The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  The zambo was starting to moan, a moan which turned into a shriek as Billy gently pushed the end of his blade into the second Negro’s eye. The humming from the woods now had loud human shrieks within it, as of women dying in the trees. One of the Brethren leaned away and was sick, and then, like all his fellows, he looked back into the trees in terror, as if something with claws and teeth was about to burst out onto the beach. The Negro screamed and screamed, the zambo screaming with him, and the quartermaster smiled, as if just noticing the zambo again. He flashed his knife across the Negro’s neck, and once again cut it down to the bone. More blood spurted into his face. He leaned into the zambo, dark drops falling from his chin into the sand.

  “Now,” he said. “Now, you. Are you going to help me get what I want, or am I going to cut your skin from your bones?”

  The zambo was gibbering, but one word could be made out.

  “Sí . . . sí . . . sí . . .”

  The quartermaster stood and wiped the blade of his knife on his rough cotton trousers. He looked back into the woods, which were now suddenly almost silent, only speaking in whispers as the breeze moved through the leaves. Billy looked at Sharp again, and smiled that empty smile. He pulled out a purse, and from his purse he pulled out a coin, a piece of eight. He flicked it into the air, and it landed on the body of the first Negro he’d killed. No one moved to pick it up.

  They took the zambo back to the flotilla.

  The following night, under the zambo’s direction, they beached their boats three miles outside Portobelo, and the final march by land began.

  Caridad was woken up from a dream of jaguars in the woods by her father shouting and stamping around outside her bedroom door. She was wide awake in an instant. Her father’s noise was unusual enough, but even more arresting were the sounds from outside the little house which she had heard immediately upon waking. She clambered over her bed to the window to look down into the street, ignoring the protests as she trampled over her two sisters who were still dozing beneath the covers.

  Outside in the street people were rushing out of their homes and shouting, but in a funny way, like they were still half asleep. She laughed to herself as the old man who ran the tavern across the street lurched out of his front door still in a nightshirt. How extraordinary, to see an old man outside in his night clothes! What on earth could be happening?

  Her two sisters joined her at the window, chattering with excitement. Their father was still shouting as he clattered down the stairs and their mother burst through the bedroom door, her hair in disarray. She dissolved into sudden tears when she saw the three girls clustered at the window and swooped down upon them, her arms stretched wide to gather them up.

  “Quick, we must hide, we must hide.”

  She squeezed them tight, weeping and speaking of strange men and imminent danger, and Caridad wondered how this was supposed to help, if indeed there was somebody coming to seize them. She wriggled out from under her mother’s arm (Josefina and Perlita remained where they were, crying in sympathy with their mother now, no longer excited by the commotion in the street), and went back to the window.

  She got there in time to see her father burst out of their front door, his musket in his hands. He rushed down the street, glancing back once at his family, seeing Caridad looking back at him. He raised his gun above his head, waved at her with his other hand and shouted—“Caridad! Be my brave one!”—before disappearing into the stream of men which was making its way down to the fort at the edge of the river. She felt her heart surge with pride and excitement, and filed the image of her heroic father disappearing into the crowd for a later painting.

  Caridad saw what was happening. The forts of Portobelo—the new one, still being built and unnamed, and Santiago Castle, the big fearsome place out toward the mouth of the river—were manned by only a few full-time soldiers. Most men in the town bore some responsibility for assisting those soldiers in times of crisis, and her father the grocer was one of the part-time guards. Someone had raised an alarm, and now the men were running toward the fort to fight off whoever or whatever was out there.

  Her mother and sisters were still sobbing behind her. Caridad thought about going out into the street to find out what was happening. This kind of alarm wasn’t at all unusual—whenever a strange ship was seen off the estuary, the people of the town would prepare themselves, and her mother would sob and worry herself about “strange men.” Portobelo was a rich place, Caridad understood, one of the richest places in Greater Spain, and while she was too young to understand what this meant, she saw its results all around her: the tension during the weeks of the treasure ships; the carts piled high with silver and cob coins coming down from the fabled Potosí. And these moments of running and tension, when the town seemed to fear for itself without truly believing it was in any real danger. It was like the games the boys played after school, all this running around and shouting and shoving. Games she always tried to join, and which were always forbidden to her.

  “Can I go out, mama?” she asked, not turning away from the window. There was a break in her mother’s sobbing, and she did look round then, and saw that old sign of disbelief in her mother’s eyes, like she was a stranger’s child that had been accidentally left in the house. Her mother shook her head, open-mouthed, before resuming her position, head bowed, sobbing along with her two other daughters. Caridad sighed, and looked back out of the window.

  Up and down the dusty street, women, children, and old men—those left behind by the exodus to the forts—were throwing their shutters closed and barricading their doors. There were slamming sounds from all around, and shouts from mothers to children. She saw one boy—she thought it was Hilario, the naughtiest boy in their school—running down the street toward the fort, and she thought she could hear the echo of Hilario’s mother shouting after him, begging him to come home.

  A few minutes of silence. Caridad began to wonder if this was really some kind of pretend game, perhaps a way of practicing for a real invasion, when suddenly there was an enormous BOOM from down by the river, followed by an echoing splash of water. It made her jump, that gigantic sound, and her mother and sisters sobbed even louder. Similar cries of fear could be heard from behind the closed shutters of the other houses. Only a few windows were open now, and most of them had a child of about Caridad’s age in them, looking out excitedly into the street.

  Another moment of silence followed, but then came an even more fearful noise, as a great company of men began shouting and, Caridad thought, laughing. It was a devilish sound, as if a company of demons had disgorged itself onto the shoreline and was even now firing up cauldrons and sharpening tridents, preparing to throw the locals into the inferno. For the first time, she felt afraid. Even her sisters and mother became silent as they listened to that terrible din.

  She heard musket fire behind the shouting and laughing, and saw torches dancing their way up from the river and into the town itself, followed by more of that alien shouting and laughter. There were screams from behind the shutters now, and the angry shouts of old men who sounded desperate to be out there, in the fight, face-to-face with the invading demons. Caridad thought of her father, and silently prayed that he was safe within one of the forts, firing his musket down into the demons below, perhaps sending them into the next world with a bullet of lead between their horns.

  The first demons appeared in the street beneath the dancing torches, scruffy demons who looked like they hadn’t eaten properly or washed in weeks. A few dozen of them ran from house to house, apparently randomly, shouting and laughing and smashing in the occasional door. They would rush into these unlucky houses, and Caridad could hear screams and shouts from within, and then the men would emerge with various bits of treasure—jewelry, plate, clothes—in their arms, dragging behind them the occupants and proceeding, cackling, back down the street to stash their gains and their prisoners. Or perhaps they meant to kill them? Caridad frowned at this puzzle. Why not kill them then and there? W
here were they taking them?

  Somehow, they missed Caridad’s house in this first frenzy, and she was careful to hide herself every time one of the demons looked up at the window, unwilling to draw attention to herself. Her mother, hearing the noises outside, whispered fiercely at her to step away from the open window, but Caridad ignored her, as was her wont. For perhaps fifteen minutes the invading demons busied themselves with most of the other houses on the street, but then it came—a knock at their window, a shout, and she could look down on three or four of them as they tried to get in through the heavy front door. She thought about dropping something on their heads, but then with a rip their door gave way, and the demons were inside.

  Portobelo was taken almost without a fight. Most of the townspeople, including its mayor and other dignitaries, were dragged from their homes, spluttering with dismay and astonished by the sudden appearance of Anglo-Saxons. The invaders simply ignored the massive Santiago Fort just outside the town, and the defenders inside the fort fired only a single cannonball into the sea, which did nothing but make Morgan’s buccaneers laugh delightedly at their ineptitude.

  As well as seizing the place’s riches, Morgan planned to ransom the townspeople, so there were strict orders to leave the people unharmed. The locals were taken from their homes and poured into the town’s new jail, where they were forced to listen to the sound of New Spain’s silvery entrepàt being emptied of its abundance.

  Sharp and the other Ironsides went in search of Prince Maurice. It took less than an hour to find the Brethren prisoners from Providence, still in chains in a decrepit old dungeon beneath an empty armory. It was immediately clear that the prince wasn’t there; some of the prisoners claimed that a “great man” who had been taken in Puerto Rico had been removed from their prison months before and taken to Peru. There was to be no Roundhead revenge in Portobelo.

  The Ironsides freed the English prisoners and rejoined the main body of the Brethren, which had by now gathered near the still dangerous Santiago Fort. The town was in their hands, but the fort remained. To get the full fleet into the harbor to remove Portobelo’s riches Morgan needed to secure the place, but the walls were impenetrable, and a determined force of local men remained within.

  The Brethren were hunkered down on the beach near the fort, behind a motley collection of fishing boats, rocks, and sheds. Most were looking expectantly at their admiral, who stood with the quartermaster just a little up the beach, sheltered from the guns of the fort by the hull of an old pinnace which had been dragged onto the shore. The quartermaster was talking urgently into Morgan’s ear, gesticulating toward the fort. Morgan was saying nothing, and for a while the Brethren’s excitement and good cheer were tempered by the sight of their admiral’s indecision. The quartermaster grew more and more animated. Eventually, Morgan snapped something at the quartermaster and then turned his back on him and stomped toward the Brethren. He approached Sharp and the old Ironsides.

  “He wants you,” said the admiral. “Do whatever he says.”

  And then Morgan walked away.

  Caridad burned with frustration. They were crowded into a windowless room inside Portobelo’s jail. She could see nothing, couldn’t even hear that much—the walls were thick, and all that came through them was the occasional crack of a musket shot, presumably from somewhere close to the jail. There were no shouts, no demonic laughter. In fact, everything was drowned out by the endless sobbing of the women and children in the jail. Where did they find the tears, to cry so much?

  She wondered where her father was. She hoped he had killed some of the demons. She was sure he had—he was without doubt the best shot with a musket in the town, a fact she had asserted with some physical force during a smart fight with Hilario only two weeks before.

  With that thought, Hilario himself appeared at the bars of the cell, and seeing her he shouted excitedly.

  “Caridad! They’re taking us out!”

  Hilario was standing with a half-dozen other children, all of whom she knew from school. Behind them stood a man she recognized even though she could not see his face: the schoolteacher, Gonzalez, with whom she’d struggled incessantly for two years now. He was a young man, who’d come fresh from Madrid with high ideals, but whose stuck-up ways and obvious dislike for the hard colonial life made him a figure of fun and contempt among the schoolchildren. Caridad hated him, but for now she could only feel something like sympathy.

  Gonzalez looked terrible. He was held up by two fierce-looking demons, who wore odd-looking round helmets and fearsome chest plates. The teacher’s face was sunk down upon his chest. Another demon wearing the same armor as the first two, with a terribly scarred face, stood next to them, and behind this little group stood a fourth, young and tall with dark black hair, who stared into the cell with hooded eyes which made Caridad shiver and think of the dream of nighttime jaguars which had been interrupted by the arrival of the demons.

  This tall figure muttered something at the schoolteacher, in the strange language of the demons. His voice was quiet but everyone fell silent when they heard it. It had an unsettling quality.

  The schoolteacher raised his head, and several of the women gasped as his eyes met theirs. His face was empty, as if all the energy within him had been drained away. The eyes gazed into the cell, but they were flat, unseeing. Only when they fell on Caridad did they show a flicker of humanity.

  “Her,” said Gonzalez. “Her, and her sisters. God forgive me.”

  The scarred demon took some keys, opened the cell door, and grabbed for Caridad and her sisters. Their mother screamed and jumped up to scratch at his face, but he shoved her back into the throng of sobbing bodies and pulled the three girls out. The other two armored demons shoved the schoolteacher into the cell, where some of the women moved toward his prone body, as if determined to hurt him. The demons, now with nine children, marched out of the jail.

  In procession they made their way to the fort. Caridad’s sisters were crying, but quietly, as if they were terrified they would be punished for making a noise. Hilario burbled away in Caridad’s ear.

  “I reckon they’re taking us back to our fathers,” he said.

  Caridad frowned at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look who’s here. Me, you, your sisters, Cristóbal and Diego there, their old man’s a guard at the fort . . .”

  “You mean, all nine of us have got fathers who work at the Santiago?”

  “Looks like it to me.”

  “Oh.”

  Caridad looked at her sisters, and for the first time in her young life she understood the fear they always seemed to feel.

  They approached the beach, and there Caridad saw dozens of the demons, most of them hunkered down behind boats and other obstacles, watching the group approach and then stop. It was quiet on the beach, deathly quiet. No guns were firing, and up ahead, rising up at the water’s edge, was the stone face of the Santiago. Caridad could see the heads of men moving up there, and wondered if one of them was her father.

  There was a shout from the fort, but no response from the Brethren on the beach. Caridad felt strong arms grab her beneath the armpits, and she was lifted up by someone impossibly strong and held in the air before him as he started to walk down the beach. He spoke to her then, in her own language, and she heard a humming sound in the air, and the words he spoke were the worst things she had ever heard:

  “Be still, little one. You are beyond rescue.”

  From behind her, she heard Hilario shout something, and her sisters scream. She expected they were being lifted and carried, just like her.

  Without warning, a volley of shots was fired down from the Santiago, crashing into the water which lapped the shore. Caridad felt something hot and agonizing flower in her chest, barely ten years old, and just before she died she heard a familiar sound from the ramparts above them: the sound of her father shouting again, shrieking really, his distraught words the loudest sound in the world.

  �
�No! My brave one! Oh, in God’s name, stop firing!”

  That night the Brethren celebrated. They would bleed Portobelo and its hinterlands dry over the coming days, and Morgan would negotiate a ransom with the governor of Panama which would see Spain pay handsomely for the return of her stronghold and her people. It would be a triumph, Morgan’s greatest triumph, but for now the Brethren contented themselves with drinking Portobelo’s fine brandy and eating its fine food. The women were largely left alone, as was their custom.

  Sin stalked Portobelo that night, and Sharp shrank from it. He watched his fellow Ironsides fall, one by one, into their cups. He took his prayer book into a small deserted house, climbed up to the first floor, and knelt down beneath a window which looked up at a starry, clear South American sky. The householder would have been a Catholic, but Sharp prepared his own simple Protestant ceremony in this undecorated room. He prayed for his immortal soul, the memory of the dying children who’d shielded them hot in his head, the terror of that humming in the trees thrumming in his memory. There had been evil on that beach and evil in the town that night, and Peter Sharp could smell it on him. He washed himself in prayer.

  Wrapped up in contemplation, he did not hear the steady feet on the stair, nor did he see the moonlight shadow of the shape appear on the wall beside him. He was allowed to finish his prayer. Only when he had done so did the quartermaster speak.

  “Did he answer?”

  Sharp stood up quickly, turning toward the voice, his hand on his bloody sword. The quartermaster stood at the door of the room, his pale face floating in moonlit gloom. He was smiling.

  The question was asked again.

  “Did he answer?”

  “He answers every day,” said Sharp, in a whisper.

  “He does, does he? You hear his voice?”

  The voice was ghostly and dry, like the dusty remnants of a dead, desiccated bird. Sharp said nothing, waiting. His legs and arms shook, quivering with anticipation.