Silver

by Andrew Motion

The Battle on the Shore

  I WANTED TO stay still and grieve. I wanted to creep into the earth, and pull the grass over my head like a blanket, so that I could lie unnoticed beside the captain. My mind was not ready to leave his protection. My instincts, however—my instincts were interested in nothing but saving my life. With despicable energy I jumped up, seized the captain’s sword where it lay in his open hand, turned tail, and began running fast toward the shore. In the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Creed follow suit—Stevenson pulling his hat from his head, to prevent it being swept off in the rush. The skin of his forehead was extremely white, and made a strong contrast to his weather-beaten face.

  At every step I expected a musket ball or the edge of a blade to slash into my shoulders. But either because they reckoned we were easy prey, or because they were distracted by the appearance of the Nightingale, Smirke and his men did nothing. As I continued running, and my mind reassembled itself, I heard them calling to one another—saying how pretty our ship looked, and how they would be home soon. When I threw a glance over my shoulder, several of them were pointing and clapping one another on the back; only Smirke and Stone seemed less than excited—Smirke because he was gloating over the dead body now stretched before him; and Stone because he was intent on reloading his pistol.

  The ground I ran across—it would be better to say flew—was the old marsh that Scotland and the other prisoners had turned into rice fields. Even at speed, I was conscious of how neatly everything had been made: the rows of young plants, and the low walls that created a terrace leading down to the shore, where fertile earth gave way to sand. It made me pick up my feet in a high-stepping gait, because I did not like to destroy what they had so carefully created, even though I was fleeing for my life.

  As the three of us reached the shore, Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr. Tickle ran forward—Mr. Tickle with his unlit pipe still clamped between his teeth. For all that he was not my captain, I was mightily relieved to see how determined he looked, especially since the prisoners—whose tight formation on the sand behind him had now broken up—were extremely confused. One or two had dropped down and pressed their faces to the sand, mumbling prayers that were inaudible to everyone except Mother Earth. Others had tramped into the water and stood with waves breaking around their knees, unable to decide what most deserved their attention: the pirates behind them or the Nightingale—which was now a few hundred yards offshore and putting down her anchor.

  Our friends’ distress, combined with their near-nakedness and shivering, was miserable to see. Only Scotland had kept his composure—still standing beside the bo’sun, with his arms held out so that his wife could shelter behind him. It was a brave defense but also very desperate and pathetic, since he had no weapon except his courage. Or none until I handed him the captain’s sword, still warm from my grip, and drew my own shorter weapon. Our two blades clanged together, which seemed to seal the brotherhood between us.

  “Thank you, Master Jim,” he said, very grim-faced—then added with a touch of poetry that was never far from his speech, “We are all the captain now.”

  “We are indeed,” I said.

  “We will make him proud of us.”

  “We will indeed,” I repeated—although, when I looked inland again, I felt less than perfect confidence. Smirke had now ended his gloating over the captain, and was slowly leading his men down from the stockade; they had spread into a crescent, to prevent anyone slipping past them. None were talking, not even to curse us, but instead they kept a very menacing silence, swinging their swords lazily from side to side as if they were mowing grass.

  The most terrible thing about this approach—more terrible than the fact of massacre it seemed to anticipate—was the appetite it suggested. Every swish of steel spoke of how the pirates would enjoy dispatching us, and of how they saw this enjoyment as merely the prelude to other pleasures now lying before them—namely, commandeering the Nightingale, and escaping from the island to whatever life they wanted.

  At this point, when the likelihood of disaster became very clear to me, I found my terror had suddenly evaporated and my head was clear. It was not that I reconciled myself to death, rather that I found a way to keep my dignity—by deciding to end my life in a way that made me unlike my murderers. I would fight as myself, in the best way I could. I would not allow my courage to weaken because I was a long way from my home, and because I had lost Natty and seen the captain die. I would not allow Death to think he had gained the upper hand because I had done wrong in my life—by stealing the map especially, and betraying my father. I would believe I might be forgiven my sins. I would accept the second life I had been given when I was rescued from the sea.

  I did not express these thoughts as words—of course not; they were a surge of authority, of possibility, that I have since captured for myself in these terms. I cannot otherwise explain the change that came over me in those moments on the beach. Behind me I heard shouts from the Nightingale as men lowered our jolly-boat into the water and began rowing toward us. This settled my nervousness. Around me I had the beauty of the world—the white spray whipping off the gray waves; the shivering tree line around the pedestal of Spyglass Hill; the glimmer of birds flitting between trees in the forest. This stiffened my resolve. But the principal inspiration came from myself alone. I was transformed for as long as necessary into a belligerent angel.

  Bo’sun Kirkby and the others in our troop, which now included Scotland, had fallen into a line along the beach with the prisoners milling in the shallows behind us. They were in no condition to come to our aid, and without them we were only a handful, outnumbered by the pirates bearing down on us. It was therefore strongly in our favor to delay the fight until the jolly-boat arrived—as the pirates also understood.

  They crossed the last few yards very swiftly, tramping through the rice fields, then thudding over the firmer sand. The bo’sun was at the further end of our defense, and opposite him was Smirke. Next to the bo’sun was Mr. Tickle, still chewing on the stem of his pipe, squaring up to one of the slavers—a hideous-looking man, with staring eyes and a coat that seemed to be made of twigs and patches. Scotland stood in the middle facing Stone—and although it was not the moment to reflect on the inequality of this contest, I did notice with relief that Stone had put away his pistol and was preparing to go at it sword to sword. Mr. Stevenson was fighting close to Mr. Creed, opposite a gaggle of slavers who could not decide which among them was in the vanguard and which was not, and so flashed their weapons together in a noisy tangle. My own adversaries were two characters I had not much noticed before in the camp—both of them also slavers from the Achilles. One was a little stooping monkey, who now began passing his weapon from hand to hand with great agility, and the other a taller, older, heavier oaf, whose face was so thickly covered with sores, his eyes were almost closed.

  I went for him first, shutting my mind to the sound of clanging and scraping and cursing that now broke out around me. The monkey fellow (exactly as a monkey might) seemed to sit on his friend’s shoulder, chattering continuously: “Hit him low, Turner, hit him low. There in the vitals. Stick him; stick him.” Almost none of this advice was taken by old Turner, who lumbered toward me with his sword pointing toward the sky—planning to bring it straight down on my head and end things that way. Whether he stumbled in the sand, or whether I actually did outwit him, I am not certain. What I do know is: while his weapon was still high in the air, mine found its way into his belly, entering (because I was smaller) in an upward direction beneath his ribcage, then sliding on toward his heart. The texture of his body was thicker than a pig’s, and the great quantity of blood that began to pour from him was about the same as a pig would produce. It ran down sticky and very warm over my hands, until I quickly tugged out my blade as if I had been scalded.

  The monkey fellow now sprang forward, screeching and flashing his teeth as if he meant to nip me and not fight me. We circled one another a few times—and in this interval I had t
he chance to see Turner finally lower his sword. Not, as he had intended, in a cleaving blow, but with a heavy and useless swoop, which ended in the sand as his body collapsed on top of his weapon. His face was drained of all color, except for the sore places on his cheeks and forehead, which remained bright red.

  “Kill me, would you, you pup?” the monkey nattered. “Put away old Turner, would you, and leave a widow in the world? Orphans too, I shouldn’t wonder—orphans in the ports here and there with hungry mouths.” With my new sense of purpose, none of this had the slightest effect on me. Once I had followed him around in a shuffling circle a few times, and got the measure of things, I made a direct jab that seemed to amaze him. His sword fell from his hand as he parried my strike—and the tip of my blade entered his throat, in the hollow below his Adam’s apple.

  “Ah!” he said, in the thoughtful voice of someone who has found the answer to a mystery that has long eluded him. Whatever this knowledge might have been, he kept it to himself. For as his sigh ended, his life left him. Then he too toppled onto the sand, where his head rested against the thigh of his friend Turner; they lay there together like two men sleeping after a meal—Turner blubbery and elephantine, the monkey still quite young, but very bald. As I looked at them, I waited for a shock of pity or revulsion to break through me. I felt nothing of the sort. Instead a calm voice spoke in my head, saying, “You have killed a man. You have killed two men.”

  At other times in my life, such a sentence would have been monstrous. In the strange state I had now entered, it seemed nothing other than a statement of fact; I did not pause to consider what it implied, in transferring me from one sort of existence to another. My only concern was my friends, whose contests were more evenly balanced than my own had been. Furthest away from me, Smirke and Bo’sun Kirkby were both standing at their full height, swinging their cutlasses with methodical ferocity. (Smirke, I noticed, was puffing a good deal and sweating very heavily.) Mr. Tickle, Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Creed were also standing their ground—Stevenson with his chin held high and a disdainful expression on his face, as though he considered the whole business of fighting to be beneath him; Creed hopping quickly from foot to foot. Mr. Tickle stood solid as a yeoman, chopping and thrusting as if he were demonstrating a means of signaling—with swords, not flags.

  The battle between Stone and Scotland was more subtle. Scotland had evidently decided his long incarceration put him at a disadvantage—which it certainly did, in terms of strength and stamina. He stood well back from his enemy, up to his ankles in water, making occasional lunges. The scars across his shoulders, and one raw gash across the crown of his head, made it appear he had already been struck several blows. In reality these were earlier wounds he had received in the stockade—for Stone was also reluctant to fight close-to.

  This hesitation seemed strange, until I noticed that, with crablike maneuvers, Stone was in fact not especially interested in Scotland himself, but what lay behind him. This was the woman who had walked at his side when he emerged from the log house. His wife.

  I am writing these words as though in the midst of battle I had time to stand easy, and observe, and think. There was no such time—only a brief pause before I began fighting again—but in such moments as did exist, I noticed this woman with peculiar clarity. She was almost the same height as Scotland and the same age, with loosely curled hair, skin as black as ebony, and an upright way of standing that made her Scotland’s equal. I was yet to hear her speak, but the blank fury in her eyes made speech unnecessary. It was clear that she wanted much more than Stone’s death. She wanted him killed and all trace of him entirely removed from the face of the earth.

  In the same instant that I felt the power of her rage—seeing her stand up to her knees in sea water, with the waves plucking at her—my horror of the stockade and everything it contained reached a new intensity. Smirke was heartless enough, but my instincts told me it was Stone who had instigated the worst obscenities. The coldness of the man was a kind of petrifaction—the lizard stare, the carved mouth, the dead pallor of his face. Although I wondered whether any earthly weapon could put an end to him, since he had already survived the slash across his throat, I nevertheless threw myself forward to join Scotland, where I might strike a blow for justice.

  As I did so, I saw the jolly-boat had made less progress toward the shore than I would have expected. To judge by the way some of the rowers were struggling, while others bailed the water breaking over the sides, I assumed they had encountered a current running offshore—produced, no doubt, by the powerful stream that entered the bay near to where they were arriving. It was obvious that we needed to hold our ground for another several minutes. Or to put it a better way: I thought we had several minutes to win the battle ourselves.

  It was not to be. Although I did not flatter myself by thinking Stone wanted to avoid me, the sight of my approach did accelerate the matter he already had in mind. Rather than engaging with Scotland and trying to finish him, he now backed away entirely, scrambling to the top of a little sand ridge that divided the rice fields from the shore. Here he paused, one minute looking down the slope to where Scotland and I stood side by side, and the next out to sea, where the shouts of my shipmates were clearly audible above the slop and crash of waves.

  I blame myself for failing to understand what he had in mind; I have criticized myself ever since. If my wits had been about me, I would have rushed forward regardless of any risk—and really believe that, with Scotland to help, we might have overpowered the wretch. As it was, I waited like a fool for Stone to come down to us again. This gave him his opportunity. Without so much as a blink, he coolly struck his sword in the sand (which it entered with a hiss, as if the blade were hot), then reached a long hand inside his coat and produced from it his silver pistol—the same he had used to kill the captain. This he raised with a straight arm, pointing it not at my heart, or at Scotland, but between and beyond us—at Scotland’s wife. It was simple cruelty that made him do this, because he knew the grief it would cause.

  Scotland’s misery began as Stone squeezed the trigger; he saw immediately what must happen. Therefore, instead of flinching or leaping aside, he turned around to discover what he already knew—his wife straight on her back in the waves. His wife with the waves splashing over her, making a continuous rocking movement, such as might send a child to sleep. The spirals of her hair swayed lazily about her face. Her blood, too, where it flowed from her breast.

  I saw this in the second before I also saw Scotland run out to her, kneel, heave her upright and dripping, and begin calling her name. It was a terrible, loud wail; the saddest sound I ever heard. And the sound of it was all I needed then, to make me begin laboring up the slope toward Stone. I thought he would be reloading his pistol, or at least be pulling his sword from the sand, to send me on my way to the afterlife by one means or the other. In fact he seemed not in the least bothered with me, or with what he had just accomplished. He was staring over our heads and out to sea—not in the direction of the jolly-boat, and not toward the Nightingale either, but toward the feathery mound of the White Rock, which lay midway between our shore and Skeleton Island.

  It was the only time I saw his expression change—his blank mask melting like wax and wrinkling into a grimace. Blood surged into his cheeks and along the scar around his throat, so that it seemed like a fresh wound. “Smirke!” he called, in a high-pitched whisper. “Smirke! Smirke!” Further along the sand, his captain broke away from Bo’sun Kirkby, and looked where his lieutenant was pointing—and also changed color like a chameleon.

  “Mr. Stone,” he called back in an unsteady voice. “With me! With me!” As soon as the order was given, they both galloped away from us, disappearing across the rice fields and into the undergrowth that lay alongside the stream whose current had delayed our friends.

  31

  On the White Rock

  MY RELIEF AT seeing Smirke and Stone disappear was so great—and all the greater when their subordina
tes from the Achilles also spun on their heels and followed them into the undergrowth—I did not yet ask what had suddenly provoked them. Only when I was sure they were gone, and we were no longer in immediate danger, did I begin looking out to sea and searching for an answer. For a moment I saw nothing but the gray sea and the Nightingale. Then I looked again toward the White Rock. Then I saw the ferns crowning the White Rock. Then I saw a shadow among these ferns. Then I saw this shadow harden into a shape. Then I saw the shape change into a person. Then I saw the person had a face. Then I saw the face had eyes and a nose and a mouth. Then I saw Natty.

  My first thought was: it must be a vision. A compensation for the fright and giddiness of battle. I shielded my eyes to look more clearly and be sure. Not even this could convince me entirely, given the dimness of the day and the distance between us—until I remembered the pirates’ look of astonishment. They were aghast because they also thought Natty was dead. Their surprise was proof of her life.

  My first instinct was natural enough—to shout her name, to point, to leap up and down on the sand, to open my arms toward her and show her the happiness I felt. But I stopped myself. The ghost of the captain still stalked about my heart, and made anything like rejoicing seem unnatural. Unkind to Scotland as well, who was still kneeling in the water beside his wife, touching her face and hair and murmuring words she could not hear.

  This sight, coming so soon after my glimpse of Natty, brought sorrow and delight so strongly together in my mind, I felt rooted to the ground. But to tell the truth, I never doubted where I must turn first. After hesitating for only a minute, I splashed out through the waves to help Scotland carry his wife onto dry land. I did not so much as mention Natty. Instead, and with as much dignity as possible, we took the weight of the dead woman, and raised her, and came ashore, and laid out the body on the sand while our friends gathered around us in a tight group. Scotland held his wife by the hand and ran his fingers up and down her own, as though he might be able to preserve the warmth in them.