The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

  She picked up the chamber pot and stepped carefully across the cabin, letting her eyes adjust to the dark, not wanting to spill the contents on Billy Bird’s fine furniture or the elaborate rug that occupied most of the deck underfoot. At the after end of the cabin she knelt on the lockers that ran athwartships under the windows, leaned forward with the pot, and poured the contents out the window.

  She heard the liquid splash and then, to her complete surprise, a shout, a splutter, a curse, right under the window.

  ‘Damn me!’ she yelled, and with a start dropped the chamber pot into the dark. It did not hit the water but rather shattered on something hard. She leaned out the window. In the blackness under the counter she could see the vague outline of a boat, loaded with men, dark shapes against the water.

  ‘Who are … what … what in hell are you about?’ she shouted, more from surprise than anything, not thinking about who they might be, or why they were there.

  And then, from the boat, ‘Damn you!’ and another voice, ‘No!’ and the flash of priming, the blast of a pistol and the window a foot from Elizabeth’s head shattered. She felt the shards of glass prick her cheek and she fell back, fell back to the deck. Through the window, shouting, a voice commanding, ‘Give way!’ Feet stamping the deck above, shouts of surprise and outrage, curses, the language of violence.

  She pushed herself to her feet and listened. Overhead she could hear steel on steel, a pistol shot, then another, more shouting fore and aft.

  ‘Goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit …’ She said it over and over like a chant.

  She snatched up two of Billy’s pistols, thrust them in her waistcoat, two more in her belt, two more in her hands. She knew the guns were loaded, knew that Billy thought an uncharged gun the most useless thing on earth. She was not thinking, just acting, just knowing somehow that she wanted to be on deck, in the open, and armed, not trapped inside the cabin.

  Through the door and down the dark alleyway, she bounced off the cabin bulkheads on either side as she ran. The door to the waist was ajar and she kicked it open and burst onto the deck, a pistol in each hand, stepping right into the fray.

  The fight was fully joined in those few seconds it took her to grab the weapons and race out of the cabin. The men from the boat were pouring over the side and meeting the Bloody Revenges, steel clashing against steel, pistols blasting away the dark, and Elizabeth could not tell who were her friends and who were the enemies.

  She took a step forward and with the edge of her left hand cocked the firelock of the pistol in her right.

  A man coming over the side, a man she did not recognize. He turned, looked at her, brought his pistol around, and she knew he was not her friend and she shot him, square in the chest, blowing him back over the rail.

  She flung the spent gun away, transferred the other to her right hand, cocked the lock. The man fighting Quartermaster Vane, standing over his kneeling form, cutlass drawn back, she shot in the head from a distance of three feet, just as he was about to slash Vane’s throat.

  He tumbled to the deck and she saw his brains blown in a great red swath across another man’s shirt and in the unreality of the moment all she could think was, will such a mess ever come clean?

  She tossed that gun aside, pulled another from her belt. Billy Bird was standing on the main hatch, a long sword in his right hand, a dirk in his left, fending off a wild, savage attack, the tails of his coat swirling around his legs as he lunged, parried, danced side to side.

  Then there was a sword in front of her, wielded by a man she thought was the Revenge’s gunner, and she tried to smile at him but he lunged at her, point first.

  She pivoted, turned sideways with a dancer’s grace, and the sword made a rent in her waistcoat as it passed and she brought her pistol up, the end of the barrel actually touching the man’s forehead.

  The man gaped at her, shocked that she had eluded his thrust, surprised to find that it was he who was going to die, and then she pulled the trigger and the face was lost in the smoke and when the smoke blew away the man was gone.

  She tossed that gun aside. One of the pistols she had thrust in her waistcoat was slipping out through the gash cut in the brocade cloth, and she grabbed the barrel and pulled it out all the way, felt the flint scrape painfully across her breast, and then some great hulk of a man slammed into her, knocking her to the deck.

  Her shoulder banged into a hatch combing and a shock of pain radiated through her neck and back. She rolled over; the gun was still in her hand.

  The man who had run her down was fighting with one of the Revenges – the boatswain, she recognized him, he had been kind to her in pointing out the various aspects of the vessel’s rig – and Elizabeth lifted the gun in her hand, pointed it at the center of the other man’s massive back, and pulled the trigger.

  The man pitched forward and behind him stood the boatswain, shocked, his adversary seemingly struck down by the hand of God. Then he saw Elizabeth lying on the deck. Their eyes met, he nodded to her, then turned and flung himself back into the fight.

  Billy Bird was still there, still making his stand on the main hatch, sword and dirk working together, but there were two men on him now, and he was breathing hard and there was a heaviness in the way he wielded his weapons.

  The enormity of the scene, growing more real by the second, was working on her head, and the noise and the shouting and the flash of guns were making it hard for her to think. She saw one of the men lunge at Billy, saw his sword catch Billy’s shoulder, saw Billy twist in pain even as he used his dirk to knock the blade away.

  Shoot them, Billy, just shoot them, she thought, and could not fathom why Billy did not do as she wished. She rolled over on her hands and knees and crawled forward, through pools of blood, warm and sticky on her palms. There were men looming over her, swords clashing in the air above her head, but she crawled on.

  She came at last to the main hatch and sat up on her knees, pulled the pistol from her belt, cocked the lock, fired into one of the men fighting Billy Bird, and as he crumpled she thought, there, just shoot him.

  She tossed the gun aside and pulled her last firelock from her waistcoat and cocked it and looked over the barrel. The man she intended to shoot had seen her and now he was turning from Billy and coming at her, his cutlass over his head.

  Elizabeth’s sense of reality began to waver. The man swam toward her. She could see his crooked and rotten teeth, his stained, filthy shirt, ripped from the neck down, broadcloth coat, his battered cocked hat, dirty red sash around his waist, all of that she took in in the fraction of a second it took for him to close with her and for her to discharge her pistol right into his stomach.

  His cutlass came down as he pitched forward, and Elizabeth dodged to one side as the man fell past, the cutlass hitting the deck and the man falling on it. She felt the deck shudder as he hit and he made a gasping sound as the breath was knocked from his lungs and then he was groaning, gasping, gurgling blood.

  ‘Bastard!’ Elizabeth screamed, and then stopped screaming, and in the odd quiet that came with her stopping she realized that she must have been screaming continuously, for how long she could not recall.

  She pushed herself to her feet, swiped the hair from her face, stepped away from the horrible dying man. She saw figures going over the rail, as if they were abandoning the ship, but it was quieter now; the guns had stopped firing, she could not hear the clash of edged weapons, and when she looked again she saw that the fight was over, and she recognized the men on deck so she assumed that the Revenges had won.

  And now Billy Bird was looking at her, his eyes wide, and she smiled at him.

  ‘William, dear William, well done,’ Billy said, stepped toward her quickly, dropping his weapons to the deck rather than taking the time to sheathe them. She saw his eyes dart down toward her chest.

  She looked down. Her long blond hair was loose and hanging over her shoulders like she often wore it. Through the rent in her waistcoat and shirt she could
feel the warm, moist night air on her breasts, but looking down she could not tell if they were visible through the tear.

  Still, she grabbed the cloth and held it together as Billy stepped up to her, saying, ‘William, bully for you, now let us go to the cabin and have a look at that famous wound you have suffered.’ He spun her around and all but shoved her aft and through the door to the privacy of the great cabin.

  Marlowe had thought they were right behind King James and company, had thought they would run them down easily, but after taking the Spaniard they had failed to raise those new-fledged pirates, or any other vessel for that matter.

  For three weeks they searched, through more than sixty degrees of longitude, following roughly the fortieth parallel until dropping south of that and raising the Azores. Marlowe had come on deck every morning before dawn, expecting to see the French merchantman, and each time he was greeted with empty seas all around.

  Finally they had dropped the hook in Ponta Delgada on the Portuguese island of São Miguel. There Marlowe was able to sell, discreetly, some of the vast bounty taken from the Spaniard, since there were few among the Portuguese who worried overmuch about anything plundered from the Spanish.

  That done, he was able to distribute some small amount of specie to the men, who were given leave to spend it all in as short a time as they could manage. That they did, with the famed abandon of sailors ashore, drinking to insensibility, fighting, whoring, venting all the pent-up aggression and passion that is by necessity held in check while aboard a tight-packed ship, the survival of which depends upon mutual effort.

  Two days of that and the Elizabeth Galleys were sated, their money gone, their heads pounding, their cocks limp, and they were more than happy to lay into the capstan and drag the anchor up from the mud, cat it, let fall the topsails, and head off to the forced sobriety of the sea. As they staggered about the deck, some were moved so far as to claim they would never do the like again, some even to the point of believing it.

  Four days after the Azores had dipped below the horizon, Noah Fleming approached Marlowe on the quarterdeck, fidgeting. ‘Sir, beg your pardon, but some of the men, they wanted me to ask you …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I know you don’t countenance such things as secret meetings and votes and such things as the pirates are wont to do, and this is none of that …’

  ‘I understand.’ The Elizabeth Galleys were becoming quite the cooperative and unassuming bunch, now with gold in their pockets and Griffin dead. It was the singular bright spot in Marlowe’s heaven.

  ‘Well, sir, the lads was wondering about them black pirates. We’re still after them, are we not?’

  ‘Do the men wish to be after them?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir! And the prodigious treasure they have. Yes, sir, the men would like very much to pursue them.’

  Ah, tales have been told belowdecks! Marlowe thought. ‘Well, I had thought to give that up, Mr Fleming. It will be a hell of a task, finding them. I reckon they are heading for the coast of Africa.’

  ‘I understand, sir. And, of course, this ain’t no pirate ship. What you say is law, and no arguments. But the men would just like you to know, sir, if you was to pursue those men, well, that would be fine with them.’

  Marlowe pretended to think about that. ‘Very well, then,’ he said at last. ‘We shall start at Sierra Leone and run south. If need be we shall seek them out right around the entire Bight of Benin.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, sir. The men will be right pleased to hear it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Marlowe, and he meant it. He still had before him the herculean task of finding King James and the horrible job of killing him. But at least his own men were with him in that endeavor. It was a start. At long last, it was a start.

  CHAPTER 20

  It dawned on King James that he was not captain anymore. He still slept in the great cabin. The white pilot still showed him their position on the chart. He still gave orders to wear ship when necessary, to take in or set sail, but he was not in command.

  There were subtleties going on, undercurrents running below the smooth surface of their daily routine, machinations taking place that he could not identify or understand for the differences in language.

  They had been in stasis for a while, for three weeks or so, as they plowed their easting away, making for their homes in Africa, the waking at the end of sleep.

  There had been a routine, of sorts, a nervous peace, between him and those few with him – Quash, Good Boy, Cato, and Joshua – and Madshaka and the rest of them, and around them nothing but the uninterrupted sea.

  And so they sailed, south southeast, running before the wind as it curled south along the coast of Africa, like a stream of water butting up against a seawall. Over the larboard side and below the horizon, the continent, dark only to those who did not know it. What would happen once the anchor was down, James did not know, but he was desperate to be there.

  Every day the Frenchman gave him the course, and if the daily headings did not seem to mesh with James’s rough idea of where in relation to the ship Kalabari lay, James did not have the enthusiasm to question him. He looked at the chart, nodded, gave orders for changing course, trimming sail.

  The puppet captain. He said the words, made the gestures. Madshaka pulled the strings. He knew that, and knew there was nothing he could do but wait for it to end.

  Some time after their escape from Marlowe – two weeks, three, James did not know – they raised a headland, low and green, two miles away off the larboard beam. The people crowded the rail and stood in the shrouds and the tops, some jabbering, pointing, singing. Others quiet, just looking, silent tears streaming down dark cheeks.

  Africa.

  ‘Cape Palmas,’ the Frenchman said. His eyes were wild, his face overgrown with an unkempt beard. He stunk.

  James looked at him, nodded. If his own thoughts were somehow made flesh, James thought they might look like the French sailor, wild and unhinged. He picked up the glass and trained it on the distant shore.

  He could see little. A strip of white sand that showed beyond the lines of breaking surf, tall palms with their burst of fronds on top, the green, green forest behind.

  It was hot on deck, running as they were before the wind, the sun hammering them from directly above. African sun, less than eight degrees north of the equator. And on the breeze, the smells from the shore, the salt smell of the sea, the rotting vegetation of dark and tangled forests.

  It was not the smell of America, not the smell of a new land, fresh and simple. It was the deep and profound smell of an ancient land, a land that had seen so much of humanity. It was a smell that James had not smelled in more than twenty years, a smell he had not understood when he had lived within it, but he understood it now.

  He lowered the glass. ‘Cape Palmas?’

  ‘Cape … yes … Cape Palmas.’

  James did not think so, but he could not argue the point. The sight of the African shore had spun his thoughts off on a whole new heading.

  When he had first been taken from those shores he had thought of nothing but getting back.

  Then he had despaired of ever returning, and then later he had thought only of escaping his bondage and finding a home somewhere in the New World.

  Then, finally, he had thought only of the life he might make at Marlowe House, what happiness he might carve out as a free black man in the context of a slave society.

  And now he was back.

  Cape Palmas. Very well. If the pilot was right, then they were not above a thousand miles from Kalabari. A week of sailing if the wind held for them.

  James felt his thoughts coming in a jumble, a disorganized heap. He was supposed to be giving orders to the people, but he could only give them to Madshaka and hope that Madshaka told the people what he said. He felt as if he had to break out of this pattern, but he could not see how. He could not figure what he might do to gain control.

  It was like bondage again, like the shac
kles and the yoke that kept him from moving, but it was worse. Then, there had been a physical restraint to chafe against, something he could feel and understand. Now the shackles were invisible: confusion, indecision, an inability to speak.

  James stared at the green headland and wished he could fling himself onto that beach, curl up on that land as if it were his mother’s lap, let Africa comfort him the way he had not been comforted in so very long.

  The point receded in their wake and the pilot said, ‘Our new heading, it should be east northeast, a half east …’

  James looked at him, sharply. ‘East northeast?’

  The pilot cleared his throat. ‘The land, it tends away here, we must cross the Gulf of Guinea now. There are currents …’

  Finally James nodded. The land did tend away, to be sure. Very well. He could not think about it. His mind was awhirl and he could not think. ‘Madshaka,’ he called, ‘we must wear ship.’

  The ship came around, settled on the new course.

  Lines were coiled down, the rhythm of the shipboard community resumed, and James wondered again if any of those dozens of people forward were aware of the silent drama, the lopsided struggle for dominance, going on aft.

  He did not think so.

  They knew only what Madshaka told them. Just like him. They followed Madshaka’s orders, and if they thought that those orders originated with King James, then they were mistaken, and there was no way for them to discover the truth.

  Marlowe woke, and when he came to he realized that he had one foot on the deck of the sleeping cabin, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other going for his pistol. Beyond the door, a light rapping, someone politely knocking to wake him.

  I have got to bloody relax, he thought. These are not the mutinous villains of a month past.

  He released the weapons, put both feet on the deck, stood, stepped out of the sleeping cabin into the great cabin, and called out, ‘Come!’