteo gasped. He raised it from the water. A ragged gash from the joint to the middle of the forearm leaked blood freely. “I can climb, though.”
“Be careful,” Jan said. He lay on his stomach in the stream and extended his arms to help the priest. In the back of his mind, he knew they were finished if it was true about the werewolves’ sense of smell. His own experience hunting taught him there was no richer smell than blood to an animal. They could only bind the cut with their clothing, and that made doing away with it useless.
“Bring a scrap of cloth to wrap around your arm,” he muttered.
Timóteo stopped climbing and looked back the way they’d come.
“Just do it,” Jan groaned. “Don’t worry about it.” He knew the blackfriar guessed his thoughts, knew his priestly martyrdom would soon show its face. “By myself I’ve got no chance. We’ll think of something else,” he added.
Timóteo did not look at him. He pointed a skinny arm across the pool.
Jan looked over, suddenly alert and rigid. Had they come already? The sun was hours from falling! Had Badham ordered the boat turned around at the last minute and decided to hoard their carcasses for himself?
But no. No men or beast-men came out of the jungle.
Framed in the leaning branches and drooping vines was a half-naked girl.
She was small, yet not a child. Her skin was coffee-colored, and there was a sheen to it. Her short, tightly curled hair framed a pretty face, but her wide, dark eyes regarded them with open mistrust. She was slightly hunched, one slender leg poised to propel her back into the foliage. She wore a low slung, short skirt of dry grasses, a few strings of teeth and shells, and a single rattan hoop through her right ear. In her hand she held a crude, dark, stone axe.
Jan touched one of the smooth stones nearest him. The girl raised her axe in warning and took a wary step back into the brush.
Jan released the stone and showed her the heels of his hands.
Timóteo did the same, then hastily covered his own nakedness as an afterthought. Jan thought he saw the priest’s pallid cheeks redden and allowed himself half of a grin.
“What do you think she intends?” he whispered.
“Maybe she’s one of the ones the villagers turn over to them,” Jan said.
“You told me Vigoreaux said they went willingly.”
“He said some of them did,” Jan said.
“Peace, child,” Timóteo ventured, speaking soothingly.
The girl lowered her weapon and worked her jowls, looking from first one of them and then to the other and back.
She said something. It was not anything either of them could understand.
They shook their heads.
She quickly got down on all fours and gnashed her teeth.
“What the hell. She’s mad,” said Jan.
“No, no,” said Timóteo. “I don’t think so.”
Timóteo looked to Jan and then to the girl, and having the more prodigious hair between the two of them, he gripped tufts of first his dark beard and then his chest hairs and made growling noises, pantomiming an animal.
Red Sails Page 3