Pirate Latitudes: A Novel (14 page)

Chapter 22

H
UNTER AWOKE WITH the instant conviction that something was wrong. He heard Spanish voices, but this time they were close — much too close. And he could hear footsteps, and the rustle of foliage. He sat up, wincing as the pains shot through him; if anything, his body ached more fiercely than it had the day before.

He glanced around at his little group. Sanson was already on his feet, peering through palm fronds in the direction of the Spanish voices. The Moor was quietly rising, his body tense, his movements finely controlled. Don Diego was sitting up on one elbow, eyes wide.

Only Lazue still lay on her back. And she was lying absolutely motionless. Hunter jerked his thumb at her to get up. She shook her head slightly, and mouthed “No.” She was not moving at all. Her face was covered with a fine sheen of perspiration. He started to move toward her.

“Careful!” she whispered, her voice tense. He stopped, and looked at her. Lazue was lying on her back, with her legs slightly apart. Her limbs were oddly rigid. He then saw the red, black, and yellow–striped tail disappear up the leg of her trousers.

It was a coral snake, attracted by the warmth of her body. He looked back at her face. It was taut, as if she were withstanding some extraordinary pain.

Behind him, Hunter heard the Spanish voices growing still louder. He could hear several men clumping and thrashing through the underbrush. He gestured to Lazue to wait, and went over to Sanson.

“Six of them,” Sanson whispered.

Hunter saw a party of six Spanish soldiers, carrying bedding and food, armed with muskets, moving up the hillside toward them. The soldiers were all young, and apparently regarded this excursion as a lark; they laughed and joked with each other.

“It’s not a patrol,” Sanson whispered.

“Let them go,” Hunter said.

Sanson looked at him sharply. Hunter pointed back to Lazue, still lying rigidly on the ground. Sanson immediately understood. They waited as the Spanish soldiers passed by, and moved on up the hillside. Then they returned to Lazue.

“Where is it now?” Hunter said.

“Knee,” she said softly.

“Moving up?”

“Yes.”

Don Diego spoke next. “Tall trees,” he said, looking around. “We must find tall trees. There!” He tapped the Moor. “Come with me.”

The two men set off into the brush, in the direction of a clump of Mayaguana trees some yards away. Hunter looked at Lazue, and then up at the Spanish soldiers. The soldiers were clearly visible, a hundred yards farther up the hillside. If any of the soldiers chose to look back, they would see the group immediately.

“It is too late in the season for mating,” Sanson said. He frowned at Lazue. “But we may be lucky and find a chick.” He turned to look at the Moor, who was scrambling up one of the trees, while Diego remained on the ground below.

“Where is it now?” Hunter said.

“Past the knee.”

“Try to relax.”

She rolled her eyes. “Damn you and your expedition,” she said. “Damn all of you.”

Hunter looked at the trouser leg. He could just see the slight movement in the fabric the snake made as it crawled upward.

“Mother of God,” Lazue said. She closed her eyes.

Sanson whispered to Hunter, “If they find no chick, we may have to stand her and shake her.”

“The snake will bite.”

They both knew the consequences of that.

The privateers were hard and tough; they regarded the poisonous bite of a scorpion, a black widow, or a water moccasin as no more than an inconvenience. Indeed, it was high good fun for a man to drop a scorpion into a comrade’s boot. But two venomous creatures commanded the respect and dread of everyone. The fer-de-lance was no laughing matter — and the little coral snake was the worst of all. No one ever survived its timid bite. Hunter could imagine Lazue’s terror as she waited for the tiny pinch on her leg that would signal the fatal bite. They all knew what would inevitably occur: first sweating, then shaking, then a creeping numbness that would spread all over the body. Death would follow before sunset.

“Where now?”

“High, very high.” Her voice was so soft he could hardly catch her words.

He looked at her pants and saw a slight ripple of the fabric at the crotch.

“Oh God,” Lazue moaned.

And then he heard a low squeak, almost a chirp. He turned and saw Diego and the Moor returning. Both smiled broadly. The Moor held something cupped in his hands. Hunter saw it was a tiny bandybird chick. It squeaked and fluttered its feathery, soft body.

“Quick, some cord,” the Jew said. Hunter produced a length of twine, and it was fastened around the chick’s legs. The chick was placed by the mouth of Lazue’s trouser cuff and tied to the ground, where it remained squeaking and twisting around its bonds.

They waited.

“Do you feel anything?” Hunter said.

“No.”

They looked back at the bandybird chick. The little creature struggled piteously, exhausting itself.

Hunter turned to Lazue.

“Nothing,” she said. And then her eyes abruptly widened.

“Coiling . . .”

They looked at her trousers. There was movement. A slowly forming curve in the cloth, which then dissolved.

“Going down,” Lazue said.

They waited. Suddenly, the chick became very agitated, squeaking more loudly than ever before. It had smelled the coral snake.

The Jew produced his pistol, shook out the shot and prime, and gripped the barrel in his fist, holding the butt like a club.

They waited. They could see the progress of the snake now passing the knee, going along the calf, moving by slow inches. It seemed to take forever.

And then suddenly, abruptly, the head appeared in the light, and the tongue flicked out. The chick squealed in a paroxysm of terror. The coral snake advanced, and then Don Diego leapt on it, pounding the head into the ground with the pistol butt, and simultaneously Lazue was on her feet, jumping back with a scream.

Don Diego pounded the snake with repeated blows, crushing its body into the soft earth. Lazue turned and was violently sick. But Hunter paid no attention to that — at her scream, he had immediately turned and looked up the hillside, toward the Spanish soldiers.

Sanson and the Moor had done the same.

“Did they hear?” Hunter said.

“We cannot risk it,” Sanson said. There was a long silence, interrupted only by Lazue’s retching. “You noticed they carried supplies and bedding.”

Hunter nodded. The meaning was clear enough. They had been sent up the slope by Cazalla as a warning party, to watch for pirates on the land — and also to scan the horizon for the approach of the
Cassandra
. A single musket-shot from that group would alert the fort below. From their vantage point, they would see the
Cassandra
many miles away.

“I will do this,” Sanson said, smiling slightly.

“Take the Moor,” Hunter said.

The two men slipped away, moving up the hillside after the Spanish troops. Hunter turned back to Lazue, who was pale, wiping her mouth.

“I am ready to leave,” she said.

Hunter, Don Diego, and Lazue shouldered the equipment, and moved on down the hillside.

.   .   .

NOW THEY FOLLOWED
the river that opened into the harbor. When they first met it, the river was only a narrow trickle, and a man could step across it easily. But it quickly broadened, and the jungle growth along its banks became thick and deep.

They encountered the first of the organized patrols in late afternoon — eight Spaniards, all armed, moving silently up the river in a longboat. These men were serious and grim, fighting men prepared for battle. As night fell, the high trees along the river turned blue-green, and the river surface black, unmarred except for an occasional ripple of a crocodile. But the patrols were now everywhere, moving in steady cadences, by torchlight. Three other longboats ferried soldiers up the river, their torches casting long, shimmering points of light.

“Cazalla is not a fool,” Sanson said. “We are expected.”

They were now just a few hundred yards from the fortress of Matanceros. The stone walls loomed high above them. There was a lot of activity, inside and outside the fort. Armed bands of twenty soldiers paced the perimeter.

“Expected or not,” Hunter said, “we must keep to our plan. We attack tonight.”

Chapter 23

E
NDERS, THE BARBER-SURGEON and sea artist, stood at the helm of the
Cassandra
and watched the gentle breakers turn silver as they smashed over the reef of Barton’s Cay, a hundred yards to port. Up ahead, he could see the black hulk of Mt. Leres looming larger on the horizon.

A man slipped aft to him. “The glass is turned,” he said.

Enders nodded. Fifteen glasses had passed since nightfall, which meant it was nearing two in the morning. The wind was from the east and fresh at ten knots; his ship was on a strong tack, and he would reach the island in an hour.

He squinted at the profile of Mt. Leres. Enders could not discern the harbor of Matanceros. He would have to round the southerly point of the island before he came into view of the fortress and the galleon he hoped was still anchored in the harbor.

By then, he would also be within range of the Matanceros guns, unless Hunter and his party had silenced them.

Enders glanced at his crew, standing on the open deck of the
Cassandra
. No man spoke. Everyone watched silently as the island grew larger before them. They all knew the stakes, and they all knew the risks: within hours, each man would either be unimaginably rich or almost certainly dead.

For the hundredth time that night, Enders wondered what had happened to Hunter and his party, and where they were.

.   .   .

IN THE SHADOW
of the stone walls of Matanceros, Sanson bit the gold doubloon, and passed it to Lazue. Lazue bit it, then passed it to the Moor. Hunter watched the silent ritual, which all privateers believed brought them luck before a raid. Finally, the doubloon reached him; he bit it, feeling the softness of the metal. Then, while they watched, he tossed the coin over his right shoulder.

Without a word, the five of them set out in different directions.

Hunter and Don Diego, with ropes and grappling hooks slung over their shoulders, crept northward around the fortress perimeter, pausing frequently to allow patrols to pass. Hunter glanced up at the high stone walls of Matanceros. The upper walls had been constructed smoothly, with a rounded lip to make grappling difficult. But the masonry skills of the Spanish were not sufficient to the conception; Hunter was certain his hooks would find purchase.

When they reached the north wall of the fort, farthest from the sea, they paused. After ten minutes, a patrol passed, armor and weapons clanging in the still night air. They waited until the soldiers disappeared from sight.

Then Hunter ran forward and flung the grappling iron up over the wall. He heard a faint metallic clink as it landed on the inside. He tugged on the rope, and the iron came back, crashing to the ground beside him. He cursed and waited, listening.

There was no sound, no indication that anyone had heard him. He threw the grappling iron again, watching it sail high over the walls. Again he tugged. And he had to dodge as the iron came back.

He threw a third time, and this time the hook held — but almost immediately, he heard the noise of another patrol. Quickly, Hunter scrambled up the wall, panting and gasping, urged onward by the approaching sounds of armored soldiers. He reached the parapet, dropped down, and hauled up the rope. Don Diego had retreated back into the underbrush.

The patrol passed by beneath him.

Hunter dropped the rope, and Don Diego scrambled up, muttering and swearing in Spanish. Don Diego was not strong, and his progress seemed interminable. Yet finally he came over the side, and Hunter pulled him to safety. He hauled in the rope. The two men, crouched down against the cold stone, looked around them.

Matanceros was silent in the darkness, the lines of tents filled with hundreds of sleeping men. There was an odd thrill to be so close to so many of the enemy.

“Guards?” the Jew whispered.

“I see none,” Hunter said, “except there.” On the opposite side of the fortress, two figures stood by the guns. But they were sea watches, posted to scan the horizon for approaching ships.

Don Diego nodded. “There will be a guard at the magazine.”

“Probably.”

The two men were almost directly above the wooden building Lazue had thought might be the magazine. From where they crouched, they could not see the door to the structure.

“We must go there first,” the Jew said.

They had brought no explosives with them, only fuses. They intended to take their explosives from the fortress’s own magazine.

Silently, in the darkness, Hunter slipped to the ground, and Don Diego followed, blinking his eyes in the faint light. They moved around to the magazine entrance.

They saw no guard.

“Inside?” the Jew whispered.

Hunter shrugged, went to the door, listened a moment, slipped off his boots, and gently pushed the door open. Looking back, he saw Don Diego also removing his boots. Then Hunter went inside.

The interior of the magazine was lined in copper sheeting on all sides, and the few carefully protected candles gave the room a warm, reddish glow. It was oddly inviting, despite the rows of gunpowder casks and the stacked bags of cannon charge, all suitably labeled in red. Hunter moved soundlessly across the copper floor. He saw no one, but heard a man snoring from somewhere in the magazine.

Slipping among the casks, he looked for this man, and eventually found a soldier asleep, propped up against a barrel of powder. Hunter struck the man hard on the head; the soldier snorted and lay still.

The Jew padded in, surveyed the room, and whispered, “Excellent.” They immediately set to work.

.   .   .

IF THE FORTRESS
was silent and sleeping, the rough shanty town that housed the galleon’s crew was boisterous. Sanson, the Moor, and Lazue slipped through the town, passing windows through which they could see soldiers drinking and gaming in yellow lantern-light. One drunken soldier stumbled out, bumped into Sanson, apologized, and was sick against a wooden wall. The three moved on, toward the longboat landing at the riverside.

Although the landing had not been guarded during the day, a group of three soldiers were there now, talking quietly and drinking in the darkness. They sat at the end of the landing, hanging their feet over the side into the water, the low sound of their voices blending with the slap of water against the pilings. Their backs were to the privateers, but the wooden slats of the landing made a silent approach impossible.

“I will do this,” Lazue said, removing her blouse. Naked to the waist, her dagger held behind her back, she whistled a light tune and walked out onto the dock.

One of the soldiers turned.
“Que pasa ca?”
he demanded, and held up a lantern. His eyes widened in astonishment as he saw what must have seemed to him an apparition — a bare-breasted woman nonchalantly walking toward him.
“Madre de Dios,”
he said, and the woman smiled at him. He answered the smile in the instant before the dagger passed through his ribs into his heart.

The other soldiers looked at the woman with the bloody dagger. They were so astonished they hardly resisted as she killed them, their blood spurting over her bare chest.

Sanson and the Moor ran up, stepping over the bodies of the three men. Lazue pulled her tunic back on. Sanson climbed into one boat and immediately set out toward the stern of the galleon. The Moor cut free the other boats, and pushed them out into the harbor, where they drifted free. Then the Moor got into a boat with Lazue, and made for the bow of the galleon. Nobody spoke at all.

Lazue pulled her tunic tighter around her. The blood of the soldiers soaked through the fabric; she felt a chill. She stood in the longboat and looked at the approaching galleon while the Moor rowed in swift, powerful strokes.

The galleon was large, about one hundred and forty feet, but mostly she was dark, only a few torches demarcating her profile. Lazue looked to the right, where she saw Sanson rowing away from them, toward the galleon’s stern. Sanson was silhouetted against the lights of the raucous shanty town on shore. She turned and looked left, at the gray line of the fortress walls. She wondered if Hunter and the Jew were inside yet.

.   .   .

HUNTER WATCHED AS
the Jew delicately filled the possum entrails with gunpowder. It seemed an interminable process, but the Jew refused to be hurried. He squatted in the center of the magazine, with an opened bag of powder at his side, and hummed a little as he worked.

“How much longer?” Hunter said.

“Not long, not long,” the Jew said. He seemed completely nonchalant. “It will be so pretty,” he said. “You wait. It will be very beautiful.”

When he had the entrails filled, he cut them into various lengths, and slipped them into his pocket.

“All right,” he said. “Now we can begin.”

A moment later, the two men emerged from the magazine, bent over with the weight of the powder charges they carried. They crossed the main yard of the fortress stealthily, and paused beneath the heavy stone parapet on which the guns rested. The two lookouts were still there.

While the Jew waited with the gunpowder, Hunter climbed onto the parapet and killed the lookouts. One died in complete silence and the other gave only a quiet groan as he slipped to the ground.

“Diego!” Hunter hissed.

The Jew appeared on the parapet and looked at the guns. He poked down a barrel with a rammer.

“How delightful,” he whispered. “They are already powdered and primed. We will make a special treat. Here, help me.”

The Jew pushed a second bag of powder down the mouth of one cannon. “Now the shot,” he said.

Hunter frowned. “But they will add another ball before they fire.”

“Of course. Two charges, and two balls — these guns will breech before their eyes.”

Quickly, they moved from one culverin to the next. The Jew added a second charge of powder, and Hunter dropped in a ball. Each ball made a low rumbling sound as it moved down the cannon mouth, but there was nobody to hear it.

When they had finished, the Jew said, “Now I have things to do. You must put sand in each barrel.”

Hunter slipped down the parapet to the ground. He took the loose sandy surface of the fortress in his fingers and dropped a handful down each cannon mouth. The Jew was clever: even if, by chance, the guns fired, the sand in the barrels would destroy the aim — and ream the inside so badly that they would never be accurate again.

When he was finished, he saw the Jew bent over one gun carriage, working beneath the barrel. He got to his feet. “That’s the last,” he said.

“What have you done?”

“Touched the fuses to the barrels. The heat of firing the barrel will ignite the fuses on the undercarriage charge.” He smiled in the darkness. “It will be wonderful.”

.   .   .

THE WIND CHANGED
, and the stern of the galleon swung around toward Sanson. He tied up beneath the gilded transom and began to scale the rear bulkhead toward the captain’s cabin. He heard the soft sound of a song in Spanish. He listened to the obscene lyrics but could not locate the source of the song; it seemed to drift in the air, elusive and faint.

He stepped through a cannon porthole into the captain’s cabin. It was empty. He moved outside, on the gun deck, and down the companionway to the berth deck. He saw no one. He looked at the empty hammocks, all swinging gently in the motion of the ship. Dozens of hammocks, and no sign of a crew.

Sanson did not like this — an unguarded ship implied a ship without treasure. He now feared what they had all feared but never voiced: that the treasure might have been taken off the ship and stored elsewhere, perhaps in the fortress. If that were true, their plans were all in vain.

Therefore, Sanson found himself hoping for a good-sized skeleton crew and guard. He moved to the aft galley, and here he was encouraged. The galley was deserted, but there was evidence of recent cooking — a bullock stew in a large cauldron, some vegetables, a cut lemon rocking back and forth on the wooden counter.

He left the galley, and moved forward again. In the distance, he heard shouts from the sentry on deck, greeting Lazue and the Moor as they approached.

Lazue and the Moor tied up alongside the midships ladder of the galleon. The sentry on deck leaned down and waved.
“Questa faire?”
he called.

“We bring rum,” Lazue answered in a low voice. “Compliments of the captain.”

“The captain?”

“It is his day of birth.”

“Bravo, bravo.”
Smiling, the sentry stepped back as Lazue came aboard. He looked, and had a moment of horror as he saw the blood on her tunic and in her hair. Then the knife flashed through the air and buried itself in his chest. The sentry clutched the handle in surprise. He seemed about to speak. Then he pitched forward onto the deck.

The Moor came aboard, and crept forward, toward a group of four soldiers who sat playing cards. Lazue did not watch what he did; she went below. She found ten soldiers sleeping in a forward compartment; silently, she shut the door and barred it.

Five more soldiers were singing and drinking in an adjacent cabin. She peered in and saw that they had guns. Her own pistols were jammed in her belt; she would not fire a shot unless she had to. She waited outside the room.