The Buccaneers Read online

  “I'm Davy Jones!” the voice screeched, shocking me with its suddenness. The scratching and rustling came from up forward, and then a banging of wood.

  I went toward the voice with my heart in my mouth. I ducked under a hanging lamp and came into a cabin so dark that I could see nothing at first, and then only shapes. By the depth of their shadows, I knew that berths were stacked on either side, eighteen in all, in narrow tiers of three. I could tell that in four of them lay sailors, all still and silent. But the cabin pulsed with a steady little ticking noise, as though all of them had watches.

  I was afraid of what I'd find, of what I'd feel if I went groping through the dark. So I fetched the candle from the captain's table, and brought its flame to light the cabin.

  The sailors were covered by gray blankets that had been drawn up around their heads and shoulders. The wool was thick with blood, and across the dark stains—their legs ticking furiously—crawled thousands of gleaming cockroaches.

  Then, to my utter horror, one of the blankets fell to the floor, shedding a mass of beetles. The sailor below it heaved a leg over the side of his berth. He rose to his feet and came staggering toward me.

  His forehead was split right across, laid open to the bone by a cutlass. His skin hung over his eyes like a blindfold, dried to a hardness by clots of black blood. He reached out his arms, and I moved back as he lumbered down between the berths.

  “Mate!” he cried. “Are you my mate?”

  “No,” I said, and he cowered back, his mouth in an awful grimace of fear.

  “Then you're one of them,” he said.

  “One of who?”

  “Of them!” He tumbled forward, facedown on the deck. The cockroaches swarmed over him in a sleek, black carpet.

  My candle went out. I turned and ran from the cabin, slamming my head on the lamp, crashing into the table with a rattle of dishes. I spun away from there, up to the deck and the sunlight, to the crucified man, who grinned at me with a leer that was all teeth with no lips.

  I lay at his feet, on bleached planks warmed by the sun. And soon I heard the most welcome, the most wonderful sounds I had ever heard: a flapping of canvas; a ripple of water; the splash of an anchor going down. I got to my knees and saw first the square topsail of a schooner, then a black hull below it, then the name Apostle and the numbers 1219 scrawled across the side.

  Her decks were packed with men, and she anchored so closely that I could see the faces of those who tended the cable. Black and blond, bearded and not, they seemed the cruelest lot who had ever sailed a ship. In rags and bright bandanas, bedecked in glittering gold, they snubbed the cable and brought the ship to a stop beside me, under the dead gaze of the man they had crucified.

  I retreated to the companion-way. In the shelter of its hood, I listened as boats were lowered and oars fitted into pins. Then, fearing that the buccaneers would return to the brig, I crept below to find myself a weapon.

  That awful laughter greeted me, and that voice came from everywhere. “I'm Davy Jones. Throw me a line, matey.”

  I sorted through the galley lockers, through drawers and shelves and bins. But the best I could find was a short, thick knife with a dull and rusted blade. Then I stood at the stove, digging clotted stew from the pot with my fingers, waiting for footsteps on the deck.

  I resolved to fight until the end as bravely as I could, and hoped I might fall in a swift melee. I might take one or two of them with me, I thought, but I would not give myself up, no matter how they begged; I would not suffer the same terrible ends as my new shipmates.

  But soon I grew teary-eyed at the thoughts of the coming battle. The stew sickened me until I could no longer eat; my hands and my legs trembled badly. I had to admit that I was scared—a coward at heart, I thought. And when I heard the boats going past in a chorus of rough voices and a splash of oars, I was more than immensely relieved.

  I went to the stern cabin and, keeping myself to the shadows, peered out through the windows.

  The brig had swung very close to shore. A thick mooring line drooped down from her stern, snaked through the water, and climbed again toward the trees. From the ship to the shore was a distance of less than fifty feet, but I thought of the sharks I had seen, and knew I'd never dare lower myself into that water.

  The boats appeared below me, packed with men. Two passed side by side, then a third, and a fourth behind it. At rough count there were sixty buccaneers, some in rags and some in finery, some with cutlasses and pistols, but most with no more weapons than I. They rowed toward a coconut grove, a crescent of golden sand.

  Emboldened, I stood closer to the windows. The brig was drifting on the current, stretching out her mooring line as she swung across the bay. The cable lifted from the water, doubling my distance from the shore. But now I directly faced the coconut grove, and a crude sort of camp emerged from among the trees. There was a structure of logs, a firepit, a water barrel standing upright. And high on the sand lay a pair of ship's boats, once the complement—I thought—of my ill-fated brig.

  The buccaneers spilled ashore, splashing through the shallows. With laughter and shouting and much hallooing, they swept up in a mass, and disappeared into the trees.

  They left the beach deserted, their boats tethered to the coconut palms. Above me, the mooring line stretched as tight as a bar, and I thought that if I could pull myself along it, I might be able to reach the boats unseen and …

  I groaned. The tide was flooding now. I had barely rowed against the current in the Dragons little dory; I could never hope to do it in a longboat built for twenty men. I would have to wait for the ebb again, nearly six hours distant. But at least I would have darkness on my side.

  “Three fathoms down!” the voice cried suddenly. “Throw me a line, matey.”

  I looked toward the sound, through the cabin door and up to the galley. I thought of the man I'd left lying on the deck in a swarm of cockroaches, and I imagined the voice was his, and that even now he was crawling aft. I could almost see him in the shadows, his eyes blinded by his own skin, his hands dark with blood, the mass of beetles ticking, ticking on his back.

  I couldn't wait six hours. I couldn't wait another six minutes in the creaking old ship full of nightmares. I threw myself at the windows and fumbled with the latches. Just as I worked them open, another boat appeared below me.

  It slid out from the curve of the old brig's hull, a boat smaller than the others, with only a few men instead of a pack. They were armed to the teeth with pistols and muskets and gleaming cutlasses.

  The first oarsman passed, and then the second, dressed like the crew of an admiral's barge, in stripes of white and blue, in straw hats ribboned at the crowns. They bent forward, bent back, in perfect rhythm, and their feathered oars made hardly a ripple. I stood frozen at the windows; they needed only look up to see me.

  Next came a figure in blue, standing upright with a cutlass for a cane, his hands folded on its guard. By the gold on his sleeve, by the bright plume in his hat, I knew it was Bartholomew Grace. He wore high boots curled down at the tops, and his wild, black hair covered his shoulders completely. He lifted his face toward the stretched-out mooring line, and I caught a glimpse—below the broad brim of his hat—of a smooth and pinkish cheek.

  I was afraid that he would feel me watching him, yet I couldn't move away. My arms ached from the effort of holding them still, and my fingers started trembling so badly that the window latch rattled.

  The oarsmen rowed swiftly, steadily, carrying that frightful figure along. But a man shouted at them from the stern, “Put your backs to it! Row, ladies, row!” He laughed, and I felt a great stir in my heart, for that laughter was so familiar.

  He came into my sight an instant later, rocking back as the oarsmen pulled on their oars, as the boat lifted up at the bow. And it was true, though I could scarcely believe it. There, in his old crimson coat, with pistols stuffed all over him, sat Dashing Tommy Dusker.

  I had known him as Dasher, and had see
n him last on a forest road in Kent nearly eight months before. A highwayman, a smuggler, a rogue in a devilish way, he had been my shipmate on my first voyage in the Dragon. He'd been so scared of the sea that he had dressed himself in a suit of corks. That jerkin was gone now, but in its place he wore wineskins puffed with air, two of them slung over his neck and under his arms.

  “Oh, you're doing fine, ladies, fine,” he said. His hand was on the tiller. “You can smell the gold now, can't you? Well, sniff at it, you dogs.” He gave the rudder a little shimmy that made the boat rock side to side. Bartholomew Grace tipped sideways, leaning on his cutlass for support. And Dasher shouted, as though the bowman had done it, “Mind your oar there, Miller! I should slice a new one from your wooden head.”

  He seemed the same as ever, full of himself and as blustery as a north wind. How he had come to be part of a pirate crew was a mystery that I could not hope to solve, but I was desperately glad to see him. Dasher once had saved my life, and I felt now a desperate hope that he might somehow help me again.

  In moments the boat grounded on the sand. The rowers held up their oars like four little trees, and Bartholomew Grace stepped between them, up the length of the boat, and onto the sparkling sand. With its silver at his feet and the green of the island behind him, in his blue and gold and crimson, he looked the very picture of a pirate, the way an artist might have thought a pirate ought to look. He stood with his back to me, and the breeze ruffled at his sweeping plume, at the ribbons in his rowers’ hats, and then he strode up to the camp with his black boots shining, toward the shouting and laughter that fell to silence at his coming.

  I waited until his boat had emptied, and at last I moved from the window. I threw myself down on the captain's settee, hoping to sleep until nightfall. But all manner of schemes ran through my mind, each seeming brilliant at first, all dissolving into hopelessness.

  I wondered where the Dragon was; surely she waited for me somewhere. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the island as I had seen it on the chart; I got up again to rummage through the captain's desk for a pen and paper. And I sketched it there: the island; the rocks; the narrow little spit at the north of the harbor; and the beaches beyond it, where even now my little ship might be lying on the beach, her repairs under-way. Yet just as easily, she might be standing off to the south or anchored at a cay, and I drew arrows and anchors all over my map before it occurred to me that the Dragon might even be off on her way to England.

  In the end, it came down to one choice: I had to get away from the island. I had to take a boat that would let me search for the Dragon. If I couldn't find her, I had to sail to the next island, and the next, and on and on, if need be, until I found someone, somewhere, who would take me home to England.

  I kept getting up and going back to the windows, staring out at the boats on the beach. But right beyond them were the buccaneers, busy with some sort of labor that took them in and out of the camp. If I was somehow going to steal a boat, it would have to be done right beneath their noses.

  Finally, I did sleep. When I woke, it was dark.

  A huge fire roared and crackled at the pirate camp. Its flames soared up through the coconut palms and I saw the buccaneers in their ragged clothes, turned orange by the light, then dark as demons as they passed before the fire. They carried chests and bags down to the beach, to a pair of boats that shuttled back and forth under bright, guttering torches. The harbor was ablaze with firelight.

  And somewhere in my haunted ship came that rustling sound. And that cracked and broken voice cried out, “I'm Davy Jones. Three fathoms down!”

  The sound was louder than I'd ever heard it, and through the darkness of the brig, this thing came scratching, screeching, ticking toward me.

  “Show no quarter!” it screamed.

  Chapter 15

  CRAWLING WITH

  CANNIBALS

  The door to the cabin creaked as something pushed against it. I squinted into layers of shadows that shifted in the fiery glow from the windows. I could see nothing but could imagine anything, and in the dark mass that moved along close to the deck, I formed the shoulders and the battered head of the man I had left covered in cockroaches. I saw his arm stretch out, his fingers spread. Then he leapt from the deck.

  He hurtled toward me and crashed against my shoulder. I fended him off, feeling a hardness first and a softness below it, as though my hand had passed through a mass of beetles. And he tumbled back with a deathly shriek, only to swoop up again and batter at my face and arms. Then he shot past, crashing against the windows with a jarring bang of wood and glass. And I saw him there, silhouetted in the flames of the buccaneers’ fire.

  It was only a parrot, old and tattered, as bedraggled as a bunch of dead flowers. “I'm Davy Jones,” he said, and squawked. “Three fathoms down. Three fathoms more.”

  With his beak and his claws, he bashed at the window frame.

  The noise he made seemed shockingly loud. “Stop that!” I hissed, but he went at it all the harder. He scratched and banged, and the noise came back in echoes, doubled by the trees, trebled by the hills. In the middle of the harbor, the torches of a passing boat shifted into line as the rowers turned toward me.

  I cowered down below the windows and watched the light play across the overhead in watery patterns of yellow and gold. The parrot banged and clattered; the light grew brighter, filling the cabin. I glanced up to see a face at the window.

  Under a black and tattered beard, it was gaunt and yellowed by fever and the torchlight. The skin was sunken so tight on the bones that it looked like a bearded skeleton grinning in toward me, and I gasped.

  The parrot leapt up at the glass. The latch sprang open, the window swung out, and the bird vanished through it in a rush of feathers. The face fell away, followed instantly by a great thump and a roar of oaths. Then the parrot shrieked, “Hoist the colors!”—and I saw him perched on the mooring line that was again stretched taut by the nighttime ebb. He was twitching his head like a man with the fits.

  From the boat rose a howl of coarse laughter. “It's the parrot,” said a voice … gruff as a bear's. “It's Dasher's blasted parrot.”

  But another, softer, said, “There's someone in there, I tell you. I saw him myself.”

  Again the buccaneers laughed. The fumes of their torches came in through the window, and their light flamed all across the glass. And the skeleton said, “Row me up to the chains. I'm going aboard for a look.”

  “Ghosts is all you'll find,” said the gruff voice. But oars thumped against the hull as the boat made its way forward. The torchlight slipped across the windows, darkened, and fell away.

  I looked out through the windows, straight toward the huge flare of the buccaneers’ fire. It cast bright, flickering patches onto the calm of the harbor. The lights from the boat were smaller streaks of yellow that came down the length of the brig and lay like cords of gold below me.

  I pushed the window wide and clambered onto the sill. Even reaching up, I couldn't quite touch the mooring line. But the parrot, with an angry squawk, reached down and pecked my hand.

  “Go on!” I said, a soft shout through gritted teeth. “Get out of there.” I shooed him off.

  He hopped sideways down the line, turning himself end for end. I crouched on the narrow sill, my hands on the frame at either side. Half a ship length away, a boathook caught onto the chains with a little clang of metal, and I leapt from the sill.

  The line scraped across my arms and nearly pulled through my fingers. But I caught it, swinging in the air as the parrot screamed and chattered. He hopped away again, going toward the shore along the line in a funny, sidling walk.

  Very clearly, I heard the footsteps on the deck. But the rail was above me, and all I saw, black against the stars, was the poor, dead watchman on the mainyard.

  The window hung open at the stern of the ship, a sure sign, I thought, that I had passed through it. So I reached out with my feet, swinging madly from the line as I kicked it
shut. Firelight glared off the glass, for a moment filling the cabin. And I saw my map on the captain's table, my sketch with its scribbles and notes.

  The footsteps grew louder. I looked up at the rail, sure that I would see the buccaneer grinning at me. But then my mind, tortured by worries, thought of the helmsman. What if the footsteps were his? I imagined him pulling his hands free from the nails, staggering across the deck. And what if the face that I saw was his: that grin without lips; those cold, dead eyes; his corpse's hands reaching out?

  It filled me with such a terror that before I knew it I'd swung up my legs and caught the line in my knees. I scuttled along it as fast as I could, hanging upside down like a sloth. The parrot went before me, facing east and then west, tilting onto each leg in turn, all the time uttering strange little warbles, as though he thought it tremendous fun.

  I was halfway to shore when my back touched the sea.

  From my own weight, or from some shift in the currents, the brig had swung closer to shore, and the line sagged in the middle. Soon my shoulders were wet, and then my trousers, and I was pulling myself through the water.

  And out of the bright reflections of fire came the fin of an enormous shark.

  It sliced through the patterns of yellow and red and tore them to tatters, a black sickle racing across the harbor. The shore was only yards away. I could see Dasher very plainly standing by the barrel. I pulled frantically at the line. But the shark came faster.

  It butted my legs and tore me from the line. It whirled me deep in the sea, turned, and came at me again.

  I hadn't the strength to fight it; I barely had the will. I sank until my face was underwater, and then a calmness came over me. I felt as though I floated in the sky instead of the sea, high above the little harbor with its blazing yellow lights. And the deeper I sank, the higher I floated, until the whole island was somehow laid below me.