by Various
She cupped her hands around her mouth, in order to be heard by any ears that might be listening aboard the El Dorado. “Heave-to!” she commanded, ordering the galleon’s masters to bring their vessel to an immediate halt. “Do ye hear me, ye cringin’ curs? Heave-to at once, or risk the vengeance of Captain Rob Whitby!” Her name, she knew, was spoken with fear and respect from Barbados to the Carolinas; nonetheless, there came no answer from the errant treasure ship, only the creaking of the masts as they struggled under the strain of the untended sails.
“This bodes ill,” Dr. Pratt intoned in a hush. Ordinarily it was his custom to go below ere the fighting began, the better to insure his own safety so that he might afterward tend the wounds of all those injured in the fray. On this occasion, however, no imminent danger to life or limb appeared to be in the offing.
Which was not to say, Robin realized, that the mysterious galleon did not hold hidden perils far more malignant than armed and defiant Spanish sailors. “Aye,” she agreed. In her time as Slayer, she had learned to trust her intuition where the unearthly was concerned, and right now a clammy prickling upon her skin warned her that there was deviltry at work here. “This has the stink of Satan about it.”
“Satan, yes,” Pratt surmised, “or evils even older and more obscene.” He was never one to look to the sunny side of things, her watcher.
“The sooner I get to slayin’, then.” Seeing nothing to be gained by further prattle, she hooked her cutlass to her baldric and clambered into the rigging, briskly climbing the ratlines until she was able to look down upon the barren deck of the galleon. Grappling hooks, thrown by her excited and impatient freebooters, arced over the El Dorado’s gunwales, binding the galleon to the schooner. Both ships shuddered as they came together atop the waves. “After me, mates!” Robin exhorted her crew before somersaulting off the forward gaff to land flatfooted upon the spray-splashed planks of the galleon’s waist.
Benjamin Fancy had spoken truly. From where she could see, standing amidship fore of the mainmast, the upper decks of the El Dorado appeared as deserted as those of any abandoned hulk left rotting in some lawless Caribbean harbor. Her keen eyes hastily examined the capstan and coiled cables for any damning splashes of blood, as might be left by some shipboard massacre or mutiny, but nonesuch was to be found, although she spotted ample evidence of past tumult and disorder: hatches left open, tarpaulins torn asunder, shrouds and stays dangling uselessly, and tar-smeared ropes strewn about the deck like seaweed. Drunken buccaneers, at the height of their revels, could not have left the galleon in a greater state of disarray, let alone a shipload of fastidious Dons in charge of their empire’s treasure.
Robin scowled. Something untoward had transpired here; that was for certain. But what?
Already she had her suspicions.
Howling and hollering more from habit than need, her boisterous crew of cutthroats boarded the galleon in Robin’s wake, climbing up and over the rails with their dirks and cutlasses gripped between their teeth. As their bare feet dropped onto the deck, they glared about them ferociously, accustomed to raising Cain with sword and pistol. Today, alas, they found themselves sheepishly lowering their weapons due to a lamentable lack of Spaniards to threaten. The baffled buccaneers looked so abashed and discomfited that Robin would have laughed had she not been on guard against supernatural evil.
“Luff’er smartly!” she instructed the nearest crewmen. Floating freely, the El Dorado was a danger to both herself and Neptune’s Lady. “Bring her to a halt instanter.” Robin raised her voice to address each and every boarder. “The rest of ye, keep a weather eye out for trouble. This lumberin’ barge may not be as empty as she presents herself.”
While obedient seamen hurried to the task of curbing the galleon’s wayward drifting, Robin carried her investigation forward. Cutlass in hand, she stalked the unswabbed planks, climbing onto the railed deck atop the forecastle. From there she observed that the El Dorado’s boats had not been launched, but remained secure in their berths upon the spar deck. The missing Spaniards had not fled the galleon in their own boats, then. So where were they?
Robin had heard tell of death ships such as this, found empty and abandoned upon the sea. Indeed, if her watcher were to be believed, the annals of his predecessors were fair to bursting with accounts of such star-crossed vessels. More often than not, she recalled, ’twas a leech at work, feeding on the crew by night and consigning their bodies to the deep to avoid detection. . . .
“Cap’n!” An excited voice, carrying an unmistakable undercurrent of fear, called to Robin from the stern. She bounded off the forecastle, descending the steps in a single leap, and dashed aft, where she found a cluster of her own men gathered below the quarterdeck within a shallow compartment just before the great cabin. “Hell’s bells,” one battle-scarred buccaneer said in a horrified hush, “have ye ever seen the like?”
At first, Robin could not discern what sight held the men so transfixed. “Clear the way,” she grunted, roughly elbowing her way through the packed throng—until she came nigh face-to-face with the mortal remains of the only Spaniard still remaining at his post.
Standing upright at the helm, his lifeless body lashed tightly to the whipstaff, the dead man stared blindly forward, his bearded face contorted into a rictus of perpetual agony. His garments had been shredded from his corpse, making it impossible to determine his rank, and his throat and torso were marked by a multitude of strange, circular impressions, like the puckered kisses of a devil. These livid, ringlike blemishes were the only wounds Robin saw upon the unfortunate Don, the exact nature of whose death she was at a loss to explain. As elsewhere aboard this accursed vessel, not a drop of spilled blood could she see or smell, although the deceased seaman was markedly pale beneath his typically swarthy complexion. What rendered this unlucky mariner so bloodless? she pondered. Some new and unfamiliar breed of leech?
“Leave him to the sawbones,” Robin ordered. Dr. Pratt would almost certainly want to examine the Spaniard’s remains. “As for me, I’m goin’ below to flush out the vermin that done for this poor soul. Ye’re all to stay above deck until I give the word to commence with the pillagin’.” She swept a forbidding gaze across the faces of the assembled freebooters. “Are we clear on that, me brethren?”
On any other raid, a blistering fusillade of grape shot would not have deterred the greedy buccaneers from immediately inspecting the contents of the galleon’s hold. But the El Dorado’s eerie silence and desolation, along with the ghastly spectacle of the doomed helmsman, had cast a pall over their unslaked lust for Spanish gold. “Aye, Cap’n,” said the boatswain, Jonas Pugh. Like his fellows, he appeared well content to let the captain brave the shadowy recesses of the galleon’s lower decks before the rest of them. “Just as you say.”
“Very well then,” Robin confirmed. She paused a second to take her bearings before ducking her head to enter the companionway leading to the gun deck. She fully expected to find one or more leeches lurking below, far from the purifying rays of the sun, and was not so naive or inexperienced as to expect the hidden bloodsuckers to be completely dormant just because the sun had not yet sunk beneath the horizon. She knew too well that the living dead need only shun direct exposure to daylight; indoors, sealed away from the sun, leeches were just as dangerous as they were at the blackest hour of the night.
At first she had little need of the lamp she carried, as shards of daylight penetrated the darkness through open hatches and cracks between the planks over her head. It required only a heartbeat for her azure eyes to accommodate themselves to the sunless murk of the cramped gun deck, which was fetid with reek of unwashed men crammed together for weeks or months a time. Rats and roaches scurried away at the sound of her approach, but Robin paid them no heed; it was a fouler breed of infestation she sought.
The footsteps of her crew, milling about upon the spar deck above her head, grew ever more faint as she headed deeper into the bowels of the ship, which thus far had proven t
o be as deserted as the upper decks. Here at last, far from the sun, she depended on the flickering glow of an oil lamp to see by. The lower she climbed down the companion, the more the noisome stench of the bilge polluted the air, permeating her nose and mouth. So, too, did her awareness of the presence of some diabolic evil increase the nearer she came to the galleon’s secluded hold. Her skin fairly crawled from its proximity to the unnamed abomination.
Arriving at last at the dank and dismal entrance to the hold, she took a deep breath, near gagging at the malodorous reek, then kicked open the hatch and, cutlass drawn, sprang into the compartment beyond.
“By Davy Jones’s goddamned locker!” she exclaimed aloud, her jaw dropping at what she beheld.
Gold, lustrous and unmistakable, packed the spacious hold from top to bottom, reflecting what scant light filtered through the remains of the sundered hatch high above, as well as the paltry glow of Robin’s lamp. Priceless Incan jewelry and sculptures, all seemingly forged of solid gold, glittered atop open casks overflowing with shining yellow doubloons, as well as flashing silver pieces of eight. The pagan idols, sporting jagged fangs and bestial features, stood out amidst the scattered riches by virtue of their blasphemous, albeit artfully rendered, grotesquerie; Robin’s eye was caught by one bizarre graven image, roughly the size of a half-gallon tankard of rum, whose beaklike jaws and coiled tentacles gave it the look of a squid or octopus perched regally atop a throne of skulls. Polished rubies, red as wine, served as the seabeast’s eyes.
Who in heaven’s name would venerate such a loathsome thing? she wondered, repressing a shiver of revulsion, before such philosophical concerns were driven from her mind by the sheer magnitude of the gleaming hoard before her. It’s a king’s ransom, by thunder! she exulted silently, unable, for the nonce, to tear her spellbound gaze away from the glittering treasure trove. No, an emperor’s! Even the Watchers Council, whose wealth was legend, might envy such a fathomless sea of swag.
Greed threatened to usurp the prudent caution required by her present circumstances, yet wiser counsels prevailed; Robin forcibly diverted her attention from the lavish spoils to search the hold for the leech she felt certain was hiding there. “Show yerself, ye bloodsuckin’ rogue!” she taunted, holding her sanctified cutlass at the ready. “I know ye’re in here!”
Her mind’s eye envisioned the voracious vampire draining the crew of the El Dorado one by one, then tossing the bloodless corpses over the rails into the waiting brine, the murdered seamen consigned to the deep with neither rite nor reverence. The grisly images filled the sails of her righteous fury; even popish Spaniards deserved better deaths than that. “What be the matter?” she mocked the anonymous darkness. “Have ye gorged too much on hot Spanish blood to crave a taste of me own salty brew?” She slashed at the foul, pungent air as her angry gaze swept the hold, which was, she observed, notably devoid of skulking rats, as though even those pestilential vermin feared to associate with the unnatural monstrosity she sensed nearby. “Ahoy, ye maggoty glutton! Rise and face a slayer’s vengeance!”
A furtive gasp reached her ears, drawing Robin’s attention to a closed teak casket, suspiciously akin to a coffin, lodged against a starboard bulkhead. Sea-blue eyes narrowed and a knowing smile lifted the corners of her lips as she closed upon the casket and placed her free hand palm down upon the timber lid, where she felt the telltale vibrations of someone—or something—stirring inside the rectangular wooden chest.
Thought ye could hide from me, did ye? Robin thought smugly. Her left hand gripped the lid of the casket while the other raised the cutlass high. Her sly expression turned to one of unbending resolution. Well, many’s the leech that has thought the same afore I made dust of his unbreathin’ carcass!
Exerting her more-than-mortal strength, she flung open the heavy teak lid, in full expectation of discovering a fiend-faced revenant cowering below, only to find herself staring into the frightened brown eyes of a dusky young Spanish woman whose trembling hands were clasped together in a fervent prayer of supplication. “Socorro!” she pleaded desperately in her native tongue. “Madre de Dios, socorro!” Fresh tears gushed onto cheeks already streaked by much weeping. Her panicked heart pounded so loudly that Robin would have known the terrified maiden was alive and not a duplicitous leech posing as human, even if she hadn’t spied the silver crucifix resting upon the other woman’s lacy bodice.
* * *
“Her name is Carmelita Aponte,” Dr. Pratt revealed after a rapid perusal of the El Dorado’s log. “She is the captain’s half-Indian daughter, who was accompanying him on his voyage back to Spain.” The physician sat behind a heavy wooden desk in the captain’s private office beneath the galleon’s poop deck. Chart-sized glass windows at the rear of the cabin admitted more than enough light to see by. “Furthermore, should there be any doubt, my examination confirms that the young lady is quite entirely mortal.”
Not for the first time, Robin thanked Providence that she had not beheaded the unfortunate girl by mistake; only her supernal reflexes had allowed the Slayer to check the fall of her cutlass in time to spare the other woman’s life.
Robin glanced at the captain’s daughter, who now sat tensely on the velvet cushions atop a timber sea chest. Although quieter now than when Robin first discovered her, Carmelita clearly remained in a state of dire agitation. Her birdlike gaze darted about fearfully, ever on guard against some unnamed peril, while she hugged herself tightly and whispered fretful prayers without cease. She started skittishly at the slightest unexpected sound, and she trembled within an elegant saffron gown that was now hopelessly rumpled and frayed around the edges. The silver crucifix still hung from a delicate chain around her neck; Robin wondered if the cross had played any part in keeping Carmelita alive where so many others appeared to have perished.
“Has she told ye what transpired here?” she asked Pratt, having, for appearance’s sake, permitted the doctor to examine his patient in private. “What became of her father and his crew?”
A thorough search of the El Dorado, conducted after Robin gave her crew of buccaneers leave to explore the vessel, had found no other survivors aboard the deserted treasure ship. Nor any bloodthirsty stowaways, for that matter.
Pratt shook his head. “I fear that Senorita Aponte’s reason has not yet fully recovered from her ordeal, whatever it may have entailed. She is far from lucid, barely able to utter more than repeated prayers for deliverance, and a few fragmentary words and phrases.”
Robin nodded in understanding. She had often witnessed the shocked reactions of ordinary men and women to an attack by diabolic forces; such a hellish encounter could shake even the strongest soul to its foundations. “Has she been driven mad?” Robin asked, heartfelt sympathy making her throat to tighten.
“I think not,” Pratt replied. “With time, and by the grace of heaven, she may recover, but, for the present, I am reluctant to press her too strenuously on whatever tragic fate befell this vessel. To stir up such grievous memories now would do her more harm than good.”
Robin knew better than to ask the doctor to violate his Hippocratic Oath, which took precedence over even his duties as her watcher. “And did she tell ye nothing of what claimed her father and the rest?” The persistent nebulousness of the threat frustrated Robin immensely. “Have we no clue at all?”
“Just one,” Pratt divulged. A pensive scowl deepened the furrows above his hirsute brows. “When questioned, as gently as possible, about the fate of her countrymen, she could only whisper the same puzzling phrase, over and over: ‘Muchas bocas.’ ”
“ ‘Many mouths,”’ Robin translated. What the devil?
A knock at the cabin door startled Carmelita, who sprang to her feet, her eyes wide with fright. Robin rushed to calm the distressed senorita. “Easy now, lass! All’s well. Nobody’s goin’ to hurt ye.” Lapsing in and out of Carmelita’s native Spanish, Robin gently took the other woman by the shoulders and eased her directly into the sunbeam entering the cabin through th
e stern windows. “See? Sunlight. Nothin’ can get ye, nothin’ from the dark.”
Robin’s soothing tone, in concert with the comforting warmth of the bright golden light, quieted Carmelita. “La luz del sol?” she repeated uncertainly, looking from Robin’s face to the illuminated window and back again. “La luz del dia?”
“Aye, that’s it,” Robin assured her. “You’re safe now, in the light.” Best to get her off this cursed ship before nightfall, Robin decided. She may feel safer aboard Neptune’s Lady.
The rapping at the door came again, now accompanied by the raspy voice of her quartermaster, George Newgate. “Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n, but the crew be wonderin’ what your orders is, now that we made sure this vessel’s been swept clean of Dons.” His inquiry carried a subtly hectoring edge; Robin had long suspected that Newgate harbored ambitions of usurping her as captain some day. “The crew’s chafin’ to get back to port and divvy up the spoils.”
Hardly a surprise, Robin thought with some amusement. The pirates’ uneasiness aboard the death ship had been much allayed by the discovery of the stupendous fortune stowed away in the galleon’s hold. She had no doubt that, within their fevered imaginations, her gleeful cutthroats were already spending their shares amidst the copious taverns and brothels of Port Royal.
“Hold yer fire!” she called back, taking care, after speaking so softly to Carmelita, to deepen the timbre of her voice once more. “I’ll be with ye directly.” Casting one last look at the disturbed Spanish damsel, she headed for the door. “Watch her, William,” she urged her watcher, “and keep readin’ that damned journal. I want to know what manner of devil we’re dealin’ with.”
* * *
A hasty council upon the El Dorado’s main deck rapidly yielded a consensus concerning how best to take advantage of the buccaneers’ newly-won prize. At Robin’s suggestion, it was agreed to split Neptune’s Lady’s crew between the two vessels and sail them both back to Port Royal without delay. As a caution against treachery, half of the captured Spanish gold was transferred to the schooner’s own hold, with the remainder left stowed away in the bowels of the galleon. With some reluctance, Robin turned over command of Neptune’s Lady to George Newgate so that she could remain aboard the death ship, the better to confront whatever evil might yet lurk unseen within the El Dorado’s shadow-haunted hull.