Tale of The Thunderbolt

by E. E. Knight

  Valentine noted, rather dully, the Thunderbolt turning to escape the harbor-leaving him behind. She and the submarine traded machine-gun fire; the bullets scrabbled against the respective port sides of the two ships. The ineffectual fire reminded Valentine of a pair of crabs battling with their oversize fighting claws, both too well armored to be damaged by the exchange.

  Hard hands grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him into a boat. He looked around at a mass of black faces, eyes and teeth shining in the night. A few pointed their guns at him. He could make out voices now.

  "Put those things down, you fools," Valentine barked in French. "I'm not going anywhere." He consoled himself with the sight of the Thunderbolt's churning wake as she escaped the harbor.

  They landed and trooped up the beach and past the wounded Haitians. The soldiers' screams and lamentations struck Valentine as surreal, with soft sand beneath his feet and a breeze licking his skin as though he were just back from a pleasure swim. A few of the women from the town tended to the men in a haphazard fashion, caring only for the faces known to them and ignoring others.

  The soldiers moved him along with words and gestures rather than the blows he expected, especially after the brief, intense fight. They escorted him to the stoutest building off the market square, a cinder-block three-tiered structure with a collonade and a few friezes that reminded him of an elaborate wedding cake he'd once seen back in New Orleans. They brought him into the basement by way of an exterior stairway and metal door broken only by a narrow gun slit. A navy-uniformed warden led him to a cell. Its ten-by-ten concrete floor supported no furniture, and only a drain hole and dirty ring on the floor around it hinted that there had once been plumbing fixtures.

  Cockroaches scuttled for the corners at their entry. What light there was came in through the face-size window in the door, where tiny shards of reinforced glass and wire still stood in the broken pane like the teeth circling a lamprey's mouth. He stood in the holding cell, wet and uncomfortable, while they searched him. Finding him weaponless, they took only his belt.

  He waited what he thought to be an hour or so, and a familiar eye appeared in the circle of jagged, stained glass. It widened in surprise.

  "My God! So it's true-the bargainer himself," Boul exclaimed in French.

  "That sounds like the man who told me not to fear treachery."

  A melodious chuckle came from the hall. "I know which side of the bread my butter rests on, my friend. Or in this case, on which side of this door I wish to be standing."

  "Funny thing, buttered bread," Valentine said, emotion facilitating his. command of his mother's tongue. He sat and rested his back against the wall. "If it is dropped, life always arranges for it to land butter side down."

  "My bread is brought to me, so I wouldn't know. Listen, my friend. You'll have buttered bread, decent food, as long as you stay here if you'll tell them the whole truth. That through me your captain was convinced to stay."

  "Are you sure you want to take credit for tonight's fiasco? Your prize got away."

  "Your sailors were more alert than we thought, for all the illicit rum and tequila they bought today. But your ship was damaged, my friend, damaged. Whatever you sought to do here is at an end. The Lords of Santo Domingo still rule, and they know now that you play a false game."

  "Thanks to those who would sell their countrymen's lives. For what? A uniform? Someone to bring you your buttered bread?"

  "I must put an end to this pleasant exchange, though in the future we'll have freedom and leisure to talk. Well, just leisure in your case. But first a comrade of yours will join you. It seems he wished to see you again a great deal, so much that he risked his life to be in the harbor tonight. One moment please."

  So they had Victo, too. Valentine waited, and rested. So close, and you blew it at the end. He closed his eyes and his mind and tried to reduce his lifesign. Not that it was necessary in this particular heart of darkness, but the mental discipline would calm him for whatever lay ahead.

  A heavy tread outside the door, and a rattle of a key in the lock made him open his eyes again. He readied an apology for Victo, whose life had also been on the table in this mad gamble. Valentine felt a flash of resentment at the superiors, Lifeweaver and human, who pushed men to their deaths, sacrificed like pawns. But it wasn't Victo who stood in the doorway, glowering at him.

  Captain Saunders.

  "By Kur and the Catastrophes, I owe the devil his due. It is you," Saunders rasped. His skin was darker, his hair lighter, and the wattles on his neck more pronounced with weight loss. He wore loose butter-colored cotton clothes and rope sandals.

  "Good morning, Captain," Valentine said.

  "Stow it, renegade. Boul, put this man in shackles. He's slippery."

  Boul yelled something to his men outside the door, who rushed to comply with the Haitian Creole. Valentine submitted to his boots being stripped off, and his wrists and ankles being clamped in steel. A second chain linked the upper and lower segments of the restraints.

  "That's better," Saunders said, looking over the fittings with a careful eye. He snickered. "So young, so sure of himself. Plotting behind my back. I found you out still, clever man."

  "Shouldn't you be getting back to the Thunderbolt, sir? It is your command, after all."

  A paroxysm passed over Saunders's face, and he reached into his shirt. Valentine saw a sheathed knife under his arm. Saunders clutched the hilt with a trembling hand, then relaxed.

  "You should be congratulated for being in the right place at the right time, Captain," Valentine admitted. "Was it dumb luck or evil fate?"

  "It took some doing," Saunders said. "I got away from those bastards off Jamaica by only the thinnest margins. I jumped in a raft with Peatwo and my pistols while the fighting was still going on. We rowed for shore." Saunders still enjoyed talking about himself, and he began to pace the cell.

  "Nobody noticed a missing raft. But we've been busy killing a Kurian," Valentine said.

  "I rowed for shore, but it turned out there was a third ship there. Didn't know that, did you? A little fishing boat, just a wheelhouse and a deck really. From the other pirates in Montego Bay. The scoundrels on board were hoping one or both of the ships would be so damaged by the fight, they could get in on some salvage.

  "Their sailing master, for he wasn't fit for the word captain, was a crafty one, lurking there. Pointed a bunch of guns at us, bobbing there in the raft. I saw him watching Peatwo with a look I'd seen before, so I took my pistol and put it to Peatwo's head. Promised to blow the boy's brains out if they didn't put down their guns, but I'd trade the boy for my life. The sailing master chuckled and brought me on board.

  "He meant to murder me, of course, so as soon as I got on deck, I shot him and another who moved clean dead. I made the others throw their guns overboard, and between me and Peatwo, we got five into the raft. That just left us with three, enough to handle the ship but not too many to watch.

  "I couldn't go back north, but I knew the only Kurians with ships nearby were here. We made for Santo Domingo. I ended up shooting another of those Montego dogs on the trip. I stayed awake two days at one stretch, promising myself with every breath that I'd see you again and avenge myself. I offered the Devil my soul for this moment."

  "Not much of a bargain for either of you."

  "Hold that tongue, or I'll cut it out-by Kur, I will. We got to this island, and I found the local Lords. I gave them the Jamaicans, and Peatwo for that matter, for the promise to let me serve them at sea. That came hard. Felt a bit like that guy in the Bible who had to sacrifice his own son. I couldn't have made it that week at sea without Peatwo. The Kurians didn't know what to make of me. But they had that submarine working; they used it at sea because it was almost un-sinkable. The cannon's sights were wrecked. I fixed it up for them, and they gave me the command.

  "We heard about what happened in Jamaica. At first I thought you had ideas about setting yourself up in style there. When the good Boul radioed Sa
nto Domingo that you were seen off the coast, I knew the Devil had kept his part of the bargain. You'll rot here until I get the Thunderbolt back, and then what's left of you will go back to New Orleans for disposition. Dispossession, more like, of your traitorous hide. As slowly as I can make it last."

  In a way, Valentine was relieved. He wouldn't be killed outright, and so far no one had bothered to wonder just what he was doing off the shore of Hispaniola.

  "Better get that gun fixed, sir," Valentine suggested. "Otherwise the Thunderbolt will sink your pigboat under you."

  "I intend to. The damage is repairable, within even the capabilities of the joke of a machine shop they have here in Haiti's wet asshole. But help is on the way."

  Valentine feigned disinterest and said no more in the hope that Saunders would brag out further details. But his former captain turned to leave.

  "Oh, Captain, one more thing," Valentine said. "Suppose you do get the Thunderbolt back. Are your new masters here just going to let you sail off in an armed ship that size? Our mutual friend Captain Boul, he may just have orders to shoot you in the back of the head once the Thunderbolt's safely taken."

  "A traitor judges all others by his traitorousness," Saunders sneered, as if he had hit upon an important point of philosophy. "Kur keeps her bargains with those useful to them."

  "What about with those who are no longer useful to them? What happened to Peatwo when you didn't need a second set of eyes, Captain?"

  "Boul, have him beaten!"

  Saunders stormed out, letting his stomping feet do his cursing for him. Boul's lips curled into an uneven grin, and two heavyset Haitians entered, wooden clubs in hand.

  An hour later, Valentine consoled himself with the knowledge that this pain would not be forever. Pain never was; the body either died or healed. In either case, the pain subsided.

  But for now, he had an existence of seeping blood and throbbing pain. Blood stinging his eyeballs-the sting coursed up the side of his face like a hot circuit. Blood in his mouth, blood in his urine from the hammerlike blows to his kidneys, he fancied his toes were bleeding where one of the jailers had stood on them with thick-soled boots. And pain underneath, pain as deep as the Cayman abyssal. Vomit covered his shirt, and worse filth stained the inside of his pants.

  He felt a callused yet gentle hand rock his head. Some kind of leaves went into his mouth, and the hand worked his jaw. He chewed with loosened teeth and swallowed; it seemed important to the hand.

  "Oui, oui, my child. This will help, yes," a woman's voice said in Haitian Creole.

  Valentine opened one blood-gummed eye and looked up into a black face. Warm dark eyes looked down at him, a tenderness glowing there thanks to some inner light. He felt he must be resting in a lap-though the arrangement of her legs seemed wrong-but he only had a moment to enjoy the sensation before fading out.

  When he awoke, he was in clean cotton ducks of the same kind he had seen under the straw hats in the Cape Haitian market. Something had woken him, and a sniff of fresher air made him turn to the door, which the breeze told him was open.

  A figure slid in, moving mostly with its arms like a chimpanzee. It was the same woman who had cradled his head in her caressing hands. She was disfigured: two fleshy stumps were all she had left of her legs, and one arm ended in a leather-covered knob at her wrist. She had a wide nose, so wide it seemed to touch every other part of her face, below a cheerful yellow bandanna tied tight around her head. Swinging on her arms, like a cripple using two short crutches, she was at his side in two strides. She pivoted on the wrist-stump as neatly as a ballerina en pointe.

  "Feeling better, child?"

  "Yes. Whatever was in those leaves helped."

  The door remained open. A lemon-sucking guard watched every move the woman made in the bare cell. Valentine noticed that she wore a man's wristwatch with a cracked crystal on her good arm.

  "Food and water'll help more. I brought both. I'm Sissy. I tend to the poor souls in here."

  "Sissy?"

  "Short for Narcisse," she said, unrolling a bundle. A coconut and further food wrapped in bits of rag greeted him.

  "Food doesn't sound that good, but that coconut-"

  "As full of milk as a cow, child. You want me to hold it for you?" She sniffed at the air above his waist, like a mother wondering if a diaper needed changing.

  "I think I can manage."

  Valentine removed the coir plug and tipped the sweet, thin coconut milk down his throat. It tasted like pure honey.

  "You're a good healer, child. I've seen men die from such a beating. Here you are with an appetite already."

  "I'm grateful," he said, handing her the empty husk.

  "You want the meat inside?"

  "Maybe later."

  "I understand, child. Been there myself."

  "Sorry to hear that."

  "Grateful and sorry." She chuckled. "That makes you two rungs up on every man in this town."

  "Narcisse," Valentine said, not to his nurse, but to the ceiling of the cell. "That's a lovely name."

  "Twenty years ago, I was a lovely girl."

  "You still are. Nobody is more beautiful than someone who takes away pain."

  She half snorted, half laughed. "Child, you're a charmer. Now you're three rungs up."

  Valentine unwrapped a piece of cheese and nibbled at it with sore teeth. "Good of them to let you in here."

  "Captain Boul's orders. I heard the men talking. They want you to live."

  Valentine probed a loosened tooth with his tongue and refrained from comment.

  "Ten minutes, and you'll need to pass water, bad," Sissy predicted. "I'll be back with a basin."

  She swung herself to the door and glared up at the man blocking it. "Thank you," she said as he moved aside. Valentine almost felt the air chill at her tone.

  Sissy helped him urinate at the end of the predicted ten-minute interval in such a matter-of-fact fashion, Valentine almost laughed at the procedure.

  "Christ that burns," Valentine groaned.

  "Pain means you're still breathing," she commiserated. "Told myself that before-and before that, too."

  She put his head in her lap again and started to sponge blood clots out of his hair. "You're wondering, and you're too polite to ask. I'm like this from my own beatings, from trying to run away out of here. I started out in the sugar fields. Tried to get away once too often. I'd be dead, except I can cook better than anyone this side of the island. And they're afraid of my juju."

  "Actually I was wondering about the watch. It doesn't fit you."

  "Hmpf. Most people just see a woman with stumps. This belonged to my man, Robert," she said, pronouncing the name Rowberr. "He went to join the guerrillas, and I never seen him since. I think he's dead."

  Valentine lay back, trying to fall asleep. There was no pain in sleep. "Do you ever think of running again?" he breathed, his voice hardly a whisper.

  "Hard to run with no legs, child," she said, cradling his head again and bringing her face close to his so he could hear.

  "When you bring me dinner...," Valentine began.

  Narcisse listened, gently stroking his head. But Valentine felt her body tremble with excitement as he spoke.

  Valentine lay down, and tried to sleep away the afternoon. He'd gotten up and walked around the cell. There was one final wall of pain to get through as he did so, and then he felt his strength coming back to him as though a dam had burst. He put his back to the wall where the guard couldn't see him and squatted and stretched and tried a few push-ups. The exertion left him as limp as water. He tried to sleep. He told himself he would never be able to rest: there were gaping holes in his plan, beginning with the necessity of him staying in this cell for another meal. He tried to relax, worried that a change in mood could alter his lifesign signature. He hadn't seen any Reapers on Haiti yet, or felt their presence, but that didn't mean they would not come for him. And with all those worries, sleep still ambushed him.

  He woke wit
h a start at the sound of Sissy's voice outside the door. "What, you on hourly wages? Food's getting cold, boy. Get this thing open."

  The door swung inward, and Valentine rolled over to see Narcisse. She had changed into heavier long-sleeved clothes, and the yellow bandanna had been replaced by a blue-green one.

  Valentine rolled onto his side and knelt, as a hungry man looking forward to his meal. The guards looked in Nar-cisse's bag, poking through the contents.

  "Awful lot in here."

  "You know the cap'n's orders. He wants him well fed. He didn't eat much earlier owing to the beating-he'll be healing-hungry now. I'm going to give him a wash, too. That's what the water's for."

  The jailers exchanged a look. One stepped aside so she could pass. She executed a neat hop over his foot, but her trailing culottes caught on his boot. Something fell from between her stumps and clattered to the floor.

  The guards and Valentine looked down. It was a filleting knife-with a razor-sharp blade and a sturdy handle.

  The guard outside the door reached for his rifle. The one inside bent to grasp at the knife. Valentine took his chance. Excitement overrode the stiffness in his body.

  He sprang, bringing his fist forward. The defunct but heavy watch that once belonged to Narcisse's lover was wrapped around his hand in an improvised brass knuckle. The jailer turned his head at the blur of motion. What was left of the crystal shattered against the bridge of his nose, even as he tried to bring up the knife.

  The other raised his rifle. To Valentine it seemed as though the guard moved in slow motion, and a rifle is an unwieldy weapon for a close-quarters fight. Valentine whirled around the pain-blinded guard at the door and stepped past the long barrel. He brought his watch-covered fist against the second guard's jaw in a haymaker blow, trapping the gun under his other arm. The gun fired; its bullet went into the cell, splitting the air between Narcisse and the broken-nosed man at the door.