Assassin’s Creed®

by Oliver Bowden

  ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘read this.’

  I did as I was asked, reading aloud a short communication with news of a treaty between the English, the Spanish, Portuguese …

  ‘Does it mean … ?’ I said when I had finished.

  ‘Indeed it does, Edward,’ he said (and it was the first time he’d ever called me by my name rather than ‘son’ or ‘lad’ – in fact, I don’t think he ever called me ‘son’ or ‘lad’ again). ‘It means your Captain Alexander Dolzell was right, and that the days of privateers filling their boots are over. I’ll be making an announcement to the crew later. Will you follow me yourself?’

  I would have followed him to the ends of the Earth but I didn’t say so. Just nodded, as though I had a lot of options.

  He looked at me. All that black hair and beard lent his eyes an extra penetrating shine. ‘You will be a pirate, Edward, a wanted man. Are you sure you want that?’

  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t go back to Bristol. I didn’t dare go back without a pot of money, and the only way of making money was to become a pirate.

  ‘We shall set sail for Nassau,’ said Thatch. ‘We pledged to meet Benjamin should this ever happen. I dare say we shall join forces, for we’ll both lose crew in the wake of this announcement.

  ‘I’d like you by my side, Edward. You’ve got courage and heart and skill in battle, and I can always use a man with letters.’

  I nodded, flattered.

  When I went back to my hammock, though, and was alone, I closed my eyes for fear that tears might squeeze out. I had not come to sea to be a pirate. Oh, of course, I saw I had no other choice but to follow that path. Others were doing it, including Edward Thatch. But even so, it was not what I had wanted for myself. I’d never wanted to be an outlaw.

  Like I say, though, I didn’t feel I had much choice. And from that moment on, I abandoned any plans I had of returning to Bristol as a man of quality. The best I could hope for was to return to Bristol as a man of means. From that moment on my quest became one of acquiring riches. From that moment on I was a pirate.

  Part Two

  * * *

  22

  June, 1715

  There is nothing quite so loud as the sound of a carriage-gun blast. Especially when it goes off in your ear.

  It’s like being pummelled by nothing. A nothing that seems to want to crush you. And you’re not sure whether it’s a trick of your eyesight, shocked and dazzled by the blast, or whether the world really is shaking. Probably it doesn’t even matter.

  Somewhere the shot impacts. Boat planks splinter. Men with their arms and legs torn off, and men who look down and in the few seconds they have before dying realize half their body has been shot away, begin shrieking. All you hear in the immediate aftermath is the shrieking of the damaged hull, the screams of the dead and dying.

  I wouldn’t say you ever get used to it, the blast of a carriage gun, the way it tears a hole in your world, but the trick is to recover swiftly. The trick is to recover from it more swiftly than your enemy. That’s how you stay alive.

  We’d been off the coast of Cape Buena Vista in Cuba when the English had attacked. We called them the English upon the brigantine, even though English made up the core of our crew and I myself was English by birth, English in my heart. But it counted for nothing as a pirate. You were an enemy of His Majesty (Queen Anne had been succeeded by King George), an enemy of the Crown. Which made you an enemy of His Majesty’s navy. And so when, ‘Sail ho!’, we saw the red ensign on the horizon, the sight of a frigate foaming across the ocean towards us and the figures running to and fro on her decks, what we said was, ‘The English are attacking! The English are attacking!’ with no regard for the small details of our actual nationalities.

  And this one, she came at us fast. We were trying to turn and put distance between us and her six-pounders, but she bore down upon us, slicing across our bows, so close we could see the whites of the crew’s eyes, the flash of their gold teeth, the glint of sun on the steel in their hands.

  Flame bloomed along her sides as her carriage guns thundered. Steel tore the air. Our hull shrieked and cracked as the shots found their mark. The day had been full of rain. The powder smoke turned it into a night full of rain. It filled our lungs and made us cough, choke and splutter, throwing us into even more disarray and panic.

  And then that feeling of the world crashing in, that shock, and those moments of wondering if you’d been hit and if maybe you were dead, and perhaps this was what it felt like in heaven. Or most likely – in my case at least – in hell. Which of course it must do, because hell is smoke and fire and pain and screaming. So in actual fact whether you were dead or not, it made no difference. Either way you were in hell.

  At the first crash-bang I’d raised my arms to protect myself. Luckily. I felt shards of splintered wood that would otherwise have punctured my face and eyes embed themselves into my arm, and the force was enough to send me staggering back, tripping and falling.

  They’d used bar shot. Big iron bars that would blast a hole in virtually anything provided they were close enough. In this case, they’d done their job. The English had no interest in boarding us. As pirates we would inflict as little damage upon our target as possible. Our aim was to board and to loot, over a period of days if needs be. It was difficult to loot a sinking ship. But the English – or this particular command, at least – either knew we had no treasure aboard or didn’t care – they simply wanted to destroy us. And they were doing a bloody good job of it.

  I dragged myself to my feet, felt something warm running down my arm and looked to see blood from a splinter blob to the planks of the deck. With a grimace I reached to tear the wood from my arm and tossed it to the deck, barely registering the pain as I squinted through a fog of powder smoke and lashing rain.

  A cheer went up from the crew of the English frigate as she churned past our starboard side. There was the pop and fizz of musket and flintlock pistol shot. Stinkpots and grenadoes came sailing over, exploding on deck and adding to the chaos, the damage and the choking smoke that hung over us like a death shroud. The stinkpots in particular let out a vicious sulphur gas that sent men to their knees, making the air so dense and black that it became difficult to see, to judge distance.

  Even so, I saw him: the hooded figure who stood on their forecastle deck. His arms were folded, and he stood still in his robes, his entire demeanour emanating unconcern at the events that were unfolding around him. This I could tell from his posture and his eyes that gleamed from beneath the cowl of his robes. Eyes that for a second were fixed on me.

  And then our attackers were swallowed up by smoke. A ghost ship amid a fug of powder belch, sizzling rain and choking stinkpot fumes.

  All around me was the sound of shattering wood and screaming men. The dead were everywhere, littering torn planks awash with their blood. Through a gash in the main deck I saw water on the decks below and from above heard the complaint of wood and the tearing of the smoky shroud, and looked up to see our mainsail half destroyed by chain shot. A dead lookout with most of his head shorn away hung by his feet from the crow’s-nest and men were already scaling the ratlines to try to cut the broken mast free, but they were too late. She was already listing, wallowing in the water like a fat woman taking a bath.

  At last enough of the smoke cleared to see that the British frigate was coming round in order to use its starboard guns. But now she ran into a spot of bad luck. Before the ship could be brought to bear, the same wind that had dispersed the smoke dropped, and her plump sails flattened and she slowed. We had been given our second chance.

  ‘Man the guns!’ I shouted.

  Those members of our crew still on their feet were scrambling to the mounted guns. I manned a swivel gun and we delivered a broadside that the attacking frigate could do nothing about, our shot inflicting almost as much damage to them as they had to us. And now it was our turn to cheer. Defeat had turned if not qui
te to victory, then at least to a lucky escape. Perhaps there were those of us who were even wondering what treasures might be on board the British vessel, and I saw one or two of our men, the optimistic few, with boarding hooks, axes and marlinspikes, ready to lash the ship close and take them on man on man.

  But any plans were dashed by what happened next.

  ‘The magazine,’ came the cry.

  ‘She’s going up.’

  The news was followed by screams, and as I looked from my post at the swivel gun towards the bow, I saw flames around the breach in the hull. Meanwhile, from the stern came the cries of our captain, Captain Bramah, while on the poop deck of the ship opposite, the man in the robes leapt into action. Literally. He unfolded his arms and in one short jump was on the rail of the deck, then in the next instant had jumped across to our ship.

  For a moment the impression I had of him in the air was like an eagle, his robes spread out behind him, his arms outstretched like wings.

  Next I saw Captain Bramah fall. Crouched over him the hooded man’s arm pulled back and a hidden blade sprang from within his sleeve.

  That blade. I was transfixed by it for a second. The flames from the burning deck made it alive. And then the hooded man drove it deep into Captain Bramah.

  I stood and stared, my own cutlass in my hand. From behind I vaguely heard the cries of the crew as they tried in vain to stop the fire spreading to the magazine.

  It will go up, I thought distractedly. The magazine will explode. Thinking of the barrels of gunpowder stored there. The English ship close enough so that the explosion would surely blast a hole in the hull of both ships. All of this I knew, but only as distant distracted thoughts. I was spellbound by the hooded man at work. Mesmerized by this agent of death, who had ignored the carnage around him by biding his time and waiting to strike.

  The kill was over, Captain Bramah dead. The assassin looked up from the dead body of the captain, and once again our eyes met, only this time something flared within his features and in the next instant he had bounded to his feet, a single lithe jump that took him over the corpse, and he was bearing down upon me.

  I raised my cutlass, determined not to go easily into the great unknown. And then from the stern – in fact, from the magazine, where our men had obviously failed to douse the fire whose fingers had found the stores of gunpowder – came a great explosion.

  In a thunderclap I was blasted off the deck, describing a circle in the air and finding a moment of perfect peace, not knowing whether I was alive or dead, whether I still had all of my limbs and in that moment not caring anyway. Not knowing where I’d come to rest: whether I’d slam to the deck of a ship and break my back or land impaled on a snapped mast or be tossed into the eye of the magazine inferno.

  Or what I did, which was slap into the sea.

  Maybe alive, maybe dead, maybe conscious, maybe not. Either way I seemed to drift not far below the surface, watching the sea above: a shifting mottle of blacks, greys and the flaming orange of burning ships. Past me sank dead bodies, eyes wide open as though surprised in death. They discoloured the water in which they sank and trailed guts and stringy sinew like tentacles. I saw a smashed mizzen mast twirling in the water, bodies snared in rigging dragged to the depths.

  I thought of Caroline. Of my father. Then of my adventures on the Emperor. I thought about Nassau, where there was only one law: pirate law. And, of course, I thought about how I had been mentored from privateer to pirate by Edward – Edward Thatch.

  23

  All of this I thought as I sank, eyes open, aware of everything happening around me: the bodies, the wreckage … Aware of it, yet uncaring. As though it was happening to somebody else. Looking back, I know it for what it was, that brief moment – and it was brief – as I sank in the water. I had, in those moments, lost the will to live.

  After all, this expedition – Edward had warned against it. He’d told me not to go. ‘That Captain Bramah’s bad news,’ he’d said. ‘You mark my words.’

  And he was right. And I was going to pay for my greed and stupidity with my life.

  And then I found it again. The will to go on. I found it. I grasped it. I shook it. I held it close to my bosom and from that moment to this I never let it go again. My legs kicked, my arms arrowed, and I streaked towards the surface, breaking the water and gasping – for air, and in shock at the carnage around me, watching as the last of the English frigate slipped below the water, still ablaze. All across the ocean were small blazes soon to be doused by the water, floating debris everywhere, and men, of course – survivors.

  And then, just as I had feared, the sharks started to attack, and the screams began – screams of terror at first and then, as the sharks began to investigate more insistently, screams of agony that only intensified as more predators gathered and they began to feed. The screams I’d heard during the battle, agonized as they were, were nothing compared to the shrieks that tore that soot-filled afternoon apart.

  I was one of the lucky ones, whose wounds were not enough to attract the sharks’ attention, and I swam for shore. At one point I was knocked by a shark gliding past, thankfully too concerned with joining the feeding frenzy to stop. My foot seemed to snag what felt like a fin in the water and I prayed that whatever blood I was leaking was not enough to tempt the shark away from the more plentiful chum elsewhere. It was a cruel irony that those more heavily wounded were the ones who were attacked first.

  I say ‘attacked’. You know what I mean. They were eaten. Devoured. How many survivors there were from the battle, I have no way of knowing. All I can say is that I saw that most survivors ended up as food for the sharks. Me, I swam to the safety of the beach at Cape Buena Vista and there I collapsed with sheer relief and exhaustion, and if the dry land hadn’t been made up entirely of sand I probably would have kissed it.

  My hat was gone. My beloved three-pointer, which had sat upon my head as man and boy. What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that it was the first step in me shedding the past, saying goodbye to my old life. What’s more, I still had my cutlass, and given the choice between losing my hat or cutlass …

  And so, after some time thanking my lucky stars, listening out for other survivors but hearing just faint screams in the distance, I rolled on to my back, then heard something to my left.

  It was a groan. And looking over I saw its source was the robed assassin. He’d come to rest just a short distance away from me and he was lucky, very lucky, not to be eaten by the sharks, because when he rolled over to his back he left behind a patch of crimson-stained sand. And as he lay there with his chest rising and falling, his breath coming in short, jagged gasps, his hands went to his stomach. His obviously wounded stomach.

  ‘Was it good for you as well?’ I asked, laughing. Something about the situation struck me as funny. Even after these few years at sea, there was still something of the Bristol brawler about me, who couldn’t help but make light of the situation, no matter how dark it seemed. He ignored me. Or ignored the quip at least.

  ‘Havana,’ he groaned, ‘I must get to Havana.’

  That produced another smile from me. ‘Well, I’ll just build us another ship, will I?’

  ‘I can pay you,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Isn’t that the sound you pirates like best? A thousand escudos.’

  That had aroused my interest. ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘Will you or won’t you?’ he demanded to know.

  One of us was badly wounded, and it wasn’t me. I stood to look over him, seeing the robes, hidden in which, presumably, was his blade. I had liked the look of that blade. I had the feeling that the man in possession of that particular blade might go far. Especially in my chosen trade. Let’s not forget that before my ship’s magazine had exploded this very man was about to use that very blade on me. You may think me callous. You may think me cruel and ruthless. But, please understand, in such situations a man must do what is necessary to survive, and a good lesson to learn if you’re standing o
n the deck of a burning ship about to move in for the kill: finish the job.

  Lesson two: if you don’t manage to finish the job, it’s probably best not to expect help from your intended target.

  And lesson three: if you ask your intended target for help anyway, probably best not to start getting angry with them.

  For all those reasons I ask you not to judge me. I ask you to understand why I gazed down at him so dispassionately.

  ‘You don’t have that gold on you now, do you?’

  He looked back at me, and his eyes blazed briefly and then in a second, more quickly than I could possibly have anticipated – imagined even, he’d drawn a pocket pistol and shoved it into my stomach. The shock more than the impact of the gun barrel sent me staggering back, only to fall on my behind some feet away. With one hand clutching at his wound, the other with the pistol trained on me, he pulled himself to his feet.

  ‘Bloody pirates,’ he snarled through clenched teeth.

  I saw his finger whiten on the trigger. I heard the hammer on the pistol snap forward and closed my eyes expecting the shot to come.

  But it never did. And of course it didn’t. There was indeed something unearthly about this man – his grace, his speed, his garb, his choice of weaponry – but he was still just a man, and no man can command the sea. Even he couldn’t prevent his powder getting wet.

  Lesson four: if you’re going to ignore lessons one, two and three, it’s probably best not to pull out a gun filled with wet powder.

  His advantage lost, the killer turned and headed straight for the tree line, one arm still clutching his wounded stomach and the other warding off undergrowth as he crashed into it and out of sight. For a second I simply sat there, unable to believe my luck: if I was a cat then I’d have used up at least three of my nine lives, and that was just today.

  And then without a second thought – well, maybe perhaps a single second thought, because, after all, I’d seen him in action and wound or no wound he was dangerous – I took off in pursuit. He had something I wanted. That hidden blade.