by Gene Wolfe
He still would not do it, so I said, "Sign it. Sign it now. That will save a lot of bloodshed." It was in French and he did not understand it, but Azuka interpreted for us like she had before and pulled her finger across her neck. When she did that, he signed.
I borrowed his pen and wrote across the bottom of the paper that as Azuka's new owner I freed her. I wrote that in French, signed it, and read it to her.
"I am free?"
I said, "You sure are," and handed her the paper.
"But where will I go, Captain? What will I do?"
"You're a free woman," I told her. "You can do whatever you want to, and go wherever you want to."
"Then I go with you," she said, and took my arm.
I yelled, "Estrellita, don't!," because she was pulling one of the little brass pistols off her belt. I do not believe just yelling would have stopped her, but I caught hold of her pistol and that did.
"What are you going to do now?" she yelled. "Flog me?"
I kissed her instead, and took my time about it.
Pretty soon after that all of us walked back to the longboat. I got everybody together and explained that Azuka had been in the crew of a ship I had before, and was one of our crew now. Anything she did willingly with any of them was between him and her, and I made sure everyone understood that. Then I explained that if anybody forced her, the rest of us were going to be very, very unhappy about it.
"We're all one family," I said, "the Brothers of the Coast."
That got nods and yells.
"We're brothers, and I'm the capo, the head of our family. Part of my job is seeing to it that my brothers treat each other the way brothers ought to, that nobody gets cheated and nobody gets picked on. I'm going to do that, and it would be good for everybody to remember it. It doesn't just protect Azuka here, it protects every person on board our ship."
Nobody wanted to argue, but Griz wanted to know what she was going to do.
"She'll be working with Estrellita," I told him, "and that means the two of them will do whatever I tell them to-fight, cook, make sail, nurse the wounded. Whatever I say."
Simoneau said women could not fight, and both those little brass pistols were pointed at him a lot faster than one had been pointed at me.
I yelled, "Hold it! We can't start fighting among ourselves like this. We're toast as soon as it starts. You know how I fought Yancy. If you two want to fight like that, we'll find you a little island-there's a hundred of them around here."
When I said that, Simoneau muttered something about not fighting a woman and turned away, and the whole thing blew over.
The funny thing was that the two women got to be friends, but they were always jealous of each other. Men can do the same thing, I know. Sure, they like each other, but there is a certain rivalry. I think Azuka may have made it with some of the guys in the crew, and I know with Jarden, who was pretty good-looking. I also know Novia did not, that I was the only one she ever slept with.
Or anyway, that is what I think.
12
Our First Capture
Sunday afternoons are always slow at the Youth Center, probably because kids who have not touched their homework all weekend are trying to catch up. That was yesterday, and Fr. Phil offered to Phil in for me. (His joke.) That gave me a chance to poke around the library for a few hours. Writing about Novia and Azuka the way I did on Saturday got me to wondering about women pirates, sailors, and so forth. I thought maybe we were the only ones who ever did that, and I wanted to see.
It turns out there were quite a few. Mary Read and Anne Bonney are the famous ones, but there were others. Her captain called Mary Anne Arnold the best sailor on his ship. Grace O'Malley and a mysterious Chinese lady known as Mrs. Cheng were pirate captains, both of them. Some pirate crews had a special rule-NO GIRLS-just like a bunch of little boys playing in a tree house. When I read about it I wanted to say, "Oh, grow up!"
Well, I had two of them, just like Calico Jack Rackam. Back then I thought I knew how Novia had come on board, but I was as curious as anybody would be about Azuka. When I asked whether Lesage had sold her, she said he had and cried. I let a few days pass and tried to find out what happened again, and she cried just like before. So you can say, if you want to, that I never did find out.
In another way, I did. I wanted to know whether Lesage had sold her because he got tired of her or because he had to have the money. But it had to be both. A man who loved a woman would never sell her, no matter how badly he needed the money. And a man who owned a woman and was tired of her would always find out he needed the money sooner or later. Mostly it would be sooner.
Since I have been ordained, I have spent quite a bit of time counseling people. I would say offhand that it has been about forty percent men and boys, sixty percent women and girls. Even if that is not quite right, there have been plenty of both. A man cannot sell his wife, and a wife cannot sell her husband. But I have talked to a good many husbands and wives who would if they could, and cheap. Teenage girls would buy certain boys, too, if they could. And the teenage boys would let them, pretty often for a paper clip and a stick of gum. They do not say that, but when I have talked with them once or twice I know.
The pirate books I found in the library are not as bad as I had expected. They do not tell you what it was really like, but they cannot be blamed for that, since the people who wrote them did not know. I know what it was like for me, and that is why I am writing this. (You have to know to understand why I murdered Michet.)
Things I have seen on TV have not been nearly as good. One thing I have noticed particularly is that the pirate ships look like big navy ships and fight the same way. I never saw a pirate ship as big as a Spanish galleon, and we never opened fire on a Spanish ship unless we had to. Once the cannons open up, ships get trashed in a hurry, and a lot of people get killed. We never wanted the ship we were taking to get smashed up. We wanted to sail it someplace and sell it. Getting our own smashed up would have been ten times worse, especially when it was the Magdelena, which was poison fast once her bottom was clean, and just the right size.
We did not want people killed either-not us and not them. There was always a chance that a Spanish ship would have people we could use on it, a carpenter, a surgeon, or whatever. If they had hidden their money, they could be scared into telling us where, but only if they were still alive.
You take the Rosa, which was the first ship we took. She mounted ten little guns, about four-pounders. We were flying the Spanish flag, and I hailed her in Spanish. When we got close, we ran out our guns and ran up the black flag. I told her to surrender, or we would blow her out of the water.
Which is what we would have done as soon as her gunports opened.
She surrendered, and we grappled her and boarded. I had more than fifty men, and every man had a musket and a cutlass. That was the minimum. Most of them carried the big butcher knives they had used on Hispaniola, too, and some had pistols. I had two pistols, my dagger, and the long Spanish sword. But all that was just for show-I knew I would not have to use them. They had twenty-one counting the captain. What chance would they have had if they had fought us?
I got them all together and told them the truth-we were buccaneers, and their king had treated us like dirt. We could not make an honest living anymore, so we were doing this. Since they had given up without a fight, I would let them take the boats. I would even let them take food and water, if they would tell me where the money was.
They said they did not have any, and there were too many to go in the boats.
I said, "In that case the boats will sink. I don't care because I won't be on them. The rest of you can lighten them by joining us, maybe. Anybody want to apply for a job?"
For a minute it looked like nobody did. Then somebody in back said, "Captain! Captain!"
I thought he was talking to me, but he meant the Spanish captain. He was a black man, average size, who looked like his life had been pretty rough lately. He said, "Me stay ship,
Captain? One not in boat."
The Spanish captain said no.
I asked the black man if he was the captain's slave, and when he said yes, I explained that he was free now. We had taken the captain's ship, so everything he had belonged to us. That made him our slave, and we freed him. If he wanted to join us, he could.
The Spanish captain looked like he wanted to kill me, but had sense enough to keep his mouth shut.
"You make joke?"
I shook my head. "You want to be a pirate? Fine!" I slapped his back. "Welcome to our crew." I took one of my pistols out of the sling and handed it to him. "You're a pirate."
He took it and turned. He must have cocked it as he turned, because it was very quick-turn and bang! He shot the Spanish captain, so that was two fewer in the boats.
When the rest of the Spaniards were gone, we held a meeting and decided to sail the prize to Port Royal, sell it, and split the money. I made Jarden prize captain and kept the black man on the Rosa, since he knew how she sailed already. His name was Mzwilili, but I generally thought of him as Willy and sometimes I called him that. A lot of guys look tougher than they are. Willy was tougher than he looked, something you do not see a lot of.
"You sent him away because you were afraid he would take me," Azuka said, and pouted. She was supposed to be helping with a new dress.
I shook my head. "That's between you and him."
"Also the sea. Much sea between us, because of you."
"Okay, I'll send you over in the jolly."
At that, Novia laughed and stabbed the cloth with her needle.
"I will not have you to protect me there, Chris."
"Willy will protect you."
"He is new man." Azuka giggled. "All will be against us."
I sat down and grinned at her. "I can see you're worried sick."
"I am not worried, because you will not send me away. I can make you happy every day. Estrellita will not do that."
Novia said, "There are knives enough on this ship for both of you." She had not looked up from her sewing.
"Sure," I said. "I've got one already."
The sewing dropped into her lap. "For your backs, imbeciles!"
"That does it," I told Azuka. "I'm sending you over tomorrow morning. Now get out of here."
In the morning the Rosa was nowhere in sight. I talked it over with Rombeau and Dubec. Both of them said she was probably ahead of us. Rombeau said that Jarden was the impetuous type and had probably sailed harder that night than he and Dubec had. Dubec thought Jarden was probably going to try to beat us to Port Royal, sell the Rosa, and split with the money. Both of them said we ought to set more sail and catch up.
I thought it over and ordered all sails furled. I had two good reasons, and I have generally found that if you can think of two good reasons for doing something you ought to do it.
The first was that I wanted to make one of my jib sails for the Magdelena like we had on the Windward, only bigger. It had worked fine and given us more speed, and I could not see a single reason why it would not work on Magdelena, too. As unhandy as our crew was, I did not want to have a lot of sailcloth laid out on deck and half the watch working on that while we were under sail, but this would give me a fine chance to get one made and bent.
The second was that I knew that even without a jib, the Magdelena could sail rings around the Rosa. Magdelena was built for speed and had a clean bottom now. Rosa was built to carry freight and to sail with a small crew. If Rosa had fallen behind us, she would catch up in three or four hours, tops. If she had gotten ahead, well, we were still a couple of days out of Port Royal. Maybe more. We could wait until noon and still get there before Rosa did.
The sea was not dead calm, as I remember, but you had to look for the chop to notice one. I explained my jib design to Rombeau and told him how well it had worked, and he got his watch to making one. Dubec pointed out that there was a stay on the mainmast, too. If the jib worked on the foremast stay, what about putting a sail on the mainmast stay? I said that was a great idea-which it was-and promised we would try it.
Sure enough, here came the Rosa about the middle of the morning. When she was close enough, Jarden hailed us and said there was somebody on board I might want to talk to. Should he send him over?
I said, "No, I'll come over myself, and you'd better furl all sails so as not to get ahead of us."
This time I had four reasons for deciding the way I did. If you ever read this far, you will have guessed the first already. I wanted to take Azuka over before she and Novia really got into it.
The second was that I wanted to talk to Jarden about keeping up and hoisting lanterns and so forth. And the third was that I wanted to give the watch time to finish my jib.
The fourth was probably the most important of all: I wanted to find out what was going on. We had let the Spanish crew have all Rosa's boats when we had captured her, so how was Jarden planning to send anybody over to me?
When we got there, there was a boat bottom up on the forward hatch. Jarden had a guy I had never seen before up on the quarterdeck with him. He was short and stocky and had a bristly gray beard and the look of a man who had done quite a few things in his life. "This is Antonio," Jarden told me. "He says he is not Spanish but Portuguese. He wants to make one with us."
I shrugged. "Maybe we can use him. Where'd you find him?"
"He was in that boat you were looking at, Captain. There were five others in there with them, all Spanish. They were out of water. I got them on board and gave them some."
I asked Antonio whether he understood French, and when he said, "Un peu," I asked him to talk some Portuguese.
He did, telling me where he was from and his family and so forth. I do not know Portuguese, but it was near enough to Spanish that I could guess at most of it. And I could certainly tell that it was not some made-up gibberish but a real language he knew well.
So I said, "That's Portuguese all right. Now let's hear your Spanish."
His Spanish was not as good-better than his French, but I could tell he had not grown up talking like that. After that I asked Jarden where the rest of the Spanish were, and he said he had killed them and thrown them over the side.
I felt bad about it and I still do. I had just been hit with one problem, and now I had two. The new one was that I wanted to give Jarden what for in a mild and good-mannered sort of way-you know, three Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. I could not do that up on his own quarterdeck with Azuka and eight or ten of his men in earshot.
The other problem, about five seconds older, was that I wanted to talk to Antonio quite a bit, and it was pretty clear that I was going to have to talk Spanish to him if I wanted to learn much. It would not be too bad for Jarden to hear me rattling away in Spanish, but I did not want his crew to. If they got to thinking I was really Spanish, they would get that across to my crew pretty quick. When they did that, I would be in the soup.
So I told Jarden I wanted to talk to him and Antonio in the captain's cabin. It turned out to be one of the worst ideas I have ever had, but that is what I did. If I had it to do over again-well, I could use up lots of paper writing about that, but what is the use?
We went into the captain's cabin and sat down, Jarden and me on chairs and Antonio on the bunk. Azuka wanted to come in, too, but I chased her.
I started on Antonio, asking my questions in French then switching to Spanish for things he did not understand. There is no use writing down all that. Here is the gist.
"You and some Spaniards were in one boat when Captain Jarden picked you up?"
"Si, Captain."
"What happened? How did you come to be there?"
"We were taken by pirates, Captain. They spared us, putting us into that boat, but gave us only one small keg of water. We had been at sea four days and three nights when Captain Jarden took us on board."
I turned to Jarden. "Why did you take them on board if you meant to kill them? You must have known they were Spanish."
He
sighed. "I need seamen, Captain. The men I have must be shown everything. I hoped some would join us, as this one did."
"The rest refused?"
He nodded.
"They would tell you nothing?"
"Nothing of value, no."
"Did any of them speak French? How did you question them?"
"Through Antonio here. I told them quite directly that we would kill them unless they gave us the information of good and engaged with us. I do not think they believed I would do it."
"I wish you hadn't. I might have gotten something from them." I returned to Antonio. "Did they believe him? What do you think?"
He shook his head.
"Did you?"
He fingered his beard, which looked as stiff as a brush. "No, Captain."
"But you joined us anyway?"
"I thought he would return them to the boat, Captain. I had sat enough in the boat."
"You were their leader." It was a guess, from his age.
"No, Captain. Captain Lopez was."
"Who might have told us a lot. Merda di cane!"
I took a deep breath, leaned back, and made a steeple of my fingers. "Let's start at the beginning. What were you doing on a Spanish ship?"
"Working, Captain." He spread his hands. "I had no ship, and this one paid. Not well, but enough."
"Where did you come aboard?"
"At Lisboa, Captain. That is my home. The San Mateo unloaded cacao there. I came looking for a berth, and we agreed."
The way he said that had given me a hint. "You were one of the mates?"
"No, Captain. I was Sailing Master."
I had not heard of that, but it sounded good. I said, "What can you do, Sailing Master? What are your skills?"
"On a ship, Captain? Everything."
"Carpenter?"
"Si, Captain. If there is no carpenter aboard."
"Make sails?"
"If you have no sailmaker, Captain."
Jarden asked, "What of treating wounded men?"
Antonio shook his head. "No better than you, Captain."
"You cannot do everything in such a case."