Pirate Freedom

by Gene Wolfe

  23

  J aime

  I was wrong about that. I have been trying to make myself skip this part, but that would be a kind of lie. The day before we sighted the Magdelena, we found one of my wounded sentries dead. Searching the ship got us nowhere, so after that I had two watch at a time.

  And when we met up with the Magdelena at Ile a Vache, I did one of the dumbest things I have done in my whole life. Being honest means I have to write about it, but it is not fun and I am going to keep it just as short as I can.

  I had Rombeau send Don Jose over. His hands and feet were tied, and I could have tortured him then and there, but I did not. Maybe I had the guts to do it and maybe I did not, but what was for sure was that I did not want to. I told him I had found one secret compartment on his ship, and I knew maledizione well there was another. I wanted to know where it was, and if he did not tell me, we were going to burn him with hot irons-his face, the soles of his feet, and anyplace else we thought might get him to talk.

  He said, "You may burn me, Senor. You may tear my arms off as you threaten. I cannot prevent you, but I cannot produce a second hiding place where none is."

  So what did I do? I roughed him up a little, tied him to a timber down in the hold without food or water, and told him he was going to have the rest of the day and all night to think about what we would do in the morning. And I left him there.

  In the morning he was dead, strangled just like Ben and the others. That is all I mean to write about this. WE DID A heck of a lot of work on Cow Island, and I am going to skip over just about all of it. First we shook up the crews, me getting more and Rombeau fewer. After that we really got to work, and ended up careening all three ships. The Castillo Blanco was first because I was worried about the scrape. After that we did the same thing with the Vincente. She was too good a ship to give up, and I knew-though most of the men still did not-that we would be going around the Horn with Capt. Burt. For a voyage as long as that, you want to start with everything in tip-top shape.

  And after both of those, we did Magdelena all over again, mostly because we had gotten good at it. She was smaller than the Vincente, but carried more and bigger guns, and I have got to say she was the hardest of the whole bunch.

  We got a few men on Cow Island, but not a lot. Four, I think it was. The thing was, there were not a lot there. And those who were wanted to sign on after we had careened our ships, not before. I did not want men like that, and I told them so. If they were not willing to work, I did not give a rat's rear end whether they would fight or not. I had more men now (and Azuka, who had come back with Willy when we shook up the crews), so I told Rombeau that if he wanted those guys he could have them. I do not believe he took even one of them.

  There is another thing I should say. Okay, maybe a couple. One is that he had taken no prizes. The other is that I turned loose the doctor and the others as soon as we dropped anchor, exactly like I had promised. About the time we had the Castillo Blanco up on the beach, they came back, all three in a group. For one thing they had found out that Spaniards were not really popular on that island. For another, they had not been able to find any way to get over to the Spanish side of Hispaniola. They wanted me to take them there, which of course I would not do. A day or so after that, they decided to sail to Jamaica with us. It meant we had the carpenter, which turned out to be a lucky break.

  It is not a long trip, but we ran into a calm that made it longer than it should have been. We had been going pretty much nowhere for two or three days, I think it was, when one of the wounded men came running to report that his partner had been strangled. He had left his post to use the head, and when he came back he found the body. I went down and had a look at him, and it was Pete the Hangman. I searched the ship all over again, and had Novia, Bouton, and some others search with me. No dice.

  Red Jack came early next morning with a round robin and a committee. The ship was cursed, they said. They liked me and all that. They knew how hard it was to be a good captain, and I had been a good one. But either we sold the Castillo Blanco in Port Royal or they would vote me out and put in somebody who would.

  I told them I had been thinking pretty much the same way, but I was not going to sell our problem to somebody else and get more people killed. If I was going to stay captain, we would shift everything worth moving to the Vincente and abandon the Castillo Blanco and its curse. (I said curse because they had. I knew by then that it was a stowaway, and I had a pretty good idea who it was. But if I had told them then, there would have been all sorts of trouble.)

  As it was, they just wanted to know whether I meant right now. I said bloody right, istantaneamente.

  "Today?" They wanted to be sure.

  I said, "Let's start loading the longboat. While we stand around here talking, we're just wasting time."

  They were scared, and by that time so was I, a little. If we took the Castillo Blanco to Port Royal, they were going to be on board her for another three or four days, and it could have been a week. I was offering to get them off right away, so I won.

  "What if we bring the curse in the things we are taking, Crisoforo?" Novia looked like she thought we really might.

  "There's another secret compartment on this ship," I told her. "I can't find it, but I know there is one, and that's where he is this minute. He may or may not figure out what we're doing, but he'll have to stay there just the same. He can't hide in one of the boats in broad daylight, and he's not small enough to hide in a cannon barrel or a water cask. We're going, and we're leaving him behind."

  Which is what we did. The cannon were the hardest part, as they always are. But we used the sweeps to come alongside and were able to hoist them onto the Vincente with ropes running from the mainmast of the Castillo Blanco and main yard of the Vincente. The Caribbean was as calm as glass just then, which helped a lot.

  I was the last to go, in the evening after a little breeze had sprung up. Before I left I went through the whole ship with a cocked pistol in one hand and my dagger in the other. What I yelled to the stowaway, I yelled three or four times in various places. There is no sense my giving it here more than once, because it was all the same. This is pretty much what I said in Spanish.

  "Jaime! You win! We're going, and I'm taking your wife. If you'd rather we'd stay, or you want to go with us, come out and we'll talk about it. This is a little ship, but I don't think you can handle her alone." Here I waited two or three minutes.

  "No hard feelings if you want to try. Head northwest if you can. That will take you to Cuba or New Spain. East ought to be easy. The first land you sight should be the French end of Hispaniola. We're leaving you a keg of water and half a barrel of salt pork. Good luck!"

  I was hoping he would come out and give me his hand. I knew Novia- okay, let's be formal here, I knew that Senora Sabina Guzman-did not want him anymore. She would stay with me, we would set him ashore someplace, and we'd be rid of him.

  At the same time, I was afraid he would jump me. In which case I was going to shoot him. Or whatever.

  Neither of them happened. Novia and I were the last to leave. She was crying, and I felt pretty bad, too. The Castillo Blanco was a beautiful little ship, and she had sailed like a dream. She would be called a schooner now, but we called her a two-stick sloop. When I think of her it is always in one of two ways. The first is outrunning the Lucia, jumping around among the rocks of the Canal du Sud, half the time in the surf. The other one I am about to tell you about.

  Novia and I were on the quarterdeck of the Vincente looking back at the Castillo Blanco. She had been a sort of resort hotel for us. I almost said a honeymoon hotel, and maybe I should have. Neither of us was ever going to forget her, and both of us knew that. We were holding hands and wishing things had gone differently, when we saw the first flames. That was when the fire burned through the hatch cover.

  Novia looked at me and said, "Crisoforo…?"

  "No," I said. "Absolutely not. Did you do it?"

  She just shook
her head. Later she said she thought one of the crew must have done it before he got into the longboat.

  The fire got bigger, and all of a sudden there was somebody standing on the quarterdeck. Novia screamed and pointed.

  I said, "Is that him?," and she stared for a second or two, then asked for my glass.

  She must have looked at him through it for a minute or more. Finally she took it down, slid the brass sections together again, and gave it back to me. I did not say anything more, but the question was still there, if you know what I mean.

  Finally, she said, "Yes." There were tears in her eyes.

  Rombeau came over and asked who it was, but neither of us told him anything right then. We were watching Jaime. I figured he would dive overboard any minute and start swimming, but he did not. He did not hold the wheel, or climb the rigging to get away from the fire, or in fact do anything. He just stood there. There was a big puff of flame and a roar we could hear just fine over where we were.

  When the flames died down a little, he was gone. What happened, I am pretty sure, is that the fire had burned through the quarterdeck. That was the roar we heard, and the puff of flame. When it did he fell, and it must have been like falling into a furnace.

  "I am a single woman now," Novia said, and went below. I knew she wanted to be alone, and I told myself right then that I should stay away from the cabin until pretty late.

  The first thing I did after I left was explain things to Bouton. "There are only two or three things I'm sure of," I said. "The rest is guesses. If you've got better guesses, I'd like to hear them."

  He nodded, "You will, Captain, if they find any faith with me."

  "There was a secret compartment in that ship. I showed it to you the night we got Estrellita to come out of it. There was another one, too, one we never found. One I couldn't find even when I knew I was looking for a secret compartment."

  "For what purpose?"

  I shrugged. "Smuggling, maybe. Have you got a better idea?"

  "I have no idea at all, Captain. What would be smuggled?"

  "Gold, silver, whatever would show a profit. The gold and silver the mines produce belong to the Crown, because the king owns the mines. It can't be spent until it's been minted. Suppose a smart Spaniard could get hold of some of it before it left New Spain. What could he do?"

  Bouton leaned against the rail and pulled at his nose. "What we would do, I suppose."

  I shook my head. "We'd take it to Port Royal or some French colony, or a Dutch or Danish one, and sell it for whatever we could get. If a Spaniard went to one of those places, don't you think his government would notice?"

  "Yes, if they knew."

  "They'd know, because his crew would talk about it when they got back to New Spain."

  Something struck Bouton as funny, and he roared.

  When he finally quieted down, I asked what it had been.

  "They would not get there, Captain. Not to Port Royal, certainly. What chance would a Spanish ship have there?"

  He had a point, and I said, "You're right, but that's just another arm of the argument I'm making. Anyway, look at this. A rich man, a big landowner, has a beautiful little ship he uses for pleasure trips and so on. By and by he loses his wife. There's a lot of disease, and who knows? He marries again and uses his ship to take his new bride to Spain, then on a nice cruise to Italy and France. Maybe all around the Mediterranean. What's wrong with that?"

  Bouton rubbed his jaw. "Nothing, I suppose, if he can dodge the corsairs."

  "They stop at Naples or wherever, and he gives his crew leave, except for one or two men he can trust-the captain and the mate, maybe. When they sail out of the Bay of Naples, the ship's a bit lighter. But who's going to notice?"

  "Low," Bouton told me. "This secret place for gold will be very near the keel."

  I nodded. "I think so, too. But I couldn't find it without tearing the ship apart. The thing is, Jaime did. Maybe Don Jose showed it to him-I don't know. When he found out Estrellita had been cheating on him with Don Jose, he went down there. My guess is that he just wanted to be alone for a while to think things out. He did, and it drove him a little crazy. Sabina was his wife. I know you know that."

  "I comprehend."

  "He beat her because he thought she'd fallen for me. He'd beaten her before, but this time he really laid into her, and a few days later he did it again. One day he came home and she was gone, and she never came back. It must have hurt him a lot."

  "Any man would be hurt, Captain." Bouton was nothing like handsome. Looking at him in the watery light of a lantern somebody had run up the mizzen, I wondered whether any woman had ever loved him, and whether any woman ever would.

  "So Jaime took up with his housemaid, Estrellita. It would be a cinch to blame her for that, but I'll skip it. If she had played it straight, she'd probably have ended up with the second son of a grocer. Jaime was big and strong, and rich. A lot of women have done worse things."

  Bouton nodded.

  "Only Don Jose was richer and a lot smoother. She probably thought Jaime might dump her when they got to New Spain, and it would be smart to have somebody to fall back on. Only Jaime found out, and when he did he got a little crazy."

  "Yet he did not leap into the sea as Don Jose recounted," Bouton put in.

  "Right. My guess is that Don Jose really thought he had, though, at least at first. The secret compartment down in the hold can't be very big. About the size of a coffin, if I had to guess. Don Jose probably thought Jaime wouldn't get in there, and he might have thought Jaime couldn't. Later he must have found out he was wrong."

  "His crew suffered, Captain. Not ours alone."

  "Exactly. What would you have done?"

  Bouton drew his finger across his throat.

  "Sure. It would have been easy to kill him. Let's say he could shoot through the wood and into that secret compartment. Then he drags the body up on deck. There's an officer on watch who's awake, and a man at the wheel, even if the rest of the watch is asleep."

  "The shots would awaken many," Bouton said.

  "I think so, too. They make port in New Spain, somebody talks, and Don Jose gets busted."

  "I am in agreement," Bouton said. "He will not do this. He will take his captain and perhaps one other man. They will open the compartment. If this Jaime fights, they will kill him."

  "Swell. Only now Ojeda and the other man know where the compartment is and how it works. Besides, what if they don't kill him? Suppose he just gives up. Or suppose Don Jose shoots him, but he doesn't die? He was Don Jose's partner. My guess is that he was originally supposed to be their Spanish connection. He'll talk."

  I shook my head. "Don Jose played it smart. He let Jaime alone. There was a good chance somebody in the crew he tried to jump would kill him. There was also a real good chance he would try to jump Don Jose. If he did that, Don Jose would be ready. He'd have weapons, probably a knife and couple of pocket pistols, and everybody would call him a hero. He'd have to act before they made port, sure. But until they did, the smart move was to watch and wait and hope for the best. Which is what he did."

  We were quiet for a while after that. Finally Bouton said, "He killed him, Captain. This Jaime who was the husband of Senora Sabina. He strangled Don Jose. It was shortly after we dropped anchor at Ile a Vache, was it not?"

  "That's right. Don Jose pushed his luck too far. He hoped Jaime would come around to see him when we left him alone in the hold. He'd always been able to talk Jaime into just about anything, and this time he'd talk him into cutting him loose. The two of them would sneak up on deck, go over the side, and swim for shore. With luck, they might have been able to lose themselves on the island until we left. Only it didn't work-"

  That was when Novia came up and asked when I was coming to bed.

  24

  Our pirate fleet

  The Secretary of State was on TV tonight. She said flatly that the PCC is losing its grip. I cannot express the joy I feel.

  I will see
my Novia again, or die trying. I will even the score-no, that is wrong. Vengeance is a sin. I will forgive him, if I can. May God forgive all his cruelty and betrayal. Last night I was shaken by what I had heard. Today I was joyful, whistling and singing under my breath. Old, old chanteys we sang around the capstan, and songs the men used to ask me to sing after we found the guitar on the Castillo Blanco-"Far Aloft," "Ritorna-Me," "Sott'er Cielo de Roma," "Mon Petit Bateau," and on and on.

  "Carmela," "La Golondrina," "El Cefiro," and "Flor de Limon." Old Spanish songs the priest in Coruna had taught me or that Novia had taught me. Simple songs we had played in the music class at the monastery. It was all I could do to keep from humming when I said mass. To a congregation of old ladies, I preached on the goodness of God. And was really preaching to myself, and preaching to the choir at that.

  What follows will be-must be-summary. I will have time for nothing more. We had a Spanish carpenter on board. I believe I have explained that. I set him to work making more gunports, and before we made Port Royal we had all the guns from the Castillo Blanco in place and ready to fire. It gave us fifteen guns per side, plus the same bow and stern chasers we had on the Castillo Blanco. With five twelve-pounders and five nine-pounders per side, we could stand up to anything short of a galleon.

  In Port Royal, where a big crane on a barge made things easy for us, we reshuffled the guns as well, putting the twelve-pounders on the lower deck and our old nines on the upper deck where the twelves had been. I knew it would make the ship a better sailer, which it did.

  We repainted, too. And when the repainting was almost complete, we renamed our ship, making her the Santa Sabina de Roma.