The Pirate Round

Chapter 20

ELEPHIANT, Lord Yancy, sat on his temporary throne and stared out over the top of the stockade, out over the sharp cut of the valley, deep green with its blanket of jungle and shadow, out over the flashing ocean and finally to the low, blue-green, irregular line that was Madagascar in the distance. He held a glass of brandy in one hand and took desultory sips from it. He listened.

To his right, in a slightly shorter chair, sat the ursine figure of Henry Nagel, drinking rum. Nagel was still dressed in the rags of a sodden pirate thrown up on the beach. In his halting way he was relating the events of the past few days.

When he finished, Yancy closed his eyes and said, “Henry, tell it all to me again, please.” He had to be certain he had missed nothing. He had to check for inconsistencies that might indicate betrayal.

“Them two ships come in on the tail of the flood,” Nagel began with the great patience of a man too slow-witted to grow restless, “and they anchored by their best bowers. I knew there was no one still at the house, doing that Dinwiddie’s bidding, so I got four of our lads to act like they was a boat for hire. Dinwiddie comes down to the dock, dressed like it was his fucking coronation and acting the right king. He hires the lads to take him out to the big ship, the Queen’s Venture. Says he has to welcome the new arrival to ‘his’ island.”

“Dinwiddie did not recognize any of the boat crew?”

“No. They was lads never met him. So they take him out, and he’s welcomed aboard with a side party and all. And then Press comes out and starts kicking him around the deck. The lads in the boat, they stayed there the whole time, listening, peeking over the gunnel sometimes, and never a one noticing them.

“So Press beats hell out of Dinwiddie for an hour, and the whole time he’s asking, ‘Where’s Yancy? Where’s Yancy?’ and all the time Dinwiddie’s saying, ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ ”

Yancy nodded his approval. How could Press think he would outwit him, catch him by surprise? Press was a pathetic worm, not worthy of the title “adversary.”

“After an hour or so,” Nagel continued, “Press stops, and then he sees the lads in the boat and near shoots them, but they got away. I’m watching from the shore with a glass. They put together a landing party, goddamned lot of men, two hundred or more, I guess.

“They come ashore, and I watched them march by. I’m laying against a wall, like I’m dead drunk, and they just march on past, nothing said. They had that dumb bastard Dinwiddie with them, leading him on a halter like a cow. They go up and take your house with no fight, ’cause there weren’t no one there to fight with.

“That night a hundred men or so come back down to the town, and they search every building, going through the warehouses, the whorehouses-everywhere. And everywhere they are asking, ‘Where is Elephiant Yancy? Where is Yancy?’ and the only answer they get, course, is ‘Dead.’ ”

Again Yancy nodded as he listened to Nagel’s account of events unfolding just as he had set them up. Every man on St. Mary’s who knew unequivocally that he was alive and where he could be found was right here with him. Everyone in the town below would have known about the fire and heard the rumor of his death and would have no reason to doubt it. They were the perfect people to pass the lie on to Press, because they did not think they were lying.

“But here’s the damnedest thing of it,” Nagel continued. “They’re there… a day and a half, I reckon, and then next thing I know here’s Press marching most of his men right back to the ship, and it’s up anchor and away. The tender’s left behind, and maybe seventy of the men to garrison the house, but the rest of ’em just sail off.

“I reckoned you’d want to know why, so I go up to the house, and I bring a bottle, and I start in to talking with the bastard they got guarding the gate and sharing my bottle with him. Tell him I figure to join in with them and can I talk to Press?

“And what does he tell me? Tells me Press is hot to kill that son of a bitch Marlowe, what was just here. I reckon Dinwiddie told Press Marlowe was here and where he gone. Turns out they go way back, Press and Marlowe. So he’s off to hunt Marlowe down, and when he catches him, he’s bound back to St. Mary’s and reckoning he’ll make himself lord of the island. Like he could take your place, my lord.”

Hot to kill Marlowe? Yancy thought. How very odd. He recalled how Press had been obsessed with killing the man named Malachias Barrett, who had marooned him, left him to die. He had been there on that patch of sand eight days when Yancy found him. It did not seem possible that any living thing could have survived that long, with no food and a single bottle of water, under the blistering Caribbean sun. But Press had. He had talked endlessly of Barrett and how he would kill him.

Now he had come to St. Mary’s on a mission of vengeance and was likewise obsessed with this Marlowe. Roger Press collected enemies the way a ship’s bottom gathers barnacles and weeds, just by being.

Yancy thought of this new irony, smiled, and then chuckled. It was all too much. Press marches off, leaves less than half his men behind, vulnerable as a nestful of eggs. And where does he go? Off to kill the man that he, Yancy, has been thinking day and night about killing. The one man who had supplanted even Roger Press as an object of Yancy’s hatred.

Perhaps Press and Marlowe will kill each other, he thought. But no, that was no good. He wanted to personally see them die, both of them.

Perhaps Press will return here with Marlowe as his prisoner. And my dear Elizabeth as well. That thought warmed Yancy extremely. And it was entirely feasible that Press would do so.

“Come, come, Henry, no time to waste.” Yancy stood up, put his glass down on the small table by his chair. “It is time for us to go home.”

The next morning they finished their preparations. It would take them the rest of that day to get from the mountain retreat to the big house, but that was fine, because what Yancy intended to do had to be done in the dark. Night was their ally. They did not need light, because they knew every inch of the house that would soon become their killing field, and the men who occupied it now did not.

Yancy and four handpicked men stripped off the fine clothing that they were accustomed to wearing, and donned tattered, stained, and patched-up rags. They smeared their faces with dirt and blood, then regarded themselves in the big mirror that Nagel had brought out. The effect was perfect.

They strapped on belts with the ubiquitous sheath knives in the small of their backs and secreted daggers inside shirts and breeches, and by midmorning they were off, working their way down the long, winding trail, down from the mountain hideout, through the valley, and over the hill that overlooked the harbor, the hill on which sat the house that Adam Baldridge had built.

It was fifteen miles, and they moved quickly, but still they did not reach the crest of the far hill until an hour after sunset. There they sat and rested and alternated between standing watch and sleeping, save for Yancy, who remained awake and alert, like a deer at a water hole.

Somewhere around midnight they headed out again. As they walked along the crest of the hill, they could see lights in the big house a mile away. They followed the trail down and down toward the water, until at last it met up with the dirt road that ran along the waterfront. They trudged on, past Yancy’s warehouses, past the low, ramshackle buildings in the town.

There was not a person in St. Mary’s who would not have recognized Lord Yancy, but now as he shuffled along, his battered hat pulled low, his clothes in rags, no one paid the slightest attention to him. He looked like any of the human flotsam that washed up on the island’s shore every day.

Up the familiar road, up to the big house. They could see lights burning in windows all over the building, could hear the sounds of men carrying on. Yancy remembered the words in the report that At-wood had sent. “Consent of the queen,” my arse, he thought as he shuffled along, looking hurt and exhausted. Bloody pirates is what they are, and no more, and all the secret dealing with the queen cannot change that…

At last they came to the gate through the stockade wall, the only realistic way in. Two months before there would have been any number of rotten bits in the stockade through which they might have crawled, but by Yancy’s own orders that wooden wall had been strengthened and repaired. Now even the most lax patrol would be alerted by an attempt to scale it or breech it.

No, it was in through the gate. That was the only way.

“Hold, there!” It was the first challenge to their progress, the guard at the gate. In the dark, Yancy saw him swing his musket around, saw a second guard do the same.

“Please, sir, I beg of you,” said Yancy, and his voice cracked most effectively. “Pray, sir, we are shipwrecked on the far side of the island. We have walked over the mountains. Please, food and water, we beg…”

There was silence after that. The guards were not ready for this eventuality. “Go down to the town,” the one guard said at last, taking the initiative. “They have food and water there.”

“Please, sir, they will give us nothing without we pay, and we ain’t got a groat betwixt us five. ‘Go see the lord of the island, do you want charity,’ they say.”

“Humph,” the guard said to that, and then, after another silence, said, “The lot of you, sit down there and keep your hands out.”

He pointed with his musket to an ironwood log, a foot and a half thick and ten feet long, that was rolled up against the stockade wall and used by the guards as a sort of bench. Yancy and his men sat in a row along the log, like birds on a branch, and the guard said to the other, “Go and get Lieutenant Tasker.”

They waited in an uncomfortable silence for five minutes, and then the guard was back and another man with him.

“This fellow says they was shipwrecked on the far side of the island. He’s begging food and water.”

The new arrival-Lieutenant Tasker, Yancy guessed-stepped toward them, looked down on them. “What ship?” he asked suddenly.

“Betsy, snow, from Liverpool, bound for the Bay of Antongil. We… we had business there, like…” Yancy had anticipated these questions, had his answers ready.

“What is your name?”

“Joe Benner, my lord. Boatswain. The officers is all dead, sir. We carried the captain halfway across the mountains, like to save him, but he died and we buried him. The rest and the other hands, they drowned.”

Tasker was silent for a moment, and then Yancy added, “Please, my lord, we suffered something horrid. Food and water, it’s all we ask, and someplace safe to sleep. We been in that wicked, wicked jungle four days now. I beg of you. You are lord of this place. Won’t you see to helping some poor, desperate sailors?”

He watched as Tasker ran his eyes over the five men, assaying the risk. It would appear small, Yancy had made certain of that. Just five men, and they too weak with hunger and exhaustion to cause any trouble.

At last Tasker said, “I am not lord of this island. Captain Press is in charge here, but he is gone and left me in command.”

He considered for a moment more and then said, “Very well. You may come into the kitchen and eat and drink and sleep there under guard.”

“Oh, bless you, sir,” Yancy began, and the others joined in with their authentic-sounding gratitude.

Tasker led them through the gate and into the house and then out a back door to the kitchen, which was connected to the main house only by a roofed-over walkway twenty feet long. Yancy stared about as if seeing the house for the first time. He took note of the guards at the entrance to the great hall, and through the open door could see that it was functioning now as a barracks, with a majority of Press’s men asleep within, like deer run into a pen.

Inside the kitchen they were given food and water, and they fell on both like wolves. They were in fact ravenous and parched, since Yancy had allowed them nothing to eat or drink for the past eight hours, and the effect was complete.

For ten minutes they sated themselves in silence while the two men guarding them grew increasingly bored. At last Yancy pushed back from the table.

“Dear God, but that is good,” he said to the guards. “Pray, give our thanks to- What was the good man’s name?”

“Lieutenant Tasker.”

“Yes, yes, of course. But say now, I had always heard there was a fellow, name of Yancy, who run things on St. Mary’s.”

The guard chuckled. “Yancy? There was. Captain Press come clear from England in order to knock that son of a bitch on the head. Lucky for him he had the good sense to drop dead right before we showed up.”

“Lucky for him,” Yancy said, and thought, You die first.

Yancy continued to nibble at the food that was laid out for them. It was the first meal he had had for some time that was prepared by another’s hands, but of course his anonymity protected him from the threat of assassination.

As he ate, he continued to engage the guard in conversation.

The man was not of a talkative bent, but Yancy drew him out, asking him about his home, his experiences, sharing stories of places they knew in common. Soon there was something of an easy rapport between them. As he talked, Yancy imagined what it would be like when he cut the man’s throat.

Finally Yancy and the four others had eaten their fill. They pushed themselves away from the table and found places on the floor to curl up and sleep. They were as genuinely exhausted as they had been hungry and thirsty, and soon the hall was filled with the bestial sounds of their snoring.

Yancy was glad of it. The guards, he knew, would not notice that he was awake with the others so genuinely asleep. He lay there motionless, eyes closed, and listened to the little sounds of the guards moving around, talking on occasion to one another, yawning.

He remained still for an hour, but he dared wait no longer for fear that the guards would be relieved. He imagined it was somewhere around two in the morning. That was a good time. Defenses were down at that hour, watchfulness at a low ebb.

He rolled over with a groan, sat up. He saw the guard straighten, reacting to the first movement in an hour or more.

“Got to piss,” Yancy said.

The guard nodded. For a moment he was silent, and Yancy knew he was debating whether or not his charge needed accompaniment in that task. Finally he said, “Out that door there. Just piss in the bush. And come right back.”

Yancy nodded and stood. The guard did not realize that his decision had bought him at least four more minutes to live.

Yancy walked slowly, awkwardly, to the door, as if his muscles were sore and aching. But once outside and beyond the guard’s view, he picked up his pace, racing around the familiar north end of the building, down a flight of stone steps and along the dark back side of the big house. He could see nothing beyond vague shapes, the outline of the house against the stars, the blackness that was the stockade fence. But that did not matter. He was lord of the place, and he knew every inch of the grounds.

To his left, thirty feet beyond the stone wall of the house, there was a hump of dirt with a small door set in it. Yancy made a move in that direction, then stopped. He heard the crunch of shoes on gravel, a guard patrolling the perimeter.

Son of a whore, he thought. He did not have too long before the idiot in the kitchen came looking for him or raised an alarm.

Yancy waited for long maddening seconds, crouched in the blackness by the wall, as the guard came closer. He heard the man stop, pause, then head back the way he had come. Yancy waited another minute, until he could no longer hear the footfalls, then left the shadows’ protection, racing across the ground in a crouch, making for that well-hidden door set in the mound of earth.

With a dozen strides he was there, feeling along the ground until his hands fell on the heavy bar that was set across the door, preventing anyone from opening it from the inside.

He lifted the bar, put it aside, and swung the door open. Movement from the darkness within, and then Henry Nagel, hunched nearly double, emerged from the tunnel. He straightened with a stifled groan, stepped aside, and then another man followed him and another and another. More and more men-big men, bearded, with weapons hanging off them-poured out of the secret entrance and spread out on the lawn, crouching down, waiting in silence.

“How many are we?” Yancy breathed the words.

“Fifty, all told.”

Yancy nodded. They were the men from the compound, the original Terrors, his loyal core. Nagel had augmented their numbers with men from the town, pirates who were temporarily on the beach or who had made their homes on St. Mary’s. They were always ready for a good fight and eager to join in on the side most likely to win. Nagel had convinced them that it was Yancy.

“Good. Let’s go.” He turned and headed back the way he had come, and behind him the sound of fifty big, armed men following, being as quiet as they could, which was not overly quiet.

Along the dark perimeter of the building and up the stone steps. Yancy guessed he had been gone five minutes at least, enough for the guard to become concerned. He hoped the man would try to find his charge by himself, rather than raise the alarm and admit he had let Yancy leave unescorted.

He moved cautiously toward the edge of the kitchen building, slowing his pace, listening.

“Benner? Benner, you son of a bitch, where are you?” he heard the guard hiss. Trying to cover his mistake.

Yancy stepped around the corner of the kitchen and stopped, twenty feet from the guard. He could just make out the man’s dark shape. “Here!” he called softly. “Come and see this, you will not believe it!”

He slipped the ten-inch stiletto blade out of his shirt, held it easily at his side.

“Get over here, you bastard!” the guard said in a loud whisper.

“No, truly, you must see this. You will not believe it!” Yancy called out. He heard the sounds of the guard approaching, just audible as he stepped over the soft ground, heard him muttering.

The man’s dark form loomed up in front of him, and Yancy said, “Here.”

They stepped around the edge of the building and stopped in the face of the fifty pirates waiting there. The guard’s mouth fell open, and he was about to say something-to yell, perhaps-when Yancy grabbed his hair and jerked his head back and with one fluid motion cut his throat, clean through to the vertebrae.

The guard made a gasping, gurgling sound and crumpled to his knees. Yancy felt a stream of hot blood lash across his cheek, and he thought of his daily pig killing.

“There. I told you you would not believe it,” Yancy said to the dying man, then waved his men forward and led them on to the open door to the kitchen.

There he stopped them again and went in himself, calling to the one remaining guard. “I think your friend has need of your help,” he said. “He sent me back for you.”

The second guard was a cautious man, and he held Yancy at musket point and made him lead the way. But for all his caution he was not ready for Henry Nagel, waiting by the edge of the door, who grabbed him by the mouth as he walked past and jerked the gun from his hand. The guard screamed into Nagel’s callused palm, thrashed like a fish in the bottom of a boat, but he could not break Nagel’s grip, and Nagel dispatched him the way Yancy had done his partner.

The fifty crowded into the kitchen and joined their four comrades waiting there. Nagel handed Yancy his sword and shoulder belt, which he draped over his shoulder, and a brace of pistols.

Nagel stuck a bunko-what the Portuguese called a “cheroot”-between his lips and lit it with a lantern, then handed it to Yancy and lit another.

“Very well. Let us go,” Yancy said. He marched out of the kitchen, down the walk, and back into the big house. The need for subtlety was past. They had surprise, and they had sufficient numbers. The men knew what to do.

Down the hallway to the tall doors that opened into the great hall. The sentry, half asleep, jerked up at the sound, turned toward Yancy and his force of men.

“What in hell…? Who the hell…?” was as far as he got before Yancy shot him and then with his second pistol shot the other guard. There was a moment’s pause, a universal holding of breath, save for the ringing echo of the pistol shots.

And then, as Yancy stepped past the slumped, bleeding forms of the guards and into the great hall, panic exploded like a keg of power going off.

Men leaped up from the floor where they slept, arms grabbed for muskets, for swords, for breeches. They were dark ghosts in the light of the three lanterns that illuminated the hall with their weak light. Men shouted in alarm or confusion, shouted questions, shouted orders.

Yancy pulled the cheroot from his mouth, touched the glowing end to the fuse of a hand grenado, tossed it into this thrashing crowd of men. Nagel and three others did likewise.

Yancy watched the path of their flight across the dark room, marked by the fuses that glowed and hissed. He was watching one of them bounce at the far end of the hall when the first exploded, then the second and the third and in the same instant the final two.

The howls of confusion turned to shrieks of agony, screams of terror, and then Yancy stepped farther into the room, and the men behind him followed and spread out, and they began to empty their pistols and muskets into the crowd.

From the darkness a few muskets answered back, and behind him Yancy heard more gunfire, and he knew that the officers, who would have been sleeping in the upstairs rooms, had come rushing to the sound of the fight and had run into the twenty men he had dispatched to lie in wait for them.

The gunfire made a relentless noise, a grand orchestra of priming and powder, so that no one shot was distinguishable from another. Then through that din came the first cry of “Quarter! Quarter!”

“Hold!” Yancy shouted, and the gunfire ceased abruptly. Nearly all of the guns would be expended by now, and there was no need to engage in fighting with cold steel if it was not necessary.

“Lay down your arms!” Yancy shouted. He did not know at whom he was shouting. The brilliant light of flash in the pans and at the muzzle ends had ruined his eyes for seeing in the dark. He was aware only of the dim shapes of the high windows in the great hall, and in the circles of light thrown off from the lanterns he could see dead men and living men and pools of blood.

From the dark came the clatter of muskets hitting the stone floor. The gunfire behind him had ceased. Yancy was once again lord of St. Mary’s.

He wondered what horror the dawn would reveal, once he was able to see the results of his slaughter. He wondered, but he did not care very much, and it was only a vague sort of curiosity. There were prisoners enough to clean up the mess and burn the dead.

For him it was just more preparation. He felt suddenly very weary, overcome with the strain of it all. He was ready to kill Press and be done with it.

Or rather, he was ready for Press and Marlowe to sail back into his arms so that he might begin the protracted process of killing them both.