by Barry Sadler
Whether he or Katie were the first of the boarders or not he could not tell since the heavy smoke covered the entire ship. His feet were now on the deck of the brigantine. A quick glance upward did not show anyone in the rigging, at least not within his limited sight. Odd... the captain of the brigantine must have his head in his ass. A couple of men in the rigging with blunderbusses could play hell with boarders.
"Too quiet, Scarface," Katie muttered.
She was right. It was definitely too quiet and boarders should have been met at the gunwales. Casca smelled ambush.
"Watch your ass, Katie," he growled.
The smoke was clearing. The yells up forward scared the shit out of him. Confused yells. His own men.
"What?"
Whatever it was Katie was going to say, she never said it and Casca saw why. The clearing smoke, blown forward from the bow so that he and Katie were the last to see the clearing, suddenly showed the helmsman and the mate neither more than a cutlass swing away.
The helmsman was old for a sailor, or at least the white hair and sunken cheeks seemed to say so. As for the mate, his salt encrusted beard made it difficult to say whether he was young or old.
Actually, though, the age of the two men made no difference at all. Both were dead. Long dead. Dried, dressed corpses with a faint suggestion of a green slime. The wheel held the helmsman upright; the binnacle where he was apparently standing when he died held up the mate.
Standing beside him, Julio grabbed Big Jim's arm and pointed to the dead men. Big Jim said it for him. "Ghost ship!"
Others in the boarding party took up the cry and added to it: "Plague! It's a plague ship!" Casca could hear the confused cries in English and Spanish that had come from up forward. In the clearing smoke he could see his men jumping back aboard the brig, slashing free the ropes of the grappling hooks in a frantic haste to get free of the death ship.
"Look what the cannon did," Katie said quietly. The grape had smashed into the paper dry corpses and scattered parts of the bodies all over the forward deck, oddly missing the fantail where he and Katie were. But it was all dry; there was no blood.
"C'mon," he said. "Let's get off this thing." But they had waited too long. The brig was free and coming about, the gap of churned water between the two ships rapidly widening. Calling to them to put about, his crew ignored him. There was no one nor anything worth returning to a plague ship for. The four of them stood there watching their brig put miles between them as the rigging and sails overhead began to flap with the increase of the winds. The storm was coming and they were trapped on a death ship. Julio made the sign of the cross and Big Jim moved to where the dead man stood by the helm and touched the dried husk on the shoulder. It fell to the deck and Big Jim took its place with a resigned look on his face.
The four of them waited not wanting to go below decks. As they each stood with their thoughts the skies darkened and the winds built even higher. The sea turned gray and the horizon was lost to sight. Only the black immensity of rolling cloud and rising wave joined them.
The wind gusted and with a loud crack that startled their minds back into activity, the fore and aft mainsail, its rigging probably weakened by hits from the grapeshot, suddenly collapsed and the brigantine was taken aback. The sudden motion threw Katie and Casca to the deck. Julio found himself hanging next to a dried, grinning corpse. Then it was gone, blown over the side into the darkened sea. They were alone now; there were only the four of them, the ship, and the rising sea.
Aboard the brig which had been the late captaincy of Captain Cass Long, the discussion had now ended. As best the officers could tell, and since no one could recall seeing them, Captain Cass Long and Katie Parnell had been lost at sea, lost overboard when the brig separated from the ghost ship. That meant the brig was now without a captain, and the factions aboard her were ready to go at each other's throats as soon as the storm was over. But they were in the storm, and since they couldn't agree on any of the stronger officers as captain, they finally chose the London fairy as acting captain, a choice which, no sooner made, was suddenly realized to have been the best damn thing they had ever done. He happened to be the only individual on the ship who seemed to have the ability to get along with all factions. Besides, he was a damn good seaman, and a good seaman was what they needed at the moment, the storm being what it was...
"You still alive, Katie?"
"Hell, no, Scarface, I died hours ago."
"Thy voice, Katie dear, is not exactly that of an angel."
"Never was, Scarface. Never was."
Casca and she had lashed themselves to the binnacle after first lashing the wheel in place and so had ridden out the storm. Now it was dawn. The winds had died. The sea was moderating. Casca got his lashings free and started to help Katie, but §he had already freed herself. "One thing I'll never like," he growled good humoredly, "is a damn woman who is as good as a man."
"Quit playing with the truth, Scarface. I'm the first woman you ever met as good as a man. There never was anybody else before. And, besides that, I'm better."
"Modest, aren't you?"
"Humility is not one of my vices, Scarface." She looked down the deck, the length of the ship, and grinned. "Well, we got scrubbed down real good."
She was right. The storm had swept the deck as clear as a double gang with holystones. There was now no trace of the dead crew. Except for the damage done by the volley of grape in their attack, the broken spar and crumpled mainsail, and a few other tattered and weathered sails here and there, the ship looked to be in excellent condition. Big Jim and Julio had been hard at work cleaning up as best they could. Big Jim cast the bodies to the deep while Julio said prayers for them. Between them they had cleared the deck of most of the wreckage from the fallen mast and sail.
Kate cast a professional eye over their domain. "It's not going to be easy to handle this thing with just the four of us. If we run into any more weather we might as well just go below and wait it out because we won't be able to do a damn thing about it.
Casca nodded knowing he was out of his depth. Julio had brightened up a bit and was hard at work scavenging in the cook shack. He'd gotten a fire started in the iron cook stove. At any rate they'd have some hot food. Big Jim was at the helm doing the best he could to keep with the wind so they'd make some headway, but he had no idea of where they wanted to go or what course to take. That was up to Kate. He wasn't a navigator. She gave him a heading that would take them into the main shipping lanes and in the general direction of Jamaica.
Casca poked through a pile of rubbish and grumped: "Wonder what killed the crew. Whatever it was got all of them and it looks like at about the same time."
"Odd," Katie said thoughtfully.
"There's something else odd, too," Casca said, looking down the deck.
"What?"
"The hatches."
"Nothing odd about that, Scarface. They're battened down as they should be. The men were at the guns. Obviously they expected a battle."
"Aye. But…"
"Oh! I see." She caught it before he had a chance to tell her. Now, that was the kind of woman he liked. "The forward hatch."
"Wide open." Followed by Katie, Casca started forward, but she stopped him at the first hatch. "Let's see what kind of cargo she was carrying." The hatch cover off, both peered over the coaming.
"Damn!"
"Uniforms!" she added.
The cargo hold under this hatch was stuffed with military uniforms not boxed or crated, but baled. The scent of the wool was strong, but it also had an odd additional odor that Casca found familiar... the odor of some fruit... Persian? He could not quite remember.
The next compartment was filled with barrel after barrel of gunpowder. The one after that had stacks of muskets. Somebody was supplying an army. A revolution? It would make sense here in the tropics the gunpowder and muskets but not the woolen uniforms.
Again, coming from both cargo compartments, there was that odor, stronger now, so stro
ng that it even overpowered the smell of the gunpowder.
"Somebody's been eating almonds," Katie said, sniffing the air. "Funny odor for a ship. "
Now Casca remembered. Misch misch. Sweet Persian apricots. They had pits that smelled of bitter almonds. When they got to the open hatch, the smell was not quite as strong, but, then, the compartment had shipped a lot of water in the storm last night. Not enough, though, to wash away the evidence of what had happened.
"What do you make of it, Scarface?"
"The same thing you do. Sloppy stowage. They had a cargo of fruit of some kind here. Looks like peaches and smells like apricots but that doesn't make sense because that's not the kind of fruit that grows around here. Anyway, whatever had spoiled began to work like wine.
Together they retrieved the splintered board that was stuck in the ladder leading down into the compartment.
"Part of a crate. Got smashed." In the darkness at the bottom of the ladder, in the gooey mass of the fermented fruit, there were odd looking containers. Bottles but not like wine bottles. The last time Casca had seen anything like them was in a private laboratory of an alchemist two hundred years ago. The stupid bastard had been trying to turn lead into gold but had only managed to kill himself with the fumes from the damn stuff he had mixed up. But that was a long time ago....
"There's an address on the crate," Katie said, meaning the piece of wood. It had been burned on, but it wasn't easy to read. "Herr Doktor Stahl, Physician to His Majesty, King of Prussia, His Majesty's Palace, Berlin."
Katie read the look in his eyes. "What's wrong, Scarface?"
"Let's go see if there's a logbook in the captain's cabin."
There was a log, all right, but it was written in a language neither Katie nor Casca could read. Portuguese, Casca thought and he was pretty sure he was right when they found the Portuguese flag, neatly folded in a cubbyhole of the captain's desk.
But it was the charts that confounded Casca.
"Portugal? Spain? You mean they were all the way over on the other side of the ocean?" Katie's voice was incredulous. But that's what the charts said. The last marking on the chart.
As best Casca could guess something had happened in the forward compartment. Either the medicines or alchemical supplies or whatever they were that were being carried to Dr. Stahl or the rotting fruit had created such a stink that the captain had opened the hatch to keep the odor out of the uniforms. Then there had been some kind of danger. Pirates? Anyway, while the men were at their stations, something had killed them. Killed them instantly. And the ship had been carried by the current south, far south, until the current turned west, and wind and current had carried the ship to the Americas. Must have taken a long time because the bodies had dried out to where they were like paper. That was why he had seen the helmsman at the wheel, the captain at the binnacle; their dried bodies were propped against these supports and apparently there had been no storms to dislodge them. There wouldn't have been if the current had carried them south.
But what had killed them? Poison? "We better not eat any of the food," he growled. He looked at the open hatch. Could the smell coming out of that have killed them? Shit! Casca had been in a lot of stinking places, and none of them had ever killed anybody that he knew of. "I wonder…"
"Save it, Scarface," Katie said quietly.
"What?"
"We got company."
He looked where she pointed, just off the port bow. There was a ship, hull up, on the horizon.
"If she holds that tack another quarter hour we'll be on a collision course," Katie said.
Damn!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Casca had Julio hoist the Portuguese flag, but there was damned little they could do against the ship now bearing down on them under full sail. She was a schooner, apparently a merchant ship, and she was flying British colors.
"Looks pretty," Katie murmured.
Casca eyed her, thinking, I'd forgotten she was a woman. But the schooner did make a nice picture, racing toward them at full speed, bow cutting the water and throwing a white spume against the blue sea, now so calm after the storm of three days past.
But pretty or not, the schooner could be a potential hazard. The English flag might be a ruse. If so, he and Katie would just have to play it by ear. For a second he regretted having tossed all the bodies overboard. They might have had the same effect on the schoonermen as they did on the other men from the brig.
The vessel showed no sign of reducing her speed or lowering any sail. She only veered off enough to pass within hailing distance. Close enough so that Casca could make out the figurehead of the schooner clearly, a freshly painted figure of a woman with feathered headdress and bare boobs with rosy nipples. And on the aft deck, the master stood with a hailing trumpet in his hands.
As they passed, the master's voice called out: "Pirates! Pirates ahead!" And then called out, "... arleton... uncan!"
Either he had said "Tarleton Duncan!" or Casca had imagined it.
There had been a few crewmen lining the rail of the schooner, but not many. They were apparently not interested in Casca 's ship. All they wanted to do was to get the hell out of there and into safer waters. Then they were gone. Casca turned back to Katie, but she had a thoughtful look on her face. She was searching the horizon ahead, but it was empty. She looked back at the receding sails of the schooner. And then she headed for the hatch which led to the captain's quarters, taking her clothes off as she went. Julio averted his eyes at this brazenness. Big Jim just swallowed his Adam's apple.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"Get out of your clothes, Scarface. Now!"
“Why?”
"Because you've been wanting to diddle me ever since we met. And I think, dammit, I want to try you on for size right now. Besides if I know anything about that ship, we might be too busy to do it later. But right now we have time, so let's have at it."
Casca thought about that for a moment.
"What the hell are you waiting for?" She was down to the buff, and damn if there wasn't a woman under all those men's clothes. Nice. Very nice. She had firm high breasts with nipples already hard and puckered from the sea breeze. "You can look later," she complained. "Now get on with it, you clod!"
He did. Julio busied himself with whatever he could find to do. Sex was still an adventure yet to come for him. Big Jim just whistled a few bars of filthy sailor's songs and tightened his grip on the wheel.
The sight of his body all the scars, all the evidence of past wounds brought a puzzled look to her eyes. "How did you get cut up like that?"
"It's a long story."
"Er..." She hesitated. "You still can..."
Casca laughed. "Hell, yes. Hell, yes!"
McAdams listened to the man's report and shook his head. Giving the wretch a few silver coins he sighed deeply. Well it was a long shot at best. Cass Long didn't get very far. Damn! Now he would have to think up another plan for the disposal of Duncan. God! The swine infuriated him. Who did Duncan think he was? If it had not been for McAdams' patronage the man would never have had his own ship. And now the dog turns on his master and bites the hand that fed him. Ingrates! The world is full of them.
McAdams sat in his woven cane chair on the veranda and looked out over his domain. It had taken years of labor and pain to acquire all that was now his and he hadn't gotten it by giving up anything. No, by the gods, he got where he was by taking. Duncan knew that. It was he, McAdams, that had first taken Duncan, when he was a wet nosed pup, to sea with him. It was he who had taught him the craft of the sea raiders. For that was how McAdams had gained the foundation of his wealth. Always he had stayed in the shadows never letting his face be seen by those who survived a raid. It was Duncan he had put to the forefront and made captain of his own ship when he moved back to the island and became the principal broker for the Brotherhood. It was because of his management that Duncan, Teach and the others were rich men. He could have welded them into a major power.
; But now! Duncan, that motherless pig, had outgrown his pants. McAdams had never interfered with Duncan's small pleasures. He understood them. But this recent betrayal was too much.
He called for rum punch from one of his male servants.
Duncan had grown greedy, wanting more, always more. Not only more of the money but of the power that was rightfully McAdams'. They had quarreled and McAdams had struck Duncan across the face.
Pride, McAdams thought. That was it. Duncan had too much pride and arrogance. It drove him to challenge McAdams for control. Since then Duncan had done his best to make McAdams' life miserable, undermining his authority at every chance. Now Duncan had taken something which was his and this he could not tolerate and many knew of it. If he didn't move and move fast his power would bleed away from him and so would his wealth. That he could not, would not let happen...
Luck?
Casca wondered about that. Usually when something looked like luck it meant he was just about to get his ass in a sling. So maybe he shouldn't feel too good about the way it had worked out.
After he and Katie had bedded and that had been pretty damn good, he had to admit they had not encountered Tarleton Duncan as the British had warned. Instead, they had raised land. The luck part was that Katie recognized the coast, had been in the harbor, knew the town, and more importantly knew the waters. She had also spotted the Scorpion in port. It had not been easy bringing the ship around in a curving arc to approach offshore from a direction not visible from the town. And there was always the possibility that Tarleton Duncan had stationed a lookout on the point of land that rose up from the bay. But they had made it and there had been no lookout. Duncan's men were apparently too busy raiding the town – a small trading village that had known this kind of thing before and was powerless to do anything about it.
It was not possible to do much with the ship. Anchoring was relatively easy. Getting away would be a different matter. They could cut the anchor rope, but unless they were lucky with tide and wind the ship would be useless to them. He and Katie might be able to manage a single sail but that would be all. So, if they were unlucky, it would be the ship's smaller boat the captain's gig and the open sea.