Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  Through the wood and lanterns he could not see who came but he would not give them a cracked voice. He rolled his tongue about his mouth and lips and tried to swallow.

  A head peered at him from around the wood. It was a young face with a wiry red mop of hair, his collar marking him out as too smart to be the fellow sent to clean out the manger. Dandon then saw that he carried a flask and a cobble of bread and he was suddenly no longer interested in the man himself. The figure came forward stealthily, as if Dandon might suddenly explode, and held out the flask of water.

  Dandon showed his wrists.

  ‘I do not have the freedom to take it, sir.’ He wondered what trick this was. Would he be a lip away from the flask and then Coxon and Kennedy would appear and snatch it away? He behaved with that in mind.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Thomas Howard crept closer and popped the cork, a civil sound discordant with the stench and gloom and the blood.

  ‘Does that matter?’ He put the flask to Dandon’s lips and tipped it, careful not to flood his mouth, and Dandon no longer cared about the honour of the prisoner and sucked greedily. The bread next. Howard tore it and fed him through the chains, past the smell of blistered flesh.

  ‘My thanks, sir,’ Dandon said, wary still. ‘But you should go. Your punishment will be great.’

  ‘I have been ordered to attend,’ Howard said.

  ‘That is not true.’

  Howard felt himself blush at the words.

  ‘Then perhaps I do not like to see men starve.’

  ‘Even pirates? That’s very enlightened for an officer. You will not go far.’

  A regret for his compassion flared up Howard’s neck and he tossed the rest of the bread to the goats.

  Dandon lowered his head. He had only meant his words to turn the young man away from a situation that would not go well for either if chanced upon.

  ‘That is more like it,’ he said. ‘Don’t let your captain down.’

  ‘I have been a fool,’ Howard said. He took a pebble from a pocket. ‘All the same, keep this under your tongue and roll it in your mouth.’ Dandon did not protest and took it like a pill. ‘You are not as thirsty as you think and that will stave off your thirst.’ He turned and ducked away.

  Dandon aimed his words to the back weaving away through the supports.

  ‘Thank you, Thomas,’ he said.

  Howard’s head appeared from the last wooden pillar.

  ‘You do know me?’

  ‘I do now. Such a flurry of red hair I could hardly forget. And I remember, Thomas Howard.’ He leant towards him as best he could.

  ‘You have become a good man. Now go, before you are in as much trouble as me.’

  Howard saluted automatically and then blushed at his foolishness. He bounded up the stair.

  Dandon, revived briefly, surmised his lot and calculated how his fortunes were improving incrementally despite his empty pockets and dirty clothes.

  Manvell he had seen disapprove of Coxon openly and now came little Thomas Howard – or rather not so little – now an officer and yet feeding a prisoner ordered to starve. These were things he could use. Pebbles, one by one to build a dam, he thought, and he rolled the actual pebble around his mouth.

  The peril of others had been to underestimate and dismiss Dandon in the past, and he schemed now. Not callously or wickedly, but for survival. Devlin himself had gone on so long and so well not because of who he was . . . but because of who he was not.

  They had looked at Devlin’s shabby coat but not seen all the others, taken from those considered worthier, which he carried in his locker.

  Only Coxon was the sputtering fuse. Coxon knew. Coxon did not judge by size of snake but by speckled band. But Coxon had let a pirate onto his ship – two pirates – for Kennedy was the rotten tooth lurking behind Coxon’s shining fronts.

  Dandon sucked on his pebble. He whistled at the goats and pigs like he owned them. They chewed on his bread with pricked ears. He settled himself into the ship’s movement.

  This would be a better day.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dan Teague and Adam Cowrie manned the boat from the Shadow. Told of the priest’s betrayal, they now rowed the others to the islet hard, despite and also because of the heat, for the heat sharpened all their hate. Five of them now. Five pirates against an Irish missionary.

  O’Neill must be insane, Devlin thought, or had become part of that small percentage of holy men who turn devotion into obsession. He remembered Coxon once telling him of a Benedictine who in hermitage spent thirty years creating a three-foot tall Bible. At some point in his lonely task that monk chose to ink a massive image of the Devil on one folio and an image of heaven on the opposing page. He was mad by that time, Coxon had suggested, the monk being probably fifteen years into his task.

  O’Neill’s passion for the fragment of the cross handed down from his ancestor had surely given him a taste for martyrdom. Why would any man willingly affront pirates unless he designed to enter heaven?

  Devlin worked for gold and for those who had signed behind him and for those who had voted him theirs. Four years their captain. Kings had reigned for less.

  Only a madman could see worth in a sliver of wood, unless he were Midas. And that would be O’Neill’s only hope now. Yet there was something enviable in a man daring so much for so little.

  ‘Be ready,’ Devlin said as they came to the beach.

  ‘Where’s the boat?’ Dan Teague said it for all of them. Teague was one of the old-standers from before Devlin’s time. A broad Norfolk man with more farm than sail in him and a passion for blood as limitless as Hugh Harris’s. At times Devlin loathed them for their lusts, at others it was all he relied on.

  Devlin looked about. White sand, the surf barely discernible against it. Dead, bone-like wood sprung out from all about. Whole trees had been tossed to lie there. Behind this tide of white bone were the living palms. They nodded morosely in groups of three, angled to the sea. One of them had tipped upright back into the jungle. Its base of roots exposed like a nest of worms and snakes. You could hide men behind it.

  The white wood, the ripped tree. There were storms in this paradise. Fast storms.

  Beyond the palms an impenetrable wall of green faced them. They walked the beach. There were huge white boulders strewn as if thrown by a giant of the peak above them, cast down to destroy Argonauts for disrupting his thousand-year peace.

  It was beautiful, Devlin could see that, but an inhospitable beauty, like a desert. Isolation. The empty room. The dead man found alone in his bed.

  ‘No footsteps save ours,’ Peter Sam sang out.

  Devlin called back. ‘He landed somewhere else. Did you want him to see us coming?’

  Peter Sam scowled and trudged along the sand to survey further along the coast.

  Hugh Harris turned to the island behind them, now a kingdom green and rolling as far as he could see.

  ‘We were on that?’ His voice went high. ‘Is that India?’

  Devlin drew his hanger and slapped it in his palm. They turned at the sound.

  ‘Our work,’ he said. ‘There’s gold here.’ He hacked his first steps through the green without looking back.

  They followed, just as they always had and would, until the day came that he let them down. No iniquity in that. Devlin had signed for that day.

  He delayed that day only with moments. Moments that became hours. Hours that became stories. Stories that became songs.

  Up, was Devlin’s plan. Up and measure their world as they always did, as they plotted across the earth from a ship’s table.

  Go high enough to see the ocean all around, see where your oak girl could go, where she could run. See where your foot and your sword could reach and where men might be hiding. Hiding from them. Hiding was the word, for that would be it.

  Nobody ever sat and waited for pirates.

  The island had one great peak. Too much sweat for them. Every step was a reminder of how f
ar they were from youth and how close to that tobacco chair by the fireside. If a giant rested on that peak then let him have his peace.

  An hour later and Devlin wore his sopping shirt tight as snakeskin and the air tasted thin. But he could feel the sea again and the sky began to break through the green and the others would not call a halt until he was done, so they pressed on.

  The green retreated and sand and rock pushed forth again, then puddles of light, and at last the sun. A break. The sea. A westward vista. More islands, and those white and blue shades of waters like the pearls of the Antilles; and in the scheme of God’s moulding that made some sense, for the latitude was the same.

  The others set to slaking their thirst and perched on the great white rocks. Devlin stood still, overlooking the sea, but Peter Sam knew Devlin’s pose. The only thing still was his limbs. Devlin was working, sensing all about him like a blind man feeling the breeze and asking you to close the window or light the lamp for it was dark.

  Peter Sam would be drawn into his reasoning, and he waited for the questions to come. He drank a water-bag high and missed Dandon for the first time. The dandelion popinjay was better suited for Devlin’s musings. Peter Sam just needed steel and lead standing in front of him.

  ‘Peter,’ Devlin called and Peter Sam dragged himself from the cool rock. He sidled up like a reluctant horse. This gold hunt was getting thinner and thinner. Were there not ships to be had despite Devlin’s torture of the South Sea Company that had sent merchants to the wall? Sweating and chasing ghosts was not pirates’ work. Illusory gold crosses were for crusades, not for codmen pressed in Bristol, peeled from tavern tables.

  He came to Devlin’s shoulder. ‘What?’ he said.

  Devlin pointed to the sea below, ignoring the sullen tone. ‘What you make of that?’

  Peter looked down. There was a smaller beach far below enclosed by rock, the tide beating against with a booming roar like a distant gun. Beyond that the waves, breaking as ever they had.

  ‘I see nothing,’ Peter said. ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘To the left,’ Devlin said, ‘about twenty feet from the rocks. Every third wave or so. You see them break?’

  Peter looked again and saw the anomaly. ‘A horseshoe of rocks breaking. So what?’

  Devlin watched the white shape again. ‘Does that look natural to you?’

  ‘I gave up on natural-looking things a long time ago.’ He knew when Devlin wanted to parade himself.

  ‘I say if we get down there we’ll see more rocks scattered around where it’s been broken up. I reckon that’s a sea wall. I reckon that’s a coffer-dam.’

  ‘What’s a coffer-dam?’

  ‘It’s what I would do if I wanted to hold back the tide while I moved a million pounds into a littoral cave.’

  Peter Sam’s patience with Devlin’s and Dandon’s riddles was short at best. They read their big books together long into the night yet they were not gentlemen or educated to do so. They enjoyed them, he figured, and though strange to him he would rather follow a smart man than a fool. But sometimes his own ignorance grated when Devlin spoke like this.

  ‘What the hell’s a littoral cave now?’

  Devlin patted the big man’s back. ‘I’ll show you tomorrow.’ He walked back, expecting Peter Sam to follow.

  ‘You’ll tell me now!’ Peter Sam stayed by the cliff.

  Devlin turned. His hands rested on hilt and pistol wrist.

  ‘You have a problem, Peter?’

  The others watched but pretended not to.

  ‘Aye,’ Peter Sam bid Devlin closer, face to face.

  ‘You and I both know we have no bones between us,’ Peter Sam gave out as respectfully as he could. ‘Devil knows we don’t. But these men are mine just as much as yours. If I decide this is folly it’ll all be over. You’re walking around in a dream, bewitched by these seas. You trusted that priest and now we’ve nothing. We’ve a hundred men, Patrick, who don’t eat dreams, so you’ll tell me what’s this about or . . .’

  ‘Or what?’ Devlin’s hands had not moved from their respite on their weapons.

  Peter Sam thought. Gave one wipe of his bald head.

  ‘I’ll have to do my duty by my men.’

  ‘You agreed to this, Peter. I was the one with the doubts. You persuaded.’

  ‘That’s long gone. I can feel the guts of the men. You turn up rotten out of this and neither of us will have the final say.’ He sent a hard look to the others sitting and waiting.

  ‘It’ll be best for both of us, Patrick . . . if they know I’m in with you.’

  Devlin turned to look at the pirates, their eyes boldly on both of them now.

  ‘That might be just so, Peter. Besides I’m going to need all their backs.’ He pushed Peter’s shoulder to join him and together they went to the men.

  ‘Lads,’ Devlin said, he and Peter standing over them. ‘I thank you for your hard walk. We’ll rest awhile. Let you know what we’re to do.’

  Hugh Harris threw a stone to chip and smoke against a boulder.

  ‘Hoping we’re to kill a priest,’ he said.

  Devlin drew his hanger and they flinched, instinctively reaching toward their weapons. He laughed and began to draw in the sand with its point.

  ‘There’s a formation, a shape, out there just off the shore,’ he scraped the elongated horseshoe in front of them. ‘It might not, but I think it could be a coffer-dam. Broken up, mind, to protect its secrets, but we could build it back. It’ll take a lot of us. All of us to beat the tide.’

  ‘What does it do?’ Cowrie’s voice was almost a whimper, unsure if there was danger in words like ‘coffer’ and ‘dam’ – words which sounded too uncannily much like ‘coffin’ and ‘damn’.

  He was one of the youngest of the crew but had been with Devlin in the gaol on Providence, had fought hard on the Talefan on a terrible day and had been invaluable in rescuing Devlin from Newgate. But he still feared the Lord more than the Devil. A plot to kill a priest was wrong. He had enjoyed the Sunday masses on board the Shadow.

  ‘It’s a dam, Cowrie,’ Devlin’s sketch grew more elaborate. ‘To hold back the tide while men work behind it. These islands are full of caves, some of them only sea-caves, littoral caves. They be full of water but when the tide goes back you can get to them.’ He drew a cave which, judged by the whispered giggles, reminded Dan Teague of a woman of his acquaintance.

  ‘But they’re still full of the sea. A dam will give them time to drain elsewhere. Time enough to move a million pounds of gold and jewels inside. You couldn’t bury that, but the sea could.’ He cut a waterline over the cave. ‘Levasseur. Smart man.’

  Hugh Harris studied the sand. ‘So it’s beneath us? The priest has gone to it?’

  ‘No,’ Devlin put back his blade. ‘The tide will only reveal the cave for a short time. Even then if I were La Buse I would choose a cave that no man could take a boat into. I would say there is another way in. If a cave is big enough there is always a crawling hole to get to it. That’s nature. The hole draws in the sea.’

  Peter Sam saw reason drawn in the sand and his spirit rose to the hunt again.

  ‘The priest has come ashore,’ he said, ‘and gone to this hole? Hidden the boat. So we find this hole?’

  ‘No,’ Devlin’s tone was sorry. ‘That could take months.’

  Peter Sam was at his shoulder. Again.

  ‘So what then?’

  ‘We rebuild the dam,’ Devlin said. ‘When the tide goes out.’ The pirate’s motive crawled on Devlin’s face, the rakish Irish grin they had come to know as the promise of jingling coin.

  ‘And we go in,’ he said.

  ‘Blood?’ Hugh Harris threw another stone. Devlin caught it in the air; sent it to the sea in the same movement as they gaped at his speed of hand.

  ‘There’d better be,’ he said. He wiped his ancient boots across the drawing.

  Hugh O’Neill had been a priest for thirty years. At fifteen he was sent from Ireland to serv
e his diaconate in Lisboa. It was there that the story of his ancestor’s relic first divined to him that his profession was more than just his mother’s ambition.

  The first Hugh O’Neill, the Earl O’Neill, the man who might have been king of Ireland, failed to raise a holy army to take on the English. But after his death he bequeathed to the church a gold nine-inch cross with a small glass tomb set at its heart. Visible within was a dull, dry splinter of wood that had passed through his family for hundreds of years. The Earl O’Neill believed that towing the cross behind their fleeing ship had calmed the storm that came across them and had guided him into France. It had been a miracle but his only one. It was God’s will that an army would not come to save Ireland.

  The priest O’Neill, with such a personal connection, was entrusted to take the cross to Goa and there have it set into the Cross of Fire, a gift of Indian gold from the archbishop and viceroy to King João.

  And then a pirate intervened. And miracles ended there.

  O’Neill checked above to the diminishing light. He was scrambling down a hole, kicking wet slate and stone before him. His dread was that pirate faces might appear in the mouth of daylight even though he had tossed away the black quartz stone that marked the gap. They would look for such signs. That thought carried him down and into the dark.

  It was a confining descent and he had to scrape down on his back and push himself along with his hands at his face. His breath was hard now, the stone hot all around, and then the cool blast of air and the eruption into the enormous cavern as if the tunnel had never pressed so close.

  He dropped onto the narrow outcrop, sending a rain of shingle to glisten through shafts of light as they fell to the well of water below. They splashed and rippled like excited fish.

  He crouched and looked about the place he had left over a month ago.

  A cathedral of a cave. Fifty feet above him the stone broke in places with tiny holes that shone like the piercing of stars and shimmered on the water. He pictured the hunting feet of pirates walking high over his head. Below, the lake glowed like jade and lured you to dive as all still pools captivate if you stare deeply into them for too long.