The Pirate Round

by James Nelson

  The knot came loose, and Marlowe wrapped the end of the line around his arm, realizing that if he dropped it, they were lost. On hands and knees he crawled along the rolling, bucking bundle of spars, pausing with fingers locked around the lashings as a big sea roiled up around them and the sea anchor disappeared under a foot of foam, then crawling on. Foot by foot to the far end of the spars, until at last he was as far out at the end as he could go.

  The middle spar in the sea anchor was a spare main topmast, in the end of which was cut a hole for the topsail halyard to run. Marlowe carefully took the bitter end of the rope and threaded it through this hole and back. He held it in his teeth as he flexed his fingers, preparing for the difficult task of tying a bowline in the line, a job that he could have easily done with his eyes closed, were it not for the fact that he could hardly feel his hands.

  He heard the sound of a wave breaking against the wreck and with it a groaning, a clatter of broken parts. His head jerked around, up. The wreck was rolling toward them, starting to go over. He paused, open-mouthed and dumb with cold and fatigue, waited for it to come down on them like the foot of an angry god. But it stopped, the deck as perfectly vertical now as it could get in that rolling world. It would not stay that way long.

  Marlowe pulled his eyes from the monstrous hull over him, turned to the rope in his hands, forced himself to work the knot. His fingers were almost useless, as if they had turned to stone, and with gross moves of his hands he formed a loop, tried to get the bitter end through, but the whole thing collapsed in a heap.

  Overhead the wreck groaned again. He could see it shift on the edge of his vision. He picked up the rope again, formed another loop. He had to hold the loop in one hand, thread the bitter end through and around the standing part and back, but his aching fingers would not let him do all that.

  And then he felt the spars buck as if someone else was crawling across them. He looked over. One of the sailors had made his way up to him. Marlowe saw a long, tangled beard sprouting from a face that was gray with fatigue, a leather jerkin and torn shirt, slop trousers.

  The man did not say anything, did not even look at Marlowe. He just picked up the bitter end of the rope, his fingers wrinkled with wet and no more usable than Marlowe’s and with awkward twists of hand and wrist threaded it through the loop that Marlowe held, around the standing part, back through the loop.

  Marlowe wrapped the bitter end around his wrist, hauled it taut. An ugly, misshapen knot, something that would earn an apprentice seaman a box on the ear from any boatswain, but it would hold.

  The wreck gave another groan, a creak, and the sound of tons of shifting water, and Marlowe and the men beside him looked up in horror, straight up, as the wreck was right over them, rising like a cliff. When it rolled, it would roll right on top of them.

  Marlowe slid back to a wider place on the spars, had a chance to curse himself once again for not arranging a signal to tell the men on board the Elizabeth Galley when the line was fixed.

  He stood, legs spread, half bent, a terribly awkward position, trying to balance on the rolling, twisting sea anchor. He managed one wave of his arm, and then he was forced to drop to his belly before a big sea knocked him away.

  He spit out the water he had swallowed, blinked it out of his eyes, tried to muster the energy to stand again. He could feel his strength and will drifting away, like those others on the spars. A few more moments and he would not care if he lived or not. He wasn’t sure he cared now.

  And then the sea anchor began to turn, to twist around in the sea. Marlowe saw the line he had carried out with him come taut and rise from the water as unseen hands aboard the Elizabeth Galley hauled away with a will.

  The spars came around until at last they were pointing directly at the Galley, and the men hauling the rope and the men on the capstan were able to pull them in, able to drag them through the big seas. Water washed over them, big seas came up from behind and pitched them forward, tried to knock them off, but they were moving. They were being pulled to safety.

  Twenty yards, thirty yards from the wreck, and the the big, dead hulk gave another groan, the deep guttural sound of its final agony, Marlowe turned his head, looked back. The big Indiaman began to roll, over, over, her deck coming down onto the sea, her big weed-covered bottom rising up into the air, her keel exposed to the gray light of that stormy day.

  The men on the spars watched, silent, as the ship came to rest, upside down, and from the place where it hit, a great surge of water careened toward them, breaking white over the swells, the ship lashing out, her final attempt to take her men down with her. Marlowe grabbed on to the nearest lashings, forced his dead fingers under the ropes, saw the others do the same, and then the wave was over them, burying them, spinning them around.

  Marlowe felt himself go under, covered with water like a blanket of crushed ice. He closed his eyes, his mouth, felt himself lift off the sea anchor, tried to close his fingers around the lashing.

  And then the water fell away, and he was in the air again and still on the spars. He looked around. Two of the men were gone, pulled from their raft. The big Indiaman had slipped beneath the sea, dragged them down with her.

  For another five minutes they clung to the spars, and then the Elizabeth Galley was towering above them, not a threatening sight like the wreck but a welcome one. But for all his relief, Marlowe doubted that he had the strength to climb those high sides, and he knew the others did not. A raft of Moseses – they could see the Promised Land, but they could not reach it.

  And then, like a vision, Duncan Honeyman seemed to float in front of him, coming down from the sky, as if he were flying. Marlowe could make no sense of what he was seeing. Honeyman lit on the sea anchor, soft as a bird landing, and only then did Marlowe realize he had been lowered down on a boatswain’s chair, a wooden seat on a line used to hoist men aloft to places where they could not climb.

  Honeyman stepped off the boatswain’s chair, moved nimbly across the bucking spars, pulling the chair with him. He set it down, grabbed Marlowe under the arms, helped him to his feet.

  ‘You first, Captain,’ he said as he made Marlowe step into the chair and signaled to the men on the Galley’s deck to take up the strain.

  Marlowe tried to protest that he should not go first. He was, after all, in better shape than the other men were, for what that was worth. But he could not seem to make his mouth work.

  And then he was in the air, lifting up off the sea anchor and sailing in over the side of the Elizabeth Galley, into the waiting arms of his men. Here was Hesiod, a worried look on his dark face, pulling slack in the line with one hand and supporting Marlowe with the other. Marlowe had an image of him back at the plantation, ax over his shoulder. He looked even more a pirate now.

  Elizabeth was there, wrapped in her boat cloak, her face a mask of concern. Marlowe wondered if she were going to scold him, tell him to go to hell. But instead she seemed to be giving orders, telling the men of the Elizabeth Galley what to do with the others on the spars, telling the two men holding Marlowe up to take him aft, telling Dinwiddie that he was in command.

  On her word the boatswain’s chair lifted off again, flew back over the water to Honeyman on the sea anchor, back for the next man and the next.

  It seemed odd to Marlowe – he did not think Elizabeth had the authority to issue such orders – but she was doing it, and the others seemed to be obeying.

  The men supporting Marlowe, Hesiod and Burns – one of Honeyman’s hard cases – carried him under the quarterdeck and down the alleyway and into the great cabin. They stepped through the door, and the heat from the small wood stove hit him like a shock like that of plunging into the ocean. His head swam, and his knees buckled, and he would have fallen if he had not been supported by strong arms.

  They set him down on the locker aft, by Elizabeth’s orders, and began to strip him of breeches and waistcoat and shirt and underclothes. They dried him with rough towels, and he began to feel sensations c
oming back to his limbs, and he was overcome with fatigue.

  ‘I must go back on deck,’ he said, a weak protest.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Mr Dinwiddie has things well in hand. Put him in the bunk, pray.’ This last she said to Hesiod. The former slave hefted up the now-naked Marlowe, and he and Burns carried him into the small sleeping cabin and put him in the bunk. He stretched out full length, and they pulled the blankets over him, and he could not recall anything ever feeling so good.

  The two men disappeared, and Elizabeth stood over him, looking down. ‘Francis told me what you did. Risking everything to save those men. Stupid, stupid, going into the sea that way,’ she said, but there was no anger in her voice.

  Then, as Marlowe watched, she untied her bodice and let it fall and pulled down her skirts and let them pool on the floor. She lifted her shift over her head, and for a moment stood there, naked, perfect, and then she slid into the cot with him, pressed up against him, warm and soft and so alive.

  ‘Thomas, I swear I cannot tell if you are the biggest bastard in the world or the greatest man that ever lived.’

  ‘Somewhere in between, I should think,’ Marlowe muttered. He wondered if he had actually redeemed himself in her eyes, with his idiotic and ill-conceived heroism. It had never occurred to him that such might be the result.

  In fact, as they had hauled him back aboard the Elizabeth Galley, his only thoughts had been a dull relief that it was over and the satisfaction of knowing he now had a dozen more hands to help him plunder the fabled treasure of the Moors.

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘Hear me, Yancy,’ said Obadiah Spelt, waving a chicken leg at the king of St Mary’s, ‘when I am king here, we shall have a regular army, see? Drills, uniforms, the whole thing.’

  Spelt took another bite and wiped his mouth with the wide sleeve of his coat, which was, incredibly, even less clean than the mouth he wiped.

  Yancy nodded and pressed his handkerchief to his mouth and coughed. Spelt was off again, spewing ideas as if he might spew dinner in the alley behind some penny ordinary. Not worth interrupting. Spelt was, after all, Yancy’s handpicked successor.

  The disease was still ostensibly a secret, the cancer that was eating away at Lord Yancy’s guts, but rumors were spreading like yellow jack through St Mary’s.

  The symptoms could not have gone unnoticed: the weakness, the coughing, the spots of blood on the handkerchief. They had first appeared a few months before, grew worse to the point where Yancy could no longer deny it, at least not to his own people, the Terrors. He could not deny that the time had come to pick a successor.

  Not from among his elite. For them, the secret place in the mountains. No, the successor had to come from down below, from the population who called St Mary’s home. The successor could not know about Roger Press.

  The town of St Mary’s, if such it could be called, boasted two roads, sandy, deeply rutted, not built so much as beaten from the undergrowth. One road bordered the water, running along the shallow, open roadstead to where it terminated at a jetty, thrust out into the harbor bounded by shoreline on either side and Quail Island to seaward.

  The other road crossed the harbor road at a right angle. It continued on up the side of the hill on which sat Lord Yancy’s home. The hill itself had been cleared years before, by Baldridge and his men, for material to build the home and to create open ground with no cover for a clandestine approach.

  The high ground on which the house sat was really no more than a hump at the feet of the higher hills that stood behind the town, but it was on this hump that Baldridge had built the great house and encircled it with a wooden stockade. The road ran right to the big gate in the stockade and through it, where it spread out like a river delta into the acres of courtyard that surrounded the house.

  The courtyard’s open ground might be a place for casual amusements such as bowling or cockfighting, but it was not designed as such. It was intended as a killing field where attacking troops, caught between the stockade and the big house, could be shot down from the high windows and balconies. Amusement was all well and good, but defense was primary.

  It was through this gate, down this road, that the visibly ailing Lord Yancy and his entourage made their way for an ostensible and uncommon inspection of the town. Since first occupying the big house, Yancy had not often left it, and those forays had grown even less frequent over the past year.

  Down the hill, with Yancy riding in a sedan chair and Henry Nagel walking by his side. St Mary’s had prospered, Yancy could see that. He thought of the few dilapidated shacks that had stood at the intersection of the roads when he had first stepped ashore there; the dozen or so drunken wrecks, both pirates and natives, that inhabited them; the empty, rotting warehouses that Baldridge had left behind; the two half-sunk ships in the harbor.

  The ships were gone, torn apart bit by bit to build the taverns and whorehouses that would serve the burgeoning town. Now there were half a dozen wooden buildings clustered around the crossroads and twice that number of permanent tents set up.

  The population of the island fluctuated with the coming and going of the ships. There were never fewer than three hundred men there, and occasionally the number swelled to nearly a thousand. They sat at little tables outside the taverns and drank until they fell over, walked arm in arm with their whores along the harbor as if it were Pall Mall; they slept in upstairs rooms if they had been lucky in their hunting the Mogul’s ships or in the alleys between the buildings if they had not.

  They were pirates. Wild, ostentatious clothes, money spent as though they could dig it from the ground, utter debauch. It amused them to ape the aristocracy in their clothes and manners, but they adhered to none of the self-imposed public restraint of the people of quality.

  And why should they? They were the aristocracy here, and there was no one – no lords, no kings, no army, no navy, no magistrates – to tell them otherwise. Yancy would not. For all his rule over the place, he would not upset the fine balance of things that kept the money pouring in. The pirates were freer than any men on earth, because they took what they wanted and they truly, genuinely, did not give a tinker’s damn.

  It was into this world, which had once been his world, that Yancy rode in his chair, borne by four strong native men. They moved slowly along the dusty road, and the pirates who were promenading there stepped aside and swept off their plumed hats and bowed deep with graceful and exaggerated moves, and the whores that were with them lifted their tattered petticoats and curtsied like women who still possessed a tiny portion of modesty and dignity.

  ‘Here,’ Yancy said, flicking his handkerchief at Bartleby Finch’s Black Dog tavern, the larger of the two official taverns in St Mary’s, which stood on the northeast corner of the single crossroads.

  The natives lowered the chair, and Nagel helped Yancy out, and the entourage paraded into the Black Dog. It had a low wattle ceiling supported by heavy beams – former deck beams – and had it been in London or New York or Norfolk, it would have been dark and smoke-filled.

  But it was not. It was on a tropical island, and in keeping with that ideal climate, the tavern had big windows in each of the four walls, windows that were no more than square holes cut into the walls, unencumbered by glass or frames or shutters. They let in quite a bit of light, which unfortunately made the filth all the more visible. Still, the steady breeze kept the room largely free of smoke, despite the prodigious output of the many pipes clenched in rotting teeth.

  Yancy’s entrance produced a brief pause in the bacchanalia going on in the Black Dog, as heads turned and greetings were called out to the lord who had come down from the hill. A table was vacated, and Yancy sat wearily down. Finch appeared, twisting a towel in his hand, saying ‘Lord Yancy, ’tis an honor, sir, you blessing us, like this, with Your Lordship’s presence. Ale with you, sir? Or wine, or rum, sir?’

  Yancy waved the man away with his handkerchief, did not waste the effort to speak. He ran his eyes over th
e low room. All there had gone back to whatever they were doing before he entered. He was not pleased, but he said nothing.

  The Black Dog was something out of Yancy’s past, the ugly, rough waterfront taverns where fearless men gathered and drank hard and became even more fearless and more dangerous.

  It was not the kind of place for a man like Yancy, a small man, a man who understood that it was brains, not strength of arm, that would set someone on top. It was all strength of arm in places like this. Brains were left with the horses, hitched to the post outside.

  Yancy had never liked the Black Dogs of the world. They frightened him and still would, if he had not brought his own strength of arm in the form of Nagel and the others.

  So he sat quietly and watched. Watched big men in their blustering bravado, drinking hard and scratching and spitting tobacco on the bare wooden floor and groping the whores who fed off them. Thick, matted beards covering brown faces, flecked with the black freckles of embedded powder; sailor’s slops and long, sea-worn coats; ripped stockings thrust into battered shoes; crude cutlasses hanging from shoulder belts or fine swords – the bounty of some fortuitous strike, taken perhaps from the dead body of a merchantman’s officer or gentleman passenger – hanging from their belts. All these things, these familiar scenes from Newport and Port Royal, those traditional pirate havens, now transported half a world away.

  And he was king of it. He sat and searched the crowd and tried to find the man, just the right man, who could occupy his throne after he had made his exit. He saw many who might be right, but no one who absolutely was.

  And then, through the crowd, came Obadiah Spelt. Nearly as big as Nagel, with a beard bursting like an unattended hedgerow from his face and falling almost to his belly, dark eyes peering out from the thatch, a long black coat and waistcoat that still showed some embroidery through the filth.