Assassin's Creed: Black Flag

by Oliver Bowden

  “Mary . . .”

  I could carry her no longer, had to lay her down on the stones of the courtyard. From all around us I could hear the sound of tramping boots and soldiers calling to one another.

  Fine, I thought. Let them come. Here is where I’ll stand and fight. It’s as good a place to die as any.

  She looked up at me and her eyes focused, and she managed to smile before a fresh surge of pain made her body convulse.

  “Don’t die on my account,” she managed. “Go.”

  “No,” I tried.

  But she was right.

  I laid her down, tried to make her as comfortable as possible on the stones. My mouth was wet when I spoke. “Damn it. You should have been the one to outlast me.”

  She smiled a ghostly smile. “I’ve done my part. Will you?”

  Her image divided as though viewed through diamonds and I palmed tears from my eyes.

  “If you came with me, I could,” I urged her.

  She said nothing.

  No, please. Don’t go. Not you.

  “Mary . . . ?”

  She was trying to say something. I put my ear to her lips.

  “I’ll be with you, Kenway,” she whispered. Her final breath was warm on my ear. “I will.”

  She died.

  I stood. I looked down at Mary Read, knowing there would be time to mourn her later, when I would remember a remarkable person, perhaps the most remarkable I ever knew. But for the moment I thought of how the British soldiers had let this good woman give birth, ripped her baby from her, then left her wounded and feverish in a prison cell. No blanket to cover her. No water to touch to her lips.

  I heard the first British soldiers coming into the courtyard behind me. Just time to exact a little revenge before I make my escape.

  I engaged the blade and span to meet them.

  SIXTY-ONE

  I guess you could say I did a bit of drinking after that. I saw people in my delirium, figures from the past: Caroline, Woodes Rogers, Bartholomew Roberts.

  And ghosts too: Calico Jack, Charles Vane, Benjamin Hornigold, Edward Thatch.

  And Mary Read.

  Eventually, after a binge that lasted how long, I couldn’t say, salvation came in the form of Adewalé. He came to me on the beach in Kingston, and I thought he was another ghost at first, another figure from my visions. Come to taunt me. Come to remind me of my failings.

  “Captain Kenway, you look like a bowl of plum duff.”

  One of my visions. A ghost. A trick my poor, hung-over mind is playing on me. And yes, while we’re on the subject, where is my bottle of liquor?

  Until, when he reached a hand to me and I reached back, expecting his fingers to become wisps of smoke, to disappear into nothing, they were real. Hard as wood, just as reliable, and real.

  I sat up. “Christ, I’ve got a head for ten . . .”

  Ade pulled me up. “On your feet.”

  I stood rubbing my poor throbbing head. “You put me in a spot, Adewalé. After you left me with Roberts, I should have hard feelings about seeing you here.” I looked at him. “But mostly, I’m bloody glad.”

  “Me too, breddah, and you’ll be pleased to know, your Jackdaw is still in one piece.”

  He took me by the shoulder and pointed out to sea, and maybe it was the drink making me feel extra emotional, but tears filled my eyes to see the Jackdaw once again. The men stood at the gunwales and I saw them in the rigging and their faces at the hatches of the stern guns, every man-jack of them looking over to the beach, to where Adewalé stood with me now. They came, I thought, and a tear rolled down my cheek, one that I brushed away with the sleeve of my robes (a parting gift from Ah Tabai though I’d done little to honour them since).

  “Shall we set sail?” I asked him, but Adewalé was already walking away, further up the beach towards inland.

  “You’re leaving?” I called after him.

  “Aye, Edward. For I have another calling elsewhere.”

  “But . . .”

  “When your heart and your head are ready, visit the Assassins. I think you will understand then.”

  • • •

  So I took his advice. I sailed the Jackdaw to Tulum, back to where I had first discovered my Sense and met Ah Tabai. There, I left the crew on the Jackdaw and went in search of Ah Tabai, only to arrive in the aftermath of an attack, walking into the smouldering, smoking ruins of an Assassin village and finding Ade there too. This, then, was his calling.

  “Jesus, Adewalé, what the hell happened here?”

  “You happened here, Edward. The damage you caused six years ago has not been undone.”

  I winced. So that was it. The Assassins were still feeling the repercussions of those maps I sold to the Templars.

  I looked at him.

  “I’m not an easy man to call a friend, am I? Is that why you’re here?”

  “To fight beside a man so driven by personal gain and glory is a hard thing, Edward. I have come to feel the Assassins—and their creed—a more honourable course.”

  So that was it. The words of Mary Read and Ah Tabai had been wasted on me but Adewalé had been heeding them. I wished I’d made more effort to do the same.

  “Have I been unfair?” he prompted.

  I shook my head. “For years, I’ve been rushing around, taking whatever I fancied, not giving a tinker’s cuss for those I hurt. Yet here I am . . . with riches and reputation, feeling no wiser than when I left home. Yet when I turn around, look at the course I’ve run . . . there’s not a man or woman I love left standing beside me.”

  A new voice spoke up. Ah Tabai. “There is time to make amends, Captain Kenway.”

  I looked at him. “Mary . . . Before she died she asked me to do good by her. To sort out the mess I’d made. Can you help me?”

  Ah Tabai nodded. He and Adewalé turned to walk into the village.

  “Mary was fond of you, Edward,” noted Ah Tabai. “She saw something in your bearing that gave her hope you might one day fight with us.” He paused. “What do you think of our creed?” he said.

  We both knew that six years ago—Jaysus, one year ago—I would have scoffed and called it silly. Now, though, my answer was different.

  “It’s hard to say. For if nothing is true, then why believe anything? And if everything is permitted . . . Why not chase every desire?”

  “Why indeed?” Ah Tabai smiled mysteriously.

  My thoughts collided in my head; my brain sang with new possibilities.

  “It might be that this idea is only the beginning of wisdom and not its final form.”

  “That’s quite a step up from the Edward I met many years ago,” said Ah Tabai, nodding with satisfaction. “Edward, you are welcome here.”

  Thanking him, I asked, “How’s Anne’s child?”

  He shook his head and lowered his eyes, a gesture that said it all. “She’s a strong woman, but not invincible.”

  I pictured her on the deck of the William, cursing her crewmates as cowards. It was said she’d fired shots at the men as they cowered drunk below decks. I could well believe it. I could well imagine how terrible and magnificent she’d been that day.

  I went to where she sat and joined her, staring over the tree-tops and out to sea. She hugged her own legs and turned her pale face to me with a smile.

  “Edward,” she said in greeting.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

  I knew a thing or two about loss and was learning more every day.

  “If I’d stayed in prison, they’d have taken him from me”—she sighed as she turned her face into the breeze—“and he’d now be alive. Might be this is God’s way of saying I ain’t fit to be a mum, carrying on like I do. Cursing and drinking, and fighting.”

  “You are a fighter, aye. In prison, I heard stories of the infamous Anne Bonny and Mary Read, taking on the King’s Navy together. Just the pair of you.”

  She gave a laugh that was partly a sigh. “It’s all true. We would have won t
hat day if Jack and his lads weren’t passed out in the hold from drink. Ah . . . Edward . . . Everyone’s gone now, ain’t they? Mary. Rackham. Thatch. And all the rest. I miss the lot, rough as they were. Do you feel that too? All empty inside like?”

  “I do,” I said, “devil curse me, I do.”

  I remembered a time when Mary had put her hand on my knee, and I did the same to Anne now. She looked at it there for a moment, knowing it was as much an invitation as a gesture of comfort. And then she put her own hand to mine, rested her head on my chest, and we stayed like that for a while.

  Neither of us said anything. There was no need to.

  SIXTY-TWO

  APRIL 1721

  Now it was the time to start putting things right. It was time to tie up loose ends, to take care of business.

  It was time to begin wreaking my revenge, to work for the Assassins and carry out their contracts: Rogers, Torres, Roberts. They all had to die.

  I stood on the deck of the Jackdaw with Adewalé and Ah Tabai. “I know my targets by sight well enough. But how will I find them?”

  “We have spies and informants in every city,” said Ah Tabai. “Visit our bureaus, and the Assassins there will guide you.”

  “That fixes Torres and Rogers,” I told him, “but Bartholomew Roberts won’t be near any city. Might take months to find him.”

  “Or years,” agreed Ah Tabai, “but you are a man of talent and quality, Captain Kenway. I believe you will find him.”

  Adewalé looked at me. “If you are at a loss, do not be afraid to lean on your quartermaster for aid.” He smiled.

  I nodded thanks, then went onto the poop deck, leaving Ah Tabai and Adewalé to descend a Jacob’s ladder to a row-boat bobbling by our hull.

  “Quartermaster,” I said, “what’s our present course?”

  She turned. Resplendent in her pirate outfit.

  “Due east, Captain, if it’s still Kingston we’re sailing for?”

  “It is, Miss Bonny, it is. Call it out.”

  “Weigh anchor and let fall the courses, lads!” she called, and she shone with happiness. “We’re sailing for Jamaica!”

  • • •

  Rogers, then. At the bureau in Kingston I was told of his whereabouts; that he would be attending a political function in town that very night. After that his movements were uncertain; it needed to be that whether I liked it or not.

  So the next thing was to decide how. I decided to take on the guise of a visiting diplomat, Ruggiero Ferraro, and before I left took a letter from within my robes and handed it to the bureau chief—a letter for “Caroline Scott Kenway of Hawkins Lane, Bristol.” In it I asked after her. “Are you safe? Are you well?” A letter full of hope but burdened with worry.

  Later that night I found the man I was looking for, Ruggiero Ferraro. In short order I killed him, took his clothes and joined others as we made our way to the party, and there was welcomed inside.

  Being there took me back to when I’d posed as Duncan Walpole; when I’d first visited Torres’s mansion. That feeling of being overawed, out of place and possibly even out of my depth, but chasing some notions of fortune, looking for the quickest way to make easy money.

  I was once again looking for something. I was looking for Woodes Rogers. Riches were no longer my primary concern. I was an Assassin now.

  “You are Mr. Ferraro, I take it?” said a pretty female guest. “I do adore your frippery. Such elegance and colour.”

  Thank you, madam, thank you. I gave her a deep bow in what I hoped was the Italian manner. Pretty she might have been, but I had enough ladies in my life for the time being. Caroline was waiting at home, not to mention certain . . . feelings I had for Anne.

  Then, just as I realized that grazie was the only Italian word I knew, Woodes Rogers was giving a speech.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, a toast to my brief tenure as a governor of the Bahamas! For, under my watch, no less than three hundred avowed pirates took The King’s Pardon and swore fealty to the Crown.”

  His face twisted into a bitter, sarcastic sneer.

  “And yet, for all my successes, His Majesty has seen fit to sack me and call me home to England. Brilliant!”

  It was a bad-tempered, resentful end to the speech, and sure enough his guests didn’t quite know what to make of it. During his time on Nassau he’d handed out religious leaflets trying to persuade the merry buccaneers of New Providence to mend their hard-drinking, whoring ways, so perhaps he wasn’t accustomed to the liquor and he seemed to wobble around his own party, ranting at anyone unfortunate enough to find himself in the vicinity.

  “Hurray, hurray for the ignoble and ignorant prigs who rule the world with sticks up their arses. Hurray!”

  Moving on and another guest winced as he let fly with his whinges. “I brought those brutes in Nassau to heel, by God, and this is the thanks I get. Unbelievable.”

  I followed him around the room, staying out of his view, trading greetings with the guests. I must have bowed a hundred times, murmured grazie a hundred times. Until at last Rogers appeared to have exhausted the goodwill of his friends, for as he made another circle of the hall, he found more and more backs were turned. The next moment he swayed, marooned in the room, looking around himself, only to find his erstwhile friends engaged in more thrilling conversations. For a second I saw the Woodes Rogers of old as he composed himself, drew back his shoulders, raised his chin and decided to take a little air. I knew where he was going, probably before he did, so it was an easy matter to move out to the balcony ahead of him and wait for him there. And then, when he arrived, I buried my blades into his shoulder and neck and, with one hand over his mouth to stop him screaming, lowered him to the floor of the balcony and sat him up against the balustrade.

  It all happened too quickly for him. Too quickly to fight back or to even be surprised, and he tried to focus on me with drunken, pained eyes.

  “You were a privateer once,” I said to him. “How is it you lack so much respect for sailors only trying to make their way in this world?”

  He looked at where my blades were still embedded in his shoulder and neck. They were all that kept him alive, because as soon as I removed them, his artery would be open, the balcony would be awash with his blood and he would be dead within a minute.

  “You couldn’t possibly understand my motives,” he said with a sardonic smile. “You who spent a whole lifetime dismantling everything that makes our civilization shine.”

  “But I do understand,” I insisted. “I’ve seen The Obser-vatory, and I know its power. You’d use that device to spy. You Templars would use that device to spy and blackmail and sabotage.”

  He nodded, but the movement pained him; blood soaked his shirt and jacket. “Yes, and yet all for a greater purpose. To ensure justice. To snuff out the lies and to seek truth.”

  “There’s no man on Earth who needs that power.”

  “Yet you suffer the outlaw Roberts to use it . . .”

  I shook my head to put him right about that. “No. I’m taking it back, and if you tell me where he is, I’ll stop Roberts.”

  “Africa,” he said. And I pulled my blades free.

  Blood flowed heavily from his neck and his body sagged against the balustrade, undignified in the throes of death. What a difference from the man I’d first met all those years ago at Torres’s mansion: an ambitious man with a handshake as firm as his resolve, and now his life ended not just on my blade but in a drunken fugue, a morass of bitterness and broken dreams. Though he’d ousted the pirates from Nassau, he hadn’t been given the support he needed to finish the job. The British had turned their backs on him. His hopes of rebuilding Nassau were shattered.

  Blood puddled on the stone around me and I moved my feet to avoid it. His chest rose and fell slowly. His eyes were half-closed and his breathing became irregular as life slipped away.

  Then from behind came a scream and, startled, I turned to see a woman, the finery of her clothes in stark contrast to h
er demeanour, a hand over her mouth and wide, terrified eyes. There was the rumble of running feet, more figures appearing on the balcony. Nobody daring to tackle me but not withdrawing either. Just watching.

  I cursed, stood and vaulted to the balustrade. To my left the balcony filled with guests.

  “Grazie,” I told them, then spread my arms and jumped.

  SIXTY-THREE

  FEBRUARY 1722

  And so to Africa, where Black Bart—now the most feared and infamous pirate in the Caribbean—continued to evade the British. I knew how he did it, of course, because in his possession was The Observatory Skull, and he was using it—using it to anticipate every move against him.

  As I set the Jackdaw in pursuit of him, Roberts was stealing French ships and sailing them down the coast to Sierra Leone. His Royal Fortune remained at the head of his fleet and he continued sailing south-east along the African coast: raiding, pillaging, plundering as he went, constantly making improvements to his vessels and becoming better armed, more powerful and even more fearsome than he already was.

  We had already come across the sickening evidence of his campaign of terror in January, when we sailed into the aftermath of not a battle, but a massacre: Roberts in The Royal Fortune had attacked twelve ships at anchor in Whydah. All had surrendered apart from an English slave ship, the Porcupine, and their refusal to lay down arms had made Roberts so furious that he had ordered the ship boarded, then set alight.

  His men flooded the decks with tar and set flame to the Porcupine with the slaves still on board, chained in pairs below decks. Those who jumped overboard to escape the blaze were torn limb from limb by sharks, the rest burned alive or drowned. Horrible, horrible death.

  By the time we arrived the sea was awash with debris. Vile black smoke shrouded the entire neighbourhood, and smouldering in the ocean, almost up to the water-line, was the burnt-out hull of the Porcupine.