The Buccaneers Page 10

  Then my chest rested on the sagging loop of line, and I could go no deeper. Without thinking, I held on to it, and it seemed to anchor me high in the heavens. I felt the brig tugging at the end; the line tightened across my chest. As the brig swung out on the current, the line lifted me from the water just as the shark came back to the surface. I saw its teeth and the dark gleam of an eye. Then it passed below me, so close that the fin ripped across my leg.

  The parrot was gone. Half drowned, nearly mad with fright, I felt a pity for it that was far beyond what I should have felt. I cried for the parrot as I pulled myself along the line, from the water to the shore. Then I let my legs swing down and fell on top of them, in a heap on the warm, hard sand.

  It seemed that hours had passed since I'd leapt from the window of the anchored brig. But the buccaneers’ boat still lay at its side, and the man with the torch was only then coming up from below. He carried his light through the companion-way, and the crucified helmsman was outlined for a moment before him, arms spread wide, as though the dead embraced the living. Then the torch went quickly up the deck, its light flickering in the rigging.

  He would have found my map, I thought. He would have found the unlatched window, the wood all scarred by the parrot's claws. Soon a search would start, and they'd find me quick enough, for the first place they'd look would be where the line came to shore.

  I got up and moved shakily into the trees. The jungle was so thick that it soon swallowed me up, and by the time I'd gone a dozen paces I no longer knew where the water was. From the ship, the island had seemed deadly quiet, but here it breathed with animal sounds, with rustlings and tickings and strange little cries. Into my head rushed my boyhood fears of the forest, and my father's warning that the Caribbean crawled with cannibals. They cook you alive, or so I've heard. They boil the flesh off you, then shrink your head to the size of a walnut. And suddenly those imagined cannibals were all around me, creeping closer; the rustling was their bare feet in the forest, the ticking was the sound of poisoned arrows being nocked into bowstrings. I imagined myself being carried off by tattooed men with bones in their lips, men I'd never see until their hands reached out to grab me.

  I turned at every noise. I jumped at every snapping twig. Soon I feared the cannibals that weren't there more than the pirates that were. The great, hot fire was like a beacon, and it drew me to its edge, where the light was dim enough to hide me yet bright enough to chase the shadows from the jungle close around.

  I crept from tree to tree, circling the pirate camp, making for the west, where I thought I'd find the Dragon. At the deepest point of the circle, I looked up to see Dasher in the firelight. He stood not more than a dozen feet away, with his back toward me as he leaned against a barrel. He'd taken the air from his wineskins, and they hung flat against his sides. A little trickle of water, fed from a crude wooden trough, fell into the barrel, overflowing from the top and leaking through the staves.

  Beyond Dasher and the barrel, in stacks round the fire, were silver ingots and bars of gold, boxes and chests of every size. I saw a tangled pile of shovels and picks, and guessed that all I saw had been unearthed from the island and brought here for loading aboard the Apostle. Even as I watched, the work continued, as men tramped up from the beach to carry off another load. In the crew of nearly a hundred men, only two seemed idle. Bartholomew Grace, standing high on an iron-strapped chest, watched in all his finery. He looked like a prince or a king, his cutlass tipped on the chest, his hand on the hilt with his gold-braided cuff swaying in slow circles.

  The other man was Dasher. He never moved from the barrel, never moved at all except to dip water for others with a ladle that was tied to his wrist. It seemed he guarded the barrel as though the water were more precious than all the silver and gold.

  I thought of calling to him, but the idea passed as a fancy. Whatever he was when I'd known him before, he was a pirate now, and I had to find him alone if I hoped for him to help me. Dasher was kindly at heart, but among rogues he was a rogue himself.

  I crept on, circling behind him. But I kept an eye on the buccaneers, and didn't see the dead branch in my path until it broke under my foot with a loud and shocking crack.

  And Bartholomew Grace shouted out, “Stop where you are!”

  Chapter 16

  GONE AGROUND

  Do you think I'm blind?” roared Bartholomew Grace. “Do you think I don't have eyes in my head?”

  He stepped down from his chest, and the firelight glittered on all his gold. For a moment it reached his face below the broad brim of his hat, and it seemed to me again that he had no face.

  I crouched like a runner, ready to flee. I would take my chances with the cannibals and the jungle before I gave myself up to a gang of buccaneers.

  But Grace turned away, and his black hair hid the pink smoothness of his cheeks. “Miller!” he shouted. “Come here.”

  Into the firelight stepped the rower that Dasher had cursed. In his striped jersey and straw hat, he looked like a frightened boy. He trembled as Grace took a step forward.

  The cutlass flashed fire, and the tip sliced through the seaman's jersey. A long, red bundle came tumbling out, and the sailor clutched at it, groaning. I thought the man's innards had been torn from his body, but then coins fell out, sparkling guineas that spilled to the ground, and I saw that the redness was no more than a length of fine silk.

  “You're a thief,” said Grace. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  The man stared wretchedly down at the silk and the coins.

  “Speak, I tell you.” But the man didn't answer, and I had never seen such a silent group as that crowd of buccaneers.

  “By the Black Book and the laws of Oleron,” said Grace, judge and jury too, “a thief shall pay for his crimes.” He kicked through the silk and coins. “What have you got there? Ten guineas—a dozen perhaps?” Then he shouted out, “What's an arm worth, bosun? What does the code say an arm is worth?”

  “Ten guineas, sir,” said a voice from the crowd.

  Grace nodded, the red plume tossing on his hat. “Take him off.” He motioned with the cutlass. “Exact his payment.”

  Miller was led away, and a moment later I heard a blow of an axe and a shriek that rose and filled the island, a ghastly and terrible cry.

  “Good Lord,” said Dasher softly.

  “Is there anyone else?” asked Grace, his voice as soft as rain. He walked through the group with long and graceful strides, wheeling left and then right. “Are there any more thieves among us? Anyone else who's turned against me?”

  The buccaneers shifted around him. I could feel their terror, their dread of the man. One started keening, swaying on his feet with a pitiful moan. Grace silenced him with a swift slash that opened the fellow's cheek in a bright red smear. Another shouted, “Long live Captain Grace!” The cry was taken from man to man, though there was not a sailor in the lot who met the captain eye to eye.

  In moments he'd exposed two more thieves. Their treasures seemed paltry and dismal, mere handfuls amid a hoard of gold. But one of the men paid for his crime with an eye, and his agonized screams stretched my nerves so far that I feared they would snap. The other thief threw himself at the pirate's feet, groveling on the ground atop the sad little pile of Miller's coins and cloth.

  “Ah, remorse,” said Grace. “It calls for mercy, such a show as this. Stand up, man.” He poked his cutlass down, and seemed to pry the fellow from the ground. “How much have you got there?”

  The man held out his hands. I couldn't see what was in them, but Grace bent his head and sifted through it with his fingers. “Thirty guineas,” he said, and clucked his tongue. “Have you anything to say for yourself?”

  The man was weeping. He tried to speak, but only a grunt came out. “Water,” he said.

  “Water?” Grace nodded. “Aye, we'll give you water, and see if that loosens your tongue.” He stepped back. “Put him in the barrel.”

  To my amazement, Dasher lau
ghed. It was a loonish cackle. “In the barrel?” he said. “Is that the best you can do? Make a pickle of him? And you call yourself a buccaneer?”

  Every head swiveled toward him. Every face glowed from the fire. I sank down into the undergrowth, but I couldn't take my eyes from Bartholomew Grace. His face was flat and twisted, as though melted to his bones.

  “In Kent that's a boy's game,” said Dasher. “Every Sunday we put a parson in a barrel and make him spout his prayers.” He stepped backward, toward me, away from the barrel. “You've got a thirsty cove, you set him on a fire. You toast him, mateys; that's justice. That's what I say“

  His voice trailed off. Every man stared at him, but none with such wonder as the poor soul with his thirty-guinea debt.

  Bartholomew Grace put the point of his cutlass on the ground. “Come here,” he said, and beckoned to Dasher. “Come, come, my fine fellow.”

  I could see Dasher hesitate. But true to form, he stepped no closer to danger than he had to. “Toast him,” he said, “if you've got the heart for it.” He glanced back, as though judging the distance he would have to travel into darkness. His face was pale and sweaty. “What say you, mateys? Toast him or drown him?”

  The buccaneers were silent. Bartholomew Grace came walking between them, and I felt sick with the fear that Dasher would turn and bolt, that the pirates would follow, only to head straight toward me. I dared not move as Grace came closer to the barrel.

  But only halfway there, he stopped as a voice shouted up from the water. A torch came flickering through the trees, and I sank deeper into the jungle.

  The torch wove between the trees, shining onto fronds and ferns. And into the camp burst the gaunt and bearded man I'd seen at the windows of the brig. He held a piece of paper, which he flung to the ground at the captain's feet. “Look there!” he cried. “That come from the ship out there.”

  Grace picked up my map with his cutlass; he speared it with the point and held it up for all to see.

  “There was someone on that ship,” said the bearded man. “Now he's on the island.”

  Dasher didn't wait for orders. He pulled pistols from his bandolier and fired them wildly into the sky. “After him, mateys!” he shouted. “Follow me!” His long, red coat whirled around him as he turned and raced into the jungle.

  He passed within a yard of me, hurdling branches, thrashing at ferns. He ran like a bull through the trees, and I jumped up and started after him, afraid that Grace and all the others would be coming on his heels.

  I didn't look back, nor did Dasher. His long legs swept him along, crashing from tree to tree. His hat sailed off and fluttered past my shoulder. I heard voices behind me, but they soon faded away. Yet on we ran through jungle and glade, over streams and under windfallen trees; we ran for half a mile or more until, at last, I caught up to him in a starlit clearing and clutched to the tails of his coat.

  Dasher squealed. It was a pathetic sound, and he hurled himself down in a tight little ball, like a porcupine but with his pistols for quills. He covered his face with his hands, and a wineskin flattened under his shoulder with a tiny mouselike squeak.

  “Dasher,” I said, panting. “Dasher, it's John.”

  He spread his fingers apart and peered up at me in the darkness. “John Spencer?” he said.

  “Yes,” I told him.

  “Well, knock me down with a feather.” He sat up, and it cheered me to see his old rakish grin. “I'm surprised you could catch me, matey,” he said. “There's horses that don't run as fast as Dashing Tommy Dusker.”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Treasure.” He winked broadly. “Silver and gold, matey.”

  “Stop saying that,” I snapped.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “It's a habit. Join up with pirates and you talk like a pirate.”

  “You joined them?” I asked.

  “John,” said he, “I'm the king of all the pirates.”

  Months before, he had told me he was the king of all the smugglers, but he'd been nothing more than a laughingstock by day, and by night, a highwayman who never made much success of robbing coaches.

  He collected the pistols that had tumbled from his belt and stuffed them back in place. “That Bartholomew Grace, he fairly hops at my words. Oh, he lives in dread of Tommy Dusker, let me tell you.”

  “Indeed,” I said dryly. “I saw that.”

  “Did you?” he asked. “The barrel?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what was in there?”

  “Water,” I said.

  He laughed. “Silver, matey. And gold. Pieces of eight and louis dor and more doubloons than you've got hairs on your head.” He stood up and tugged at his wineskins. “If they'd put that pirate cove into the barrel, they wouldn't have got his ears wet before they squashed him against the treasure I hid in there. And then Grace would have tallied it up, and started counting my arms and my legs, and there wouldn't have been much of me left when he'd taken his payment. Just a head and guts, that's all I'd be. Just a poor blind head you could carry about in a basket.”

  “And to save yourself, you would have thrown that man on the fire?”

  “Oh, they wouldn't have done it,” said Dasher. “Not Grace. He's scared of fire, John. Scared to death of fire. Did you see his face? It's burned away like a candle stub. You'd go stark raving mad to look at that face in the daylight.”

  We started walking, away from the prick of light, faint as a fallen star, that was all we could see of the buccaneers’ fire. No one had come very far after us, but I saw little comfort in that. There was nowhere we could go; and at daylight they would hunt us down.

  We stumbled onto a path that was so dark and walled by growth that it might have been drilled through the jungle. And we followed it up the hillside by feel alone, brushing ferns with either hand. It had been only recently made, but already the jungle was narrowing its sides, closing it in like a scar. I wanted to listen for cannibals, but Dasher— of course—talked all the time. He told me about the treasure—it was Kidd's, he said—and how he'd come to find it.

  “Just after I saw you last—in Kent, remember—I went down to Sussex and met a codger there, an old Jack nasty-face. A hundred years old if he was a day, all wrinkles and liver spots. But there he sat at the Black Horse Inn, singing songs and crying for the rum, so I stood him a glass, and he gave me a tale. Well, he sailed with Kidd, or so he said, and he knew where the treasure lay. ‘Where?’ I say, and the codger, he needs another glass. He has an old parrot on his shoulder that's tottering on its legs; the parrot's drinking too, drink for drink from the same glass. And the codger says, ‘The parrot knows.’ It was Kidd's parrot, he says; his name is—”

  “Davy Jones!” I cried.

  Dasher stopped in midstep. “You've seen him?” he asked.

  “I was aboard the brig,” I said.

  “That blasted parrot.” Dasher tugged at his wineskin. “He hates me, John. For bringing him back here, I think.”

  “But how did you get here?” I said.

  “Aren't I telling you, John?” Dasher-walked away, and I hurried after him. “ ‘The parrot knows,’ says the old codger. He says he'll give me the parrot for a bottle of rum. ‘Good rum, mind,’ he says. Then he sits there, all stony-faced, until the bottle's standing beside him. ‘Culebra,’ he says. ‘Take the parrot to Culebra,’ and he starts in on his rum. Well, it's the last bottle he'd ever have in this world, for by morning he was dead, stretched out on the floor, bung upwards, as stiff as a plank. And that old parrot was perched on his nose, railing away like a devil. Took me days to get him sober again.”

  “The sailor?” I asked. “I thought he was dead.”

  “No, the parrot!” laughed Dasher. “He was drunk as a lord.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “Word got round that there was a fellow who knew all about Kidd's treasure.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Well, I let it out myself. In every inn from Ea
stbourne round to Romney, I told the keeper that a handsome lad, a dashing cove up by Alkham, knew exactly where it was. And they beat a path to my door, John. Squires and lords and ne'er-do-wells, they came running for a shot at that gold. We put an outfit together and hired that brig you found in the harbor, and we sailed her all the way from Bristol. Clear across the sea.”

  There was a shiver in his voice as he talked of that; I could imagine the fear he'd felt to be in a world of water.

  “True enough, the parrot knew where the treasure was. I tied him to a string, and he whirred round my head. Then off he went like a shot, flitting through the jungle, squawking like a fishwife, up to the breast of this hill.”

  Just as he said it, we came out of the jungle, onto a flat shoulder of land with little dunes in an arc on its far side. Stars shone above us, and the pale lines of surf were laid out like bones on the black of the eastern sea. Then Dasher stopped, and as I came up beside him he put out an arm and stopped me too.

  We stood at the edge of a deep, cavernous pit. Nearly fifty feet from top to bottom, bordered by the heaps of dirt I'd thought were dunes, it smelled of the earth and of moldering wood. And it reeked of gunpowder.

  “This is where the parrot came,” said Dasher. “He started hopping about, yelling, ‘Three fathoms down! Three fathoms more!’ We started digging, and nine feet deep we came to a platform of coconut logs. The bloody parrot, we thought; he can't count. But we hauled the logs out and kept on going, and we found another platform three feet farther, and a third at fifteen feet. Below it was nothing but dirt for yard after yard, and wasn't I ready to strangle that parrot? But we kept shoveling like madmen, and just where he'd said—six fathoms deep—we found it, John. The treasure. Lord almighty, the treasure! We broke open the first layer and we swam in the guineas and jewels. We drowned ourselves in the treasure, John. Only when we came out, Bartholomew Grace was standing right where you are now.”