Perhaps I expected him to remove his hood. But he did not. Instead he levelled the point of his sword just below my chin and with his other hand indicated for me to drop to my knees.
‘You don’t know me well enough if you think I’m going to meet my end on my knees, stranger,’ I told him, feeling oddly calm in the face of defeat and death. ‘If it’s all the same to you I’ll stay standing.’
He spoke in tones deep and flat, possibly disguised. ‘You’ll not meet your end tonight, Edward Kenway. More’s the pity. But I tell you this. Unless the Emperor sails with you on it tomorrow this night is only the beginning for anyone bearing the Kenway name. Leave at first light and no more harm will come to your mother or father. But if that ship sails without you they will suffer. You all will. Do I make myself clear?’
‘And do I get to know the identity of my gracious enemies?’ I asked.
‘You do not. You should know only that there are forces in this world more powerful than you could possibly comprehend, Edward Kenway. Tonight you have seen them in action. You have suffered at their hands. Let this be an end to it. Never return to these shores. And now, Edward Kenway, you will kneel.’
His sword came up and the hilt smashed into my temple.
When I woke up I was on the Emperor.
15
At least I thought I was on the Emperor. I hoped so anyway. And with my head throbbing, I pulled myself out of my hammock, put my boots to the deck and was sent flying forward.
My fall was broken – by my face. I lay groaning on the planks for a moment or so, wondering why I felt so drunk when I didn’t remember doing any actual drinking. Except, of course, I wasn’t drunk.
But if I wasn’t drunk why was the floor moving? It tipped this way and that, and I spent a moment or so waiting for it to settle until I realized that the constant rocking was exactly that. Constant. It wasn’t going to stop.
On unsteady feet that shuffled and danced in the sawdust I straightened, hands out like a man trying to negotiate a balancing beam. My body still hurt from the beating I’d taken but I was on the mend, my wounds a day or so old.
What hit me next was the air thick with a smell. No, not a smell. A stench.
Oh my days it stank. A mix of shit, piss, sweat and seawater. A smell I came to learn was unique to the below decks of a ship. Just as every butcher’s shop and every tavern has its own smell, so does every below decks. The frightening thing was how quickly you got used to it.
The smell was of men, and on the Emperor there were one hundred and fifty of the blighters, who when they weren’t manning their positions, hanging from the rigging or crowded into the galleys, would sleep cuddled up to carriages on the gun decks, or in hammocks much like the one I’d woken up in.
I could hear one of the crew now, sniggering in the shadows as the ship lurched and I was thrown against a wooden support, then just as violently slammed into a column opposite. Sea legs. That was what they called it. I had to get my sea legs.
‘Is this the Emperor ?’ I said into the murk.
The creak of the ship. Like the smell and the sea legs it was something I’d get used to.
‘Aye, you’re on the Emperor,’ came the reply.
‘I’m new on the ship,’ I called into the darkness, clinging on for dear life.
There was a rasping chuckle. ‘You don’t say.’
‘How far are we from land?’
‘A day. You were brought on asleep or unconscious. Too much booze, I’d say.’
‘Something like that,’ I replied, still hanging on to the support for dear life. My mind went to the events of the last day or so, but it was like worrying at an open wound. Too soon, too painful. I’d need to try to make sense of what had happened. I’d need to face the guilt, and I’d have letters to write. (Letters I wouldn’t have been able to write without Caroline’s tuition, I reminded myself, with a fresh feeling of regret). But all that would have to wait until later.
From behind me came a grating, wrenching sound. I swung round and squinted in the half-light, and when my eyes adjusted I could see a capstan. From above I could hear feet and the raised voices of men at work on the deck above. The capstan groaned and creaked and turned.
‘Heave,’ came the shout from above. ‘Heave.’ Despite everything the sound of it made me a wide-eyed little boy again.
I cast my gaze around. Either side of me were the rounded shapes of the carriage guns. Their barrels shone dully in the dark. At the other end of the deck I could see where a rope ladder hung from a square of daylight. I headed there, climbed to the quarterdeck above.
I soon discovered how my shipmates had earned their sea legs. Not only did they sport a different style of dress to men of the land – short jackets, checked shirts, long, canvas breeches – but they had a different style of walking, too. Their entire bodies seemed to move with the ship, something that happened entirely by instinct. I spent my first couple of days on board being tossed from pillar to post by the heaving waves beneath us, and had to grow accustomed to the sound of laughter as I sprawled on the deck time after time. But soon, just as I got used to the smell below decks, and the constant creak of the hull, and the sense that the whole sea was kept at bay by a few puny planks of wood and coats of caulking, so I learnt to move with the motion of the water, with the Emperor. Soon I, too, walked like every other man on board.
My shipmates were nut-brown, every single one of them. Most wore scarves or handkerchiefs tied loosely round the neck, had tattoos, beards and wore gold earrings. There were older crewmates aboard, their brown, weather-worn faces like melted candles, their eyes hooded and cautious, but most were about ten years older than I was.
They came from all over I soon discovered: London, Scotland, Wales, the West Country. Many of our number, around a third, were black; some of them runaway slaves who’d found freedom on the seas, treated as an equal by their captain and shipmates – or should that be, treated as the same level of scum by their captain and shipmates. There were also men from the American colonies, from Boston, Charleston, Newport, New York and Salem. Most seemed to wear weapons constantly: cutlasses, daggers, flintlock pistols. Always more than one pistol, it seemed, which I soon found out was due to the danger of the first one failing to fire because of a damp charge.
They liked to drink rum, were almost unbelievably coarse in their language and the way they spoke about women, and liked nothing better than a roaring argument. But what bonded them all were the captain’s articles.
He was a Scotsman. Captain Alexander Dolzell. A big man, he rarely smiled. He adhered to the articles of the ship, and liked nothing more than reminding us of them. Standing on the sterncastle deck, his hands on the rail as we stood assembled on the quarterdeck, main deck and forecastle, warning us that any man who fell asleep on duty would be tarred and feathered. Any man found with another man would be punished with castration. No smoking below decks. No pissing in the ballast. (And, of course, as I’ve already told you, that particular article was something I carried over to my own commands.)
I was fresh, though, and new on board ship. At that stage of my career I don’t think it would even have occurred to me to break the rules.
I soon began to settle into the rhythm of life at sea. I found my sea legs, learnt which side of the ship to use depending on the wind and to eat with my elbows on the table to stop my plate from sliding away. My days consisted of being posted as lookout or on watch. I learnt how to take soundings in shallow waters and picked up the basics of the navigation. And I learnt from listening to the crew, who when not exaggerating tales of going into battle against the Spanish, liked nothing better than to impart nuggets of nautical wisdom: ‘Red at night, sailor’s delight. Red in the morning, sailors take warning.’
The weather. The winds. What slaves we were to them. When it was bad the usual cheery atmosphere would be replaced by one of grim industry as the day-to-day business of keeping the ship afloat became a matter of simple survival in hurricane winds, when we would snatch fo
od in between maintaining sail, patching the hull and pumping out. All done with the quiet, concentrated desperation of men working to save their own lives.
Those times were exhausting, physically draining. I’d be kept awake, told to climb the ratlines or man pumps below decks, and any sleep would be snatched below decks, curled up against the hull.
And then the weather would abate and life would resume. I watched the activities of the older crewmates, their drinking, gambling and womanizing, understanding how relatively tame my own exploits in Bristol had been. Some of those I used to encounter in the taverns of the West Country, how they thought of themselves as hardened drinkers and brawlers, if only they could have been here to see my shipmates in action. Fights would break out over nothing. At the drop of a hat. Knives pulled. Blood drawn. In my first month at sea I heard more bones crunch than I had in the previous seventeen years of my life. And don’t forget: I grew up in Swansea and Bristol.
And yet the violence would dissipate as quickly as it had flared up; men who moments before had been holding blades to each other’s throats would make up with a round of bear hugs that looked almost as painful as the fighting, but which seemed to have the desired effect. The articles stated that any man’s quarrels should be ended on shore by sword or pistol in a duel. Nobody really wanted that, of course. A quarrel was one thing, possibility of death quite another. So fights tended to be over as quickly as they’d begun. Tempers would flare, then die down.
Because of this genuine grievances on board were few and far between. So it was just my luck to be on the receiving end of one.
I first became aware of it on my second or third day aboard, because I turned, feeling a penetrating stare upon me and returned it with a smile. A friendly smile, or so I thought. But one’s man’s friendly smile is another man’s cocky grin and all it seemed to do was infuriate him even more. Back came a glare.
The next day as I made my way along the quarterdeck I was struck by an elbow so hard that I fell to my knees, and when I looked up, expecting to see a grinning face – ‘Gotcha!’– saw only the smirking face of the same man as he glanced over his shoulder on his way to his station. He was a big man. Not the sort you’d want to be on the wrong side of. Looked like I was on the wrong side of him, though.
Later I spoke to Friday, a black deckhand who often had the hammock near mine. When I described the man who had knocked me down, he knew who I was talking about straight away.
‘That’ll be Blaney.’
Blaney. That was all I ever heard anybody call him. And unfortunately – by which I mean, unfortunately for me – Blaney hated me. He hated the guts of me.
There was probably a reason. Since we’d never spoken it couldn’t have been an especially good reason; the important thing was it existed in Blaney’s head, which at the end of the day was all that mattered. That and the fact that Blaney was big and, according to Friday, skilled with a sword.
Blaney, you might have guessed by now, was one of the gentlemen I first met the evening that I arrived early for the departure of the Emperor. Now, I know what you’re thinking: he was the one to whom I’d spoken, who was all ready to teach me a lesson or two for my impudence.
Well, no, if you thought that you’d be wrong. Blaney was one of the other men sitting at the cask playing cards. A simple, brutish man, with what you might call a prominent forehead, thick eyebrows that were permanently bunched together as though he was always confused about something. I hardly noticed him on the night and, thinking about it now, perhaps that was why he was so infuriated; perhaps that’s why the grudge was born: he’d felt ignored by me.
‘Why might he have taken against me?’ I asked, to which Friday could only reply with a shrug and a mumble of ‘Ignore him’, and then he closed his eyes to indicate our conversation was at an end.
So I did. I ignored him.
This obviously infuriated Blaney even more. Blaney didn’t want to be ignored. Blaney wanted to be taken notice of. He wanted to be feared. My failure to be frightened of Blaney, well, it – yes, it stoked his hatred of me.
16
Meantime, there were other things to think about. For example, a rumour going round the crew that the captain was feeling left out of spoils. There had been no raids for two months; we’d not earned so much as a half-penny and there were rumblings of discontent, most of which were coming from his cabin. It became common knowledge that our captain felt as though he was holding up his end of the bargain, but getting little in return.
What bargain, you might ask? Well, as privateers, we provided a presence for Her Majesty; it was as though we were unenlisted soldiers in her war against the Spanish. In return, of course, we were allowed to raid Spanish ships with impunity, which means as much as we bloody well wanted, and for as long as anyone could remember that’s exactly what had happened.
There were fewer and fewer Spanish ships at sea, however. At port, we’d begun to hear rumours that the war might be coming to an end; that a treaty might soon be signed.
Captain Dolzell, though, well, you’d have to give him credit for being able to look ahead of times and see which way the wind was blowing, and what with us being left out of spoils, he decided to take us on a course of action that was outside the remit of our letters of marque.
Trafford, the mate, stood next to Captain Dolzell, who removed his tricorne and wiped sweat from his brow, before replacing it and addressing us all.
‘This raid will make us rich, lads; your pockets will split. But I’ve got to warn ye, and I would be failing my duty as your captain if I did not, that it is indeed a risky venture.’
Risky. Yes. The risk of capture, punishment and death by the drop of the hangman’s scaffold.
A hanged man’s bowels open, I’d been told. A pirate’s breeches would be tied at the ankles to stop the shit escaping. It was the indignity of that which scared me more than anything. It wasn’t how I wanted Caroline to remember me, dangling from a rope, reeking of shit.
I had not left Bristol in order to become a fugitive from the law, a pirate. And if I stayed with the ship and we went through with the captain’s plan then that is what I would be. We would have the combined forces of the East India Company’s own Marines, plus no doubt Her Majesty’s navy, after us.
No, I hadn’t joined up as a privateer in order to become a pirate, but all the same if I was ever going home I couldn’t do it penniless. I had this idea that if I returned with riches I could pay the price on my head, that my enemies might be appeased.
So, no, I hadn’t joined up to be a pirate. The money I earned would be earned legally.
And please cease your sniggering. I know how quaint I sound now. But back then, I still had fervour in my belly and dreams in my head. So when the captain made his offer, when he said he knew not all on board would want a part of any badness, and that anybody not wanting a part of the badness should say now, or for ever hold their peace, so that he could organize passage off the ship, I went to step forward.
Friday stopped me with a surreptitious hand. Not looking at me. Just stopping me moving forward and staring straight ahead. From the side of his mouth he said, ‘Wait’ and I didn’t have to wait long to find out why. Five of the crew had shuffled up the deck, good men who wanted no part of any piracy. At a word from the captain the first mate had these five good men thrown overboard.
I decided there and then to keep my trap shut. And what I decided instead was this: I would follow the captain, but only up to a point. I’d follow him, reap my share of the money we made and then jump ship. After I’d jumped ship, I’d join up with other privateers – after all, I was an experienced jack tar now – and deny ever having been on the Emperor when this terrible crime was committed.
As plans go, it wasn’t especially sophisticated. It had its flaws, I had to admit, but yet again I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, with neither of my options particularly appealing.
As the appeals of the men thrown overboard receded behind u
s, the captain went on to outline his plans for piracy. He didn’t go so far as suggesting we attack the Royal Navy, that would have been suicide; instead, he knew of a target to be found along the west coast of Africa. So there, in January 1713, was where the Emperor headed.
17
January, 1713
As we sailed among the islands we would drop anchor in a sheltered bay or river estuary and men would be sent ashore to find supplies: wood, water, beer, wine, rum. We could be there for days and we’d pass the time catching turtles to eat or taking potshots at birds, or hunting cattle, goats or pigs if we could.
Once we had to careen the Emperor, which involved beaching her then using block and tackle to turn her over. We used lit torches to burn off seaweed and barnacles, caulk her and replace any rotten planks, all under the direction of the ship’s carpenter, who used to look forward to such occasions. Hardly surprising, really, because we also took the opportunity to make repairs to the masts and sails, so he had the pleasure of ordering around the quartermaster, as well as the first and second mates, who had no choice but to keep their mouths shut and carry on with the task.
They were happy days: fishing, hunting, enjoying the discomfort of our superiors. It was almost a disappointment having to set sail again. But set sail we did.
The ship we were after was a merchant ship run by the East India Company and we came across her off the coast of west Africa. There’d been many rumblings below decks regarding the wisdom of the enterprise. We knew that by attacking such a prestigious vessel we were making ourselves wanted men. But the captain had said there were only three naval warships and two naval sloops patrolling the entire Caribbean Sea, and that the East India Company’s ship, the Amazon Galley, was said to be carrying treasure, and that providing we brought the Galley to a halt in open water, out of sight of land, we should be able to plunder the ship at our leisure, escape and be out of it.
Wouldn’t the crew of the Galley be able to identify us, though? I wondered aloud. Wouldn’t they tell the navy they’d been attacked by the Emperor? Friday had just looked at me. I didn’t care for that look he gave me.
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