Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “Nevertheless, on our subsequent expedition to 490 B.C. we found they were still alive, although even less sane than ever by our standards. That last, plus their ignorance concerning time travel, was why the Transhumanists had been able to trick them into an alliance by promising to change history so as to restore their worship. When they found out they had been made fools of, they went mad with rage—even madder than their norm, not that the change was especially noticeable. They and the Transhumanists mostly killed each other off. I listened to Zeus’ last words,” Jason added with a reminiscent smile, recalling that day on a mountain overlooking the battlefield of Marathon. “But,” he concluded firmly, “they weren’t all killed. The one known to the Greeks as Aphrodite definitely survived, and there were several others about whom I couldn’t be sure.”

  “But,” Nesbit protested, “that was well over two thousand years ago! And you said their lifespans were greatly reduced. How can any of them still be alive now?”

  “I didn’t expect them to be,” Jason was forced to admit. “The possibility of encountering them on this expedition never even entered my mind.”

  “Another point,” said Grenfell, who had been listening thoughtfully. “From what you’ve told us, the area of operation of the ‘New Gods’ stretched roughly from Ireland to northern India. They certainly never established their worship in the Western Hemisphere. So even granting that they are present now, what are they doing here?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even have a theory. Actually, there are only two things we do know for certain. The first is that some Teloi are still around; Zenobia’s description, as repeated by Henri, is too exact for coincidence. The second is that Zenobia is aware of them and regards them as her enemies. From Henri’s account, she uses even a funeral as an excuse for a kind of sermon warning her followers to watch out for them.”

  Da Cunha’s brow furrowed with thought. “And when we first saw her, she was fleeing from the Transhumanists—of whom we seem to be assuming she’s one. And the last time you saw them, they were having a falling out with the Teloi, who had been their allies. . . .” Her brow furrowed even more intensely. “Of course, we have no idea what point in the future she—or the Transhumanists who were chasing her, or both—come from.”

  “I’m getting a headache,” Mondrago complained.

  “This is terrible!” Nesbit exclaimed. “Commander, you must use a message drop to inform the Authority of this appalling new development!”

  Jason expelled a long, exasperated sigh. He swept his arm out in a gesture that encompassed the ship and the Caribbean all around it. “How, precisely, do you suggest I do that, Irving?”

  Even Nesbit seemed to understand.

  The message drop system was subject to almost crippling limitations. First of all, it required a site that was sufficiently geologically stable and out-of-the-way to remain fairly unchanged until the twenty-fourth century. Port Royal itself was out of the question for obvious reasons, and the Palisadoes were subjected to repeated change over the centuries under the lash of earthquake and hurricane, while the shores of Kingston Harbor would be overrun by construction. So a spot a few miles northeast of the harbor, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, had been selected. But that ran headlong into the other requirement for a message drop site: accessibility. No one had pretended to have any clear idea how Jason was going to have an opportunity or an excuse to struggle up there.

  Now, of course, the question was academic, for they were en route to Cow Island where Morgan’s fleet was to rendezvous, aboard HMS Oxford. (The “HMS” was still appropriate, Grenfell had quipped, although now it should be interpreted as standing for “Henry Morgan’s Ship.”) The frigate’s original hundred-and-sixty-man crew had been augmented up to about two hundred and fifty, including Jason and his party. This was the usual way of pirate ships, which carried large numbers of men to provide overwhelming boarding or landing parties, not to mention prize crews. The practice had persisted aboard Oxford even though the frigate, unlike the usual pirate ship, was primarily intended as a formidable gun platform. It didn’t exactly make for privacy, especially below decks. They were carrying on this conclave amidships on the spar deck, but Jason knew they’d have to break it up soon, for they were already drawing the kind of glances that indicated suspicion of “being in a plot against the Brethren.”

  A sound from abaft caught Jason’s attention. The quarterdeck hatch leading down a short ladder to the captain’s cabin had opened, and Henry Morgan had emerged.

  The very fact that he had a cabin spoke eloquently of this expedition’s uniqueness, and of his. Typically, the pirates took one of their captured merchant ships and ripped out all below-decks bulkheads, whether used for cargo storage or for individual cabins. The resulting open space belowdecks had a practical function—to accommodate the excessive number of men these ships carried—but it went deeper than that. The buccaneers had never heard of any such word, or concept, as “ideology,” but theirs was still the very basic democracy of the original boucaniers of the Antillean coasts: no man had any special right to a greater share of anything than any other. This extended to quarters aboard ships. And among them the captain was not the absolute despot he was to become in naval tradition. He was only in command during battle or when pursuing or being pursued—during which periods his word was law. Otherwise, he was just one among peers, and the most important man was the elected quartermaster who was the “business manager.”

  Looking out over the billow toward the accompanying ships, Jason saw Zenobia’s Rolling-Calf, and knew from Boyer’s description that she was typical in all these respects. And it worked even though she was a woman. She slept in the common space, and no one dared molest her, for all knew her to be uncanny.

  Morgan, in his own way, was also special. Partly it was the nature of the ship. No one would have dreamed of performing upon this specialized fighting machine the kind of radical surgery practiced on ordinary merchantmen. And Morgan himself, although everyone still addressed him as “captain,” was the elected admiral of the buccaneers, and had been even before his fabulously lucrative sack of Portobello. The ordinary rules didn’t apply to him.

  Not that he was dressed exceptionally at the moment. At sea, he wore shirt, breeches and boots like everyone else, with his usual scarlet kerchief tied around his head. He looked about him and began sauntering in their direction.

  “Let’s break it up, people,” said Jason in a low voice. Then, as an afterthought: “Except you, Roderick. Stay with me.”

  Morgan paused and spoke to various crewmen as he walked, laughing and joking in his deep, resonant voice. But always, in some indefinable way, there was a certain intangible distance, an unspoken consciousness of command. Morgan was one of these men, able to match them drink for drink and violent act for violent act . . . but not quite one of them. It might, Jason thought, have something to do with the fact that Morgan, aside from his eloquence and assurance, spoke in the accents of an educated man—the gentleman he insisted he was. These men might have turned their backs on this century’s deeply class-conscious society, but they were inescapably products of it.

  Or, just as likely, it was something about the man himself.

  “Jason!” he greeted. “We’ve a fair wind. It shouldn’t be too long before we raise Cow Island.”

  “Aye, Captain. Think you the rest of the ships will be there?”

  “The Frogs? Oh, they’ll be there, most of them. What they’ve heard about our haul from Portobello caused them to have a change of heart about me. And besides, they no longer have that lunatic Francois L’Ollonais to follow.” Morgan chuckled. “Have you heard the story of how he died?”

  Jason did know, from Grenfell’s background lectures, how the appalling French sadist had met his richly deserved end. But he wondered if Morgan would tell a different version. “No, Captain.”

  “In Nicaragua, he managed to make the Darien Indians his enemies, by his mad cruelties and slaughters.” Morgan sho
ok his head and looked disdainful. One of the secrets of his own success in his eighteen-month rampage through Central America had been his ability to forge alliances of convenience with the local Indians, who had excellent reasons for hating the Spaniards. “They captured him and tore him to pieces while he was still alive, burning each part as soon as it came off and scattering the ashes into the winds to make absolutely sure no trace remained of such a creature.” Morgan chuckled grimly. “They’re cannibals, but they must have lacked all appetite for him.”

  “We have heard a lot of stories about L’Ollonais,” Grenfell prompted.

  “They probably fell short of the truth. He particularly enjoyed pulling out men’s tongues. But when he’d really fly into one of his wild rages he’d cut a prisoner’s chest open, reach in, and pull out the heart. Then he’d take a bite out of the heart himself before making another prisoner finish it off. He boasted that he never let a Spaniard live.”

  “We’ve also heard a few stories about what went on at Portobello when you took it, Captain,” said Grenfell. Jason held his breath, fearing that Grenfell might have gone too far. But Morgan showed no sign of taking offense. Instead, he turned discursive.

  “As you know, persuading people to reveal where they’ve hidden their valuables often requires questioning with the usual ceremonies.” The last five words, as Jason knew, meant torture in piratical argot. “And having a reputation for doing it works wonders—saves you no end of trouble. I learned my lesson at Puerto Principe.” Morgan scowled at the recollection of the one time he had, in spite of taking a Spanish town, come away with too little booty to secure the enthusiastic loyalty of his men. “I was too soft. I didn’t make that mistake again at Portobello. I had an obligation to my men, who had a right to expect healthy shares, and I did what was needed to fulfill it. That’s the difference between me and L’Ollonais: purpose. For him, slashing people to ribbons and racking them and woolding them were simply fun.”

  It took Jason a moment to recall that “woolding” meant tying a rope around a prisoner’s head and tightening it, tourniquetlike with turns of a stick, until the eyeballs popped out of their sockets. It was standard procedure on both sides of the ongoing war between the buccaneers and Spain. He began to understand. Morgan sincerely disapproved of L’Ollonais, but his disapproval was rooted in the Frenchman’s lack of professionalism.

  “You must have also learned something of that kind of thing when you first arrived in Jamaica, in the fighting against the escaped slaves,” he ventured.

  “Yes, we’ve heard various different stories about how you happened to be there,” said Grenfell, a little too eagerly. Jason gave him a cautioning look. But once again, Morgan proved to be in an expansive mood.

  “I was ‘Barbadosed,’ as people say: thumped on the head and shipped off to Barbados as an indentured servant. To get away from that, I ran off and joined Penn and Venables when they put in at Barbados on their way to Hispaniola—even though they were damned Parliamentarians! God’s blood, how could that canting bastard Cromwell have found such a pair of incompetent buffoons in all of England? But I must admit I learned a lot from them: how not to organize an expedition, how not to deal with the Indians, how not to fight the Spaniards, and above all how not to lead men.”

  Jason saw Grenfell’s eyes light up at the resolution of the long-standing controversy over how Morgan had gotten to the New World. The other theory—the more respectable one—was that he had been with the Penn/Venables expedition all the way from England, as a junior officer. In fact, it seemed he really had come up from nothing. Esquemeling would write as much in 1678, which was one of the things for which Morgan would sue his publishers, for by that time he would be Lieutenant Governor Sir Henry Morgan and would require a more high-toned background. At the present time, he could still afford to be honest.

  “Taking Jamaica from the Dons was so easy even that pair could manage it,” Morgan continued. “But afterwards . . . those of us that the diseases and starvation didn’t carry away were lucky not to be chopped up by the runaways. And believe me, dysentery and plague were better! All in all, less than half of us survived. Those were fighters I’d not want to face again!”

  “Like Zenobia’s crew of Maroons,” Jason suggested, pointing over the rail and across the water at Rolling-Calf. “It seems you don’t hold a grudge where they’re concerned.”

  For an instant, Morgan looked blank, as though he didn’t even understand the last sentence. “Oh, aye, I’m damned glad we’ve got them with us. And Zenobia herself . . . By God, she’s worth any two men in a fight. Cut! Slash! That’s her way!” His voice dropped. “Since you’re new, there’s something I ought to tell you. Tongues will always flap at anything out of the ordinary—and God knows Zenobia’s out of the ordinary! You may hear some idiots among the crews telling stories about her . . . as though she was some kind of, well, witch.” Morgan looked grim—as well he might, Jason reflected, for such accusations could have grim consequences in this century. Certain female residents of Salem, Massachusetts would learn that in 1692, the same year Port Royal would vanish beneath the sea. “But don’t listen to them. It’s just ignorant sailors’ foolishness. She may be a devil of a fighter, but there’s nothing really unnatural about her.”

  You might be surprised, thought Jason.

  * * *

  “So, how did it go?” asked Mondrago later.

  “Well, Roderick got a couple of historical mysteries solved,” said Jason.

  “That’s nice.” Mondrago did an admirable job of containing his excitement. “I’ve got some news that isn’t quite so good.”

  “What?”

  “Remember that last batch of men that came aboard before we set sail? I’ve tried to check them out without being noticed. Nothing special about most of the ones I’ve been able to get close to. But one . . . well, he wasn’t one of those we saw in Port Royal the day we arrived. But I got a good look at him, and I think I know the signs. He’s one of the Transhumanist goon-caste types.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As Morgan had predicted, the voyage to Cow Island was not a long one. But brief as it was, it served to complete the time travelers’ off-the-deep-end acculturation.

  It was easier for the Service people, of course, inured to culture shock as they had long since become. And even the academics and Nesbit had learned while in Port Royal to adapt to seventeenth-century standards of sanitation and personal hygiene. But none of them had ever experienced the hellish conditions below decks on really overcrowded sailing ships.

  Aboard Oxford they were better off than most of the fleet, for accommodations aboard the frigate were a good deal roomier than those being endured by the crews of the smaller vessels. Nevertheless, at sea the gun ports were closed and the hatches battened down, so they existed in stifling, rancid-smelling darkness as the ship rolled and lurched and creaked without letup. And aside from the ship’s head—the platform jutting forward from the bow, which was to give its name to all latter-day maritime toilet facilities—the only places to answer calls of nature were the corners of the decks on which they slept. Jason could only imagine what it was like in really heavy seas, with even salted seamen vomiting, or when intestinal ailments stuck (as they invariably did, due to the abominable quality of the drinking water) and diarrhea became widespread.

  It didn’t help that they had to keep their twenty-fourth-century fastidiousness strictly to themselves. Given the absolute lack of privacy, any squeamish reactions to conditions everyone else took for granted would have drawn attention. But the point had been emphasized in their orientation, and even Nesbit only gave Jason a couple of anxious moments. Still, the group couldn’t help acquiring a certain reputation for keeping to themselves.

  Needless to say, they went topside at every opportunity. One afternoon, Jason did so, to find Henri Boyer already there, leaning over the port rail. It was a clear day, and off the port bow, to the northeast, it was now just possible to glimpse the Massif de la Hotte, t
he mountainous western tip of Hispaniola’s southern peninsula. But Boyer was gazing aft. Quite a few others were doing the same, including Morgan.

  “Look,” said Boyer, pointing. In the far distance was Rolling-Calf, her sails furled, dead in the water and falling further and further behind the others. Morgan turned, muttering an oath.

  “What’s the matter, Captain?” Jason inquired.

  “Arrgh, it’s what I was telling you about before. I’m having trouble finding anyone to send over there to Zenobia to find out what’s wrong. None of these ignorant fools want to set foot aboard Rolling-Calf. They’re all pissing in their breeks with fear of witchcraft and black magic. But I can’t afford to bring the whole fleet about, although I’ll have everyone take in sail.”

  Abruptly, Boyer stepped forward. “Send me, Captain. She knows me—I met her back in Port Royal.”

  Morgan’s scowl vanished. “Well, thank God there’s one man aboard this ship!” he roared, loudly enough to be heard by the generality. “I’ll have a boat readied.”

  “Good work, Henri,” Jason murmured. “Maybe you’ll have a chance to get some questions answered. And by the way . . . take your musket with you as well as your cutlass.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh . . . just a feeling I have.”

  * * *

  By now, Boyer had listened to enough of Grenfell’s lectures about this era’s sailing vessels to identify Rolling-Calf with some confidence as what was called a “ketch”—two-masted, armed only with a few small guns, and with a tiny poop. (Only landlubbers called it a “poop deck,” he recalled with the smugness of the nautical neophyte.) Zenobia stood on that poop, looking down at a small boat being towed just astern, from which a diver was just slipping into the water. Boyer’s two rowers brought their boat up alongside, and a line was cast to them.