The Bloody Black Flag

by Steve Goble

  “Bastard! I used up my shot!”

  “Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it?” Spider rose and drew his sword.

  Tellam glared.

  “I know you didn’t kill my friend. But you enjoyed Ezra’s death a bit too goddamned much, I’d say.” Spider raised his rusty old sword and ignored the battles elsewhere. Tellam had all of his attention, and Tellam was going to regret it.

  Tellam, clutching at his bloody knee, leered. “I knew you were a coward.” He straightened up and wielded his cutlass.

  “Not a coward,” Spider answered. “Just not wasting time.”

  He rushed Tellam, who parried Spider’s backhand sweep with surprising efficiency. He did not parry Spider’s left foot. Heel crashed into bleeding knee. Tellam staggered, and Spider followed up by driving the knuckle guard of his own sword into Tellam’s face.

  The tattooed man backed away two steps, rose into a defensive posture far too slowly, and Spider cut his throat.

  Tellam stumbled backward, his head tilted back farther than seemed possible, his eyes staring toward heaven, and his neck gushing blood. Then he fell onto his back, convulsed, and died, eyes wide open.

  A spar, Viper’s black, bloody skull flag trailing from it, fell from above and covered Tellam’s corpse.

  Spider heard Hob fire a shot behind him. He turned and grabbed the boy. “Listen, you say nothing. Nothing! Your life depends upon it, boy.”

  Swords clattered on the deck, and most of those Vipers who had not already fallen to their deaths fell to their knees. A pair carrying one of Viper’s miserable boats toward the rail opposite the frigate was cut down by musket fire.

  Spider knelt and stared hard into Hob’s eyes. “We are done for, Hob, so listen. Let me do the talking, and you just heed what I say and be smart. We might just escape the noose. I can’t promise, but we might. Trust me.”

  “Aye.”

  Spider wished he actually felt the confidence he’d tried to portray.

  He dropped his sword and put his hands on his head. Hob followed suit.

  They knelt, surrounded by blood and bodies, shattered wood and ripped sail, dangling rope and wafting smoke. An odd silence prevailed as navy men watched and waited, weapons at the ready, wondering if anyone hid with a gun below. Spider noted that May had wisely thrown aside her knife and knelt in surrender.

  Viper’s tilt grew, and a stray four-pound ball rolled astern. It crushed the skull of a man already dead.

  “Take your men below, Mister Rogerson,” said a stern young lieutenant, pointing his sword at a midshipman. “See if our man is below. Others may be lurking, too. It is a big vessel, plenty of places to hide, so be smart about it.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Spider’s eyes darted among the surrendered and the dead. He saw no sign of a ripped arm bandage or an exposed tattoo. Nor did he see any sign of Elijah, but blood and gore and burns rendered many of the dead unrecognizable. He wished he could recall whether the arm he’d glimpsed during that battle in the hold had been black or white, but it had been too dark.

  A midshipman brought May forward. “Probably an escaped slave, sir.”

  “No,” Spider said. “A free woman, before we took her, anyway. She was wife to the cap’n of a vessel Barlow took. And I hope you noticed who she was killing before she dropped her knife. It wasn’t your lads.”

  The lieutenant stared at Spider, disgusted. He strode forth, all blazing green eyes behind a hawk’s beak of a nose. “That will be sorted out,” he said, his voice full of sneering unconcern. He turned to the midshipman. “Take her aboard Austen Castle, inform the captain and treat her well. Find her a place away from the rest of these dogs, but do not be overly trustful,” he said. “I’ve known woman pirates to be as deadly as any other, and twice as deceptive.”

  “Aye, sir.” The midshipman took his charge by the arm and went away. May cast a glance and a nod back toward Spider, who gulped when it took him a moment to recall Em’s face.

  Spider shook his head, tried to concentrate. “Do you want to find your man? Or the prize he came for?”

  The lieutenant stabbed him with a cold stare. “What did you say?”

  “I know you had a spy aboard us,” Spider said. He was determined to say nothing more. He hoped only to sow enough doubt in the officer’s mind to delay a hanging, to give him time for a miracle. It was a lousy cast of the dice, but it was all he could do for himself, and for Hob.

  The lieutenant then said softly, “Smithson, take these pirates aboard Austen Castle, place them under guard.”

  “Aye,” the man said.

  28

  Down in the belly of Austen Castle, secured to one another by lengths of chain and manacles on their ankles, six survivors of Red Viper’s demise sat quietly in a makeshift pen of crates and planks. Two armed marines stood in the hold’s shadows nearby. This would be their home for the length of their journey to an Admiralty trial in England. Captain Raintree had questioned each of them individually and said Austen Castle would lay in new supplies in Kingston, then set sail for Plymouth.

  Spider had expected they would see a trial in Port Royal, followed soon after by a spectacle upon Gallows Point. But the captain had been clear about England, and Spider supposed it was because the mystery bauble was considered too vital a matter to be left to the governor of Jamaica. The Admiralty wanted to know what the pirates knew and what Barlow planned to do with the damned thing he had pilfered.

  Raintree, a bewhiskered gentleman in his fifties who obviously had celebrated the capture of Red Viper with generous amounts of wine, had talked almost as much as he’d questioned when it came Spider’s turn for an interview. Apparently, he’d been in a similar state while interrogating the others. By the time they’d all discussed their talks with the captain, Spider understood this much: the mystery item, a small cylinder with several brass rings on it, was a decoder, and thus was something the king of England and the Admiralty wanted very much to keep out of the hands of France. A Spaniard had stolen the decoder from an English agent and had hired Barlow to take him to Spain. Barlow, instead, had killed the Spaniard and taken the decoder. A naval officer had pretended to a piratical past and joined Barlow’s crew in hopes of retrieving it.

  And Ezra Coombs had died because of it.

  Spider spat, now battered and chained and weary to his soul. Ezra had not died because someone feared his witch blood, or for mere greed or for any other reason Spider could understand. Ezra, his best friend, had died because of a king’s spy games.

  Whether Ezra’s killer had died in the carnage aboard Red Viper, or lived to turn over the damned decoder to the navy, remained a mystery to Spider, a mystery that he doubted would ever be solved.

  And he doubted Ezra would ever be avenged.

  Spider expected to remain chained in this hold for several weeks, at least. Months, perhaps, if Austen Castle laid over in Africa before heading to England. That is a long time to contemplate hanging, he thought. It would be more merciful to line us up and shoot us. His left hand wrapped around Em’s pendant, still dangling from his neck.

  Six men lived, out of more than seventy who had been aboard that night Spider and Ezra set foot on the cursed deck of Plymouth Dream off the Massachusetts coast. Spider, Hob, Doctor Boddings, toothless Dobbin, one-eyed Odin, and a mute fellow named Jones who had come over from Loon when Barlow’s crew had taken her prize. None of them, to Spider’s thinking, was a likely suspect in Ezra’s death.

  Others had come over as prisoners, too, but they were wounded badly and had not lived long. Doctor Boddings had asked permission to treat them, but he had been denied.

  Spider had been denied, too. He had wanted to unmask the killer, stare into his eyes, and plunge sharp steel between his ribs.

  Weariness seeped into Spider’s bones, and he half believed that he would simply die here, in chains, in the belly of a king’s frigate.

  A meow interrupted that maudlin thought, and Spider glanced in that direction to see Thomas
, the yellow-and-white mouser from Red Viper, perched upon Hob’s shoulder. The cat looked none the worse for all the gunfire and smoke and bloodshed. Spider wondered how many of its nine purported lives the cat had forfeited.

  A suspended lantern swung with the ship’s rolls, most of its light blocked from the prisoners by the guards, who talked quietly while keeping watch. The prisoners had said nothing since their capture the day before, save for the surgeon praying quietly and Odin chuckling as always. Now, they muttered among themselves a bit, in a probably feeble attempt to stave away thoughts of their eventual end on a noose.

  “Wish Weatherall was here to fiddle,” Boddings said after a heavy sigh.

  “Or waving his banner and telling these bastards to bugger,” Hob said.

  “Did anyone see Elijah?” Spider looked around at his shipmates. “Anyone? I never saw him once battle was joined.”

  “No,” Boddings said. “I did not.” The others echoed him.

  “Hmm.” Odin chuckled. “Maybe he’s the bastard they snuck aboard us. Sneaky, tricky bastard.”

  “He seemed a decent man,” Hob said.

  “Men can wear decency like a mask,” Boddings added.

  Spider wondered whether the surgeon might be spared the ignominy of prison and the gallows. He had not taken part in any of the violence, but he had abetted the crimes by serving as physician and saving pirate lives. Spider could not quite forgive the man’s behavior after Ezra had been killed, denying use of his Bible for rites, but he determined to do what he could for the old gent anyway. The man’s ghastly pallor and obvious fear seemed punishment enough.

  As for Odin? God alone knew what was going on in the labyrinth of that man’s mind. Spider imagined him laughing even after the rope had gone tight, peering at his executioners with his one good eye.

  Dobbin and Jones looked as though they might not survive the trip home. Neither man had a lick of fight left in him.

  None of the six survivors had witnessed Red Viper’s final moments. They had already been locked below by then, but they had heard the winches and the calls of men as they pulled everything of value from the vessel. They had heard the captain order Castle to shove off, and they had heard the frigate’s mighty broadsides reduce what was left of Red Viper to kindling and fire. Captain Raintree had used the doomed vessel to train his gunners. That was naval discipline for you.

  Castle’s men had cheered as the pirate ship finally dropped below the surface.

  Spider wished like hell he had a pipe to smoke.

  Even for a man as accustomed to violent death as he, Spider could not fathom the forces behind Ezra’s slaying.

  Death in the commission of piracy, death on the end of the Admiralty’s rope, even death in a damned drunken brawl over a card game, these all were things familiar in Spider’s world. Deliberate death delivered by the agent of one world power, just to keep secrets from the hands of another world power, all in the name of wars past and future . . . these things Spider could not understand.

  His friend, a good man despite the hard life he’d fallen into, had died a criminal, while the man who’d murdered him in a spy game, if he hadn’t died in the carnage aboard Viper, would be hailed as a hero. No one in power would have given a farthing to see Ezra’s murderer punished.

  “Poor Peg,” Boddings murmured. “I saw him plunge. Such a good spirit he had.”

  “Silence, you,” one of the guards admonished.

  “Bugger!” Hob laughed and tore off part of his already tattered shirt, waving it like Weatherall had waved his own flags at the English tars. “Bugger!”

  “Hush, lad,” Spider said tersely. “You are a pirate. They’ll not hesitate to kill you.”

  Fortunately, the silence that followed Spider’s admonishment seemed to satisfy the guards, and they did not threaten the prisoners. Spider let the frigate rock him into some semblance of real sleep and clutched Em’s charm against his heart. Still, images flitted through his mind: Peg’s mangled body after he plummeted like a meteor, Weatherall defiantly waving his banner, May slitting Addison’s throat, Doctor Boddings admonishing men for tending their own wounds when there was a perfectly fine surgeon at hand, Hob ripping his shirt and taunting the guards with it.

  Spider startled, suddenly awake. He spat. He blinked. He shuffled those images, looked at them one by one.

  By God, he thought, I know who killed Ezra Coombs.

  His next thought was a prayer: Please, Lord, let the killer be alive still.

  His third thought was determination. I am going to get out of here and kill the fucking bastard.

  29

  An unknown number of hours of sleep—honest, deep sleep—left Spider John’s mind clearer than it had been in weeks, clear like the shallow waters in a Caribbean lagoon.

  He knew what he had to do, and his friend’s memory seemed suddenly more real to him, spurring him on in death as Ezra always had in life. Ezra would not have submitted meekly to a hanging. Ezra would have pointed out things were as bleak as they could possibly be, so one last great snatch at freedom was fully merited. Escape, he would have counseled, or die in the attempt. Better a quick musket ball through the brain than waiting and waiting and waiting for the inevitable gallows.

  Usually, it had been Ezra’s role to hatch the outrageous goals and Spider’s job to whittle everything down to some kind of plan that might actually work. So Spider now simply imagined that Ezra was there with him, saying they could make a break for it in Jamaica. Now all Spider had to do was figure out how to do the deed.

  Spider watched dust motes dance in the morning light pouring through the hatch. That dim beam of light had filtered down a long way into the bowels of Austen Castle, but the intense darkness made it seem a bright beacon, nonetheless. Two new guards had replaced those of the night watch. They talked quietly, with occasional glances at their sleeping prisoners. Spider heard what he wanted to hear; Austen Castle expected to put into Kingston Harbour by morning.

  Spider edged slowly to his left, where Doctor Boddings snored. The carpenter blew on the surgeon’s face, hoping to wake him. He dared not speak or startle the man.

  After long moments, in which Odin mumbled in his slumber, the doctor opened his eyes. Spider put a finger to his own lips to urge silence, then looked to see if the guards had noticed anything.

  They hadn’t.

  “Doctor,” Spider whispered, “can you swim?”

  Boddings peered back wide-eyed. He looked dubious but nodded slowly.

  “Good,” Spider said as softly as he could. “Now, if you had a tool, do you think these irons on our ankles would trouble you any more than the locks on Cap’n Barlow’s liquor stores?”

  The surgeon’s eyebrows rose quickly. He looked at the manacles on his own ankles, then glanced back at Spider. “Simple,” he said, so quietly that Spider relied more on reading the man’s lips and expression than on his voice.

  “Odin has hairpins,” Spider said.

  Doctor Boddings grinned.

  30

  They spent the day preparing to carry out Spider’s plan. The Red Viper survivors prayed, sang quiet hymns, and drummed on the bulkhead and clapped hands, mostly to cover the click-clack noise of the doctor’s work on their manacles. Spider tapped the surgeon anytime the soldiers glanced their way. The guards urged them to sing quietly and clearly wished the captives would just sleep away the whole journey, but they did not otherwise harass the condemned men.

  Whenever the guards were occupied in talk with each other or the men above, Doctor Boddings went to work with Odin’s brass hairpins. Spider had to marvel at his skill. Even though he had not had rum for many hours now, and his hands quaked as a result, the doctor opened the locks on the manacles almost as easily as if he’d been given the key. No wonder no captain’s liquor was safe from Doctor Eustace Boddings.

  It would have been better to work by night, Spider reckoned, but then there would be no light for the surgeon to see by, and their singing likely would not hav
e been tolerated. They worked now, so as to be ready to spring next morning.

  As the surgeon freed them, they left their manacles unlocked but seemingly in place. They made several clever adjustments to hide the fact that they were no longer bound to one another or to the bulk-head; Hob tucked an ankle beneath Spider’s knee, and Odin knelt and then sat on his own ankles in an attitude of prayer that looked painful, although he grinned oddly the entire time.

  Spider was busy plotting. There was no telling what went on in Odin’s mind, but Hob, Jones, and Dobbin had a tough time concealing their excitement. Spider gave them harsh admonishing glances more than once, and when the ship’s boy brought them their water, bread, and moldy cheese, Spider was certain the guilty expression on Dobbin’s face would ruin the entire scheme. But it didn’t.

  Spider kept an ear open as the men working above called out familiar landmarks and hollered at passing vessels. He tried to discern a particular voice, a killer’s voice, out of the din, but could not. Let him be alive, he thought. Let him be alive.

  By evening, he heard the names of Morant Point and Yallahs Bay shouted above, and, just after dark, he heard mention of the long east-west spit of the Palisadoes. Spider could envision the night lights of Port Royal, sitting like a pommel gem on the tip of the spit.

  The Palisadoes separated Kingston Harbour from the rest of the sea. Spider knew the harbor itself would be crowded with ships, some preparing to leave and others having just arrived, and some anchored for repairs or just so her captains and crews could haunt the taverns and brothels and gambling houses of Port Royal and Kingston, the city across the bay from the Palisadoes. There was little chance Captain Raintree would attempt to enter the harbor by night. When dawn came and the captain ordered Austen Castle into the sheltered waters, the Vipers would make their move.

  That was the most difficult part, the waiting. The doctor had freed them all, and Spider wanted nothing more than to release his manacles completely and rub his chafed leg. He knew the others were just as eager to be free, and if he could have risked a scouting run to determine whether they were close enough to the Palisadoes or the harbor mouth to make their break here, he’d have done so in a heartbeat.