The Buccaneers Page 6

  For a moment I feared that all captains—like gunners— were mad. “I'm sorry, sir,” I said.

  “Romans: chapter twelve, verse nineteen,” said Butter-field. He made a fist and held it aloft. “ ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ “

  Horn trembled. “God save us,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  AFRAID OF THE SEA

  We saw the ships again, one fleeing and the other chasing. We saw them far away, beating to windward, and we sought the thickest of the fogbanks, hiding from the sun and those nightmarish ships. An hour later we heard cannons in the distance, from a bearing that was hard to judge.

  Fearing we'd meet the Apostle, dreading that we'd stumble on that merchantman and find the same horrors we'd found on the Meridian Passage, we turned toward the south, aiming straight for Trinidad across the wide Caribbean. And we were met by a storm like none I'd imagined.

  The fog cleared away and the clouds came behind it, towering up in pillars of black, toppling over, building again. They made spires and walls and great castellated keeps a thousand feet high, like the homes of thunderous giants. And the swells came next, enormous swells with dark and oily faces, so widely spaced that when the Dragon balanced on top of one, the next was half a mile away. She labored up them, balanced at the crests, then raced down their backs with her rail in the water.

  Captain Butterfield lashed a weather awning over the skylight and covered his windows again. Then he sat below, wedged in his bunk, with his little lamp sizzling and flaring, with everything he owned—his Bible, his pistol, his books—all swaying and tapping in their places. There he stayed all through that day and into the next, as the wind rose and the waves steepened. Then came the rain, the thunder, and the lightning. With the mainsail triple-reefed, a single jib straining at the bowsprit, we rammed our way toward the south.

  The waves boomed against the bow. The wind screamed and shrieked. And the little Dragon, with no weight in her hull, was blown like a feather from hither to yon. Now upright, now flat on her side, now pitched across to weather, she tumbled south with Horn at the helm. Only Horn could hold her.

  The day turned black as night, the night as black as black can be. When Butterfield came up to the deck in only his nightshirt, he looked like a fluttering ghost that appeared and disappeared in the flashes of the lightning. He staggered down the deck and wrapped his arms around the binnacle, screaming at Horn, “We have to turn back!”

  “We can't,” shouted Horn.

  I was surprised that the captain would even think of turning the ship in those tremendous seas. She could lose her masts or founder in an instant, and if she somehow did get her bow to the north, she would surely be dashed to pieces on the shore of Hispaniola.

  But he screamed again at Horn. “Turn, I tell you!”

  I saw the look of panic on his face and knew that Horn had been right. The captain was afraid of the sea. For more than a month he had kept his fear at bay with the curtains of his cabin, but now he could no longer control it.

  There was a flash of lightning, a crack of thunder. Butterfield's eyes rolled like those of a horse about to bolt. “Damn you!” he shouted at Horn. He threw himself at the wheel.

  Horn was caught by surprise. The spokes whirled through his hands, and the Dragon leaned as she turned. The waves rolled over the side and over the deck. They filled the waist until that was all I could see, just a seething of water and masts poking from it, a small group of men who seemed to be swimming.

  Butterfield's terror was all that saved us. As the Dragon staggered off her course, the blackness on our wind-ward side exploded in flashes of orange and yellow, the sea hurled up spouts of-water, and out of the storm—out of the lightning itself—came the Apostle.

  Before I could move, her black hull plowed through the crest we had crossed an instant before. Flinging spray, toothed with white water, she came hurtling down the wave and passed close to our stern in a long, black streak and a waft of gunsmoke. Then she climbed from the trough and rolled down to the next, and in an instant she was gone, as though she had never passed at all.

  Horn had seen her. He glanced at the sea where the spouts had erupted from the falls of her shot, right where the Dragon would have been if it weren't for the sudden turn of the wheel. But for the captain, the flash from her muzzles and the sound of her guns must have seemed like only lightning and thunder, for he kept turning the wheel as the Dragon staggered in the seas.

  Horn pulled him away. “Take the helm,” the sailor shouted to me.

  I fought against the ship, against the sails and the rudder and the fury of the wind. A wave broke over the stern, and the water swirled at my knees. But at last the Dragon spilled the seas away, flinging herself to weather with a vicious snap.

  Butterfield fell at Horn's feet. He lay huddled and white, his arms wrapped around Horn's ankles, his face wretched with fear.

  Horn stooped and gathered him up. He spoke very gently. “Grace is out there. We'll need every hand at the guns, sir.”

  Butterfield nodded. His teeth were chattering. But he rubbed at his arms and his chest as though patting his pieces—and his wits—back into place. And he managed a smile as he said, “I'll see to it.”

  He went forward, vanishing in the dark. Horn helped me at the wheel, and we steadied the Dragon on a westerly course. She bashed each wave to a cloud of spindrift and corkscrewed over its crest. But a grayness was coming to our world of black, and I saw that dawn was coming. The lightning still flickered, but behind us now, and more distant with every flash. On deck, the group of men at the guns bristled with the handles of sponges and rams.

  Behind us came the Apostle.

  I first saw her by the foam she churned at the bow. A black mass against the sea and the sky, she grew larger every second.

  Horn shouted in my ear, “Abbey will need help at the guns.”

  I started to go, but he pulled me back. “Steer,” he said. “And watch her topsail. Grace likes to shoot from the starboard side, so when he braces back, luff up, you hear?”

  He left me alone at the wheel—alone in the world, it seemed. There was nothing but shadows beyond the mast, and all around me was the raging sea. The Dragon rushed through the storm as fast as her weed-covered hull would let her. And the Apostle came bounding behind us.

  We pitched over the waves, rising in turn to the crests, always drawing closer. Then I heard the voices of the men that rode her rigging.

  Carried by the wind, stretched into terrible wails, they raised the hairs along my neck and sent shivers down my spine. They sounded like voices from the grave, uttering words I could not understand. It was a threat worse than the ship herself, worse than her cannons, and I sang to drown them out.

  The only tune that came to mind was Horn's old favorite, “Heart of Oak,” and I nearly laughed at the irony of the words as we raced for our lives through the storm: “Come, cheer up, my lads, ‘tis to glory we steer.”

  I sang as loudly as I could, screaming out the words, barely taking breaths lest I hear again the voices from the Apostle. Soon my song was taken up by the men around the guns, and in the low drone that was all that reached me, the Dragon herself seemed to pulse and gather heart.

  I let her run, and watched that big, black schooner close the distance. I saw her bowsprit reaching forward, the thin slab of her reefed topsail slashing madly side to side. I saw the ragged men riding on the yard, the foam boiling round the hull. Her bowsprit pierced the seas, rose again, rose and fell as she swiftly overtook us.

  I stared at her topsail until my eyes ached. As soon as it moved, the Apostle would turn, and all the guns on her starboard side would swing round to face us. I had to bring the Dragon about just at that moment, not an instant too soon nor an instant too late.

  The waves rolled under us. The jib flapped in the troughs where the wind couldn't reach it, then suddenly filled with a bang and a tug at the wheel.

  The Apostle's topsail shivered. I shouted out a
nd turned the wheel. The Dragon swung quickly, rearing up on a mountain of water. The Apostle rolled as she started her turn. And our two little portside guns blossomed crimson flowers. It was a small sound they made, just a pop in the wind.

  I held the wheel down. There was no power in it now, the sails flogging with a din like thunderclaps. A wave burst over the bow, and it seemed she wouldn't come about, that we'd be caught there in irons. “Turn!” I shouted at her.

  I waited for the roar of cannons and the crash of balls that would tear our ship to splinters.

  But she passed without a shot, so close behind us that I heard the rush of water at her bow. Then our sails filled with wind, and off we went toward the east.

  Before I'd caught my breath, the Apostle was behind us again.

  Chapter 10

  A BLOOD-COLORED BANNER

  We twisted and turned, but the Apostle was always there, now astern, now high to windward Twice she vanished altogether, only to pounce on us from foam-crested waves with her cannons ablaze down her length. A shot whistled through our foremast rigging, snapping shrouds that writhed like serpents. Another tore away the tatters of our ensign, and twice I felt the thump of balls against the hull, counting three hits on our planks, maybe more.

  Roland Abbey popped away with his little four-pounders, but we had small hope of hitting her, and none at all of stopping her.

  In the full light of day, as the wind began to ease, the Apostle lay just a mile to windward, close-hauled—as we were—toward the south. I looked across the endless, heaving hills of water and saw only then how high they really were. If I climbed to the topsail yard, I would still not see above them.

  Horn and Butterfield and nearly every man aboard had their faces blackened by powder. We all stared at that ship or at the water between us until she rose again into view. We stared at her name and the message of vengeance in the numbers painted starkly on her hull, at the terrible black flag that streamed from her masthead. And we sailed along, the Apostle and the Dragon, as the sun rose higher.

  “What's she waiting for?” I asked Horn when he came to take the wheel.

  “For pleasure,” he said. His blue eyes burned across the sea. “Have you ever watched a cat with a mouse, the way it bats it about, then sits and waits for it to move? Bartholomew Grace is that way; he gets a pleasure from killing.”

  “Couldn't we turn back and run for Kingston?” I asked.

  Horn shook his head. “Grace would overtake us long before we got there.”

  “We could sail east and find a harbor in the islands.”

  “He would follow us.”

  “Is there nothing-we can do?”

  “No,” said Horn. “Nothing more than put up what fight we can.”

  For an hour we sailed side by side. The Apostle kept a perfect spacing, reefed as we were reefed, to a jib and small main. The waves bore her up, then swallowed her whole.

  “Soon now,” said Horn.

  And the next time she rose, the black flag was gone from her masthead. In its place fluttered a blood-colored banner.

  “The sign of no quarter,” said Horn.

  Again she vanished in the waves, again she rose, turning toward us now. The crest passed between us; we soared on its back, and there she was, all sails set, rushing straight at us in a fury of foam.

  The men were in her rigging, in wind-torn clothes of red and black and gold. But now they rode in silence, and all we heard was the ship: the creaking of her rudder and planks, the flutter of her topsail.

  She came fast—incredibly fast—the reefs shaken out of her sails. Abbey tended to his guns, but it seemed hardly worth the bother. He could throw just eight pounds of iron at a ship weighing two hundred tons. His glass eye glowing, his round head wrapped in its scarlet cloth, he went about his business with all the bravery of Nelson. Wedges were driven to lower the barrels; the flintlocks were armed, and men took up the lanyards—Mudge at one, Abbey himself at the other.

  “Wait for it now,” he said.

  The Apostle bounded toward us. The foam at her bow tumbled along. Thirty men rode her rigging, and her deck was crowded with figures.

  Abbey fired first, and the ball fell short. With a hopeless little spout it buried itself yards before her bowsprit.

  Horn steered calmly down a wake as straight as a spar. My old uncle Stanley, beside him, tried to seem nonchalant, but his fright showed in his eyes, and in his hands, which went constantly from his side to his collar to his thin hair, made into sodden curls by rain and spray. For me, it was almost too much to bear. The black ship came so swiftly, so purposefully, and we were so helpless against her that I wanted to run and hide somewhere. I thought of the ship we had seen, decorated with dead men, and I felt the scratch of a noose at my neck. I turned away, to hide the tears that came to my eyes.

  I stared forward, at Abbey and his guns. It struck me that he really had seen the future with his coffin in the sea, that we had all been doomed from that moment on. Through tears I looked at the bowsprit, down the leeward rail, across the waves that swept away toward a land I would never see again. I watched the waves toss and roll—a huge, uncaring sea. And I saw a sail atop it.

  It grew in an instant to a pyramid of sails, and a hull appeared below it, bobbing on the swell. A big, slow ship, she made her way north under canvas whitened by the sun. And I knew then why the Apostle was hurrying so, why her men were silent; she wasn't after us at all.

  I spun to face that black ship. In the minute that I'd looked away, she'd come seven times her length toward us. Her bowsprit towered up; the men looked down from the ratlines and the yard.

  “By the guns!” I shouted. “Hold your fire.”

  Horn looked toward me. Butterfield too.

  “She'll pass us by,” I said.

  But Abbey was already tugging on his lanyard. And the four-pounder barked out smoke.

  Splinters flew from the Apostle's stern. A chunk of her rail was suddenly gone, and a dreadful scream rose from her crowded deck.

  She'll turn on us now, I thought. Like a lion we had poked with a stick, she would attack in a blind rage and shred us with her claws.

  But the hull kept passing. Her name, her numbers, marched on by. The guns kept passing, though five men stood at each, naked to the waist, ready with their sponges and their rams. Then her quarterdeck came level with our stern, the shattered railing passing, and I saw a dead man on the deck, another bleeding from the chest. Above them, at the helm, stood Bartholomew Grace.

  There was no one else it could be. Tall, strong, elegant-looking, he wore a gold-trimmed coat and a gold-trimmed hat with a crimson plume in its crown. He steered with one hand, looking ahead, and the wide brim of his hat fluttered round his face.

  Then he turned toward us. Gliding past, he turned his head. He took his hand from the wheel and swept off his hat, stooping into a courtly bow. One knee bent, his black hair tumbling in tangled ringlets, he saluted us as our ships sailed on and parted. And when he lifted his face, it seemed at first as though he had no face. It was featureless, pale, just a mouth and a pair of dark eyes, and I remembered what Horn had told me. Burned by molten tar.

  Then he was gone, traveling off toward those distant sails. The hat was back on his head, his hand on the wheel again. And the great, bloody flag rippled above him.

  Butterfield looked to leeward, toward the tower of white sails. “So that's it,” he said. “We're saved at the cost of those poor devils there.”

  “Maybe,” said Horn. “If-we're lucky.”

  “But we've got no cargo,” said I. “We're just an empty schooner.”

  “Full of powder and shot,” said Horn. “Grace always needs ammunition, new sails and new masts. If he decides to take them from us, then nothing will stop him.”

  “We'll set a new course,” said Butterfield. “As soon as we've put the horizon between us.”

  “Do what you please, it wouldn't make any difference.” Horn's pigtail swayed across his shoulders as he li
fted his head. “If he decides to chase us, you might as well strike the colors right now, and say your prayers while you can, for he'll catch us in the end. Turn east and you'll find him there. West, and that's where he'll be.”

  “He's only a man,” said Butterfield.

  “No, he's more than that,” said Horn. “Or less than that.”

  He gazed toward the Apostle, but his eyes were fixed on the distance. The merchantman lumbered along on her course, not yet in any fear or hurry.

  “Grace is everything we're not,” said Horn. “He has venom for blood. He's had us stalk a ship for days, towing barrels off the stern to slow us down, to let some lot of poor sailors think they might just get away.”

  “Then why do we run?” I asked. “We might as well turn and fight him now.”

  Horn put his hand on my shoulder. “Don't be in such a hurry, lad. By and by, your time will come.”

  Chapter 11

  THE FEVER

  The wind was too strong for our topsail, but we set it nonetheless. We raised the foresail and took the reefs from the main; we set a gaff above it. We bent on nearly every sail that we had in our hurry to leave the Apostle behind.

  No longer did we sing “Heart of Oak,” or any song at all. We felt like cowards, like traitors. When the sound of cannon fire reached us, faint as finger taps, we all pretended not to hear. Butterfield wrote in his log that day, “Sighted an unknown ship to leeward. God save their souls.”

  For nearly three hours we battered along on our course. When the sea was utterly empty, we turned sharply to the south, hiding in the waves like a mouse in a meadow.

  We ran and we ran, the poor Dragon groaning as though from pain. She rolled so fast and so far that three men came down with the seasickness, slumping on the deck with their faces green as limes. And with each roll, we heard a gurgle and a splutter from the hull, as seawater made its way in through the Dragons wounds.

  So we pumped as we ran. And it was two days before the sea settled enough to let Abbey go over the side.