Pirate Latitudes: A Novel (21 page)

Still the broadside came from the Spaniard.

To stand in the midst of this injury and destruction and keep a cool head was almost impossible, and yet that was what Hunter tried to do, as one volley after another slammed home into his vessel. It had been twenty minutes since the warship opened fire; the deck was littered with rigging and spars and wooden splinters; the screams of the wounded blended with the sizzling whine of the cannon balls that snapped through the air. For Hunter, the destruction and chaos around him had long ago merged into a steady background so constant he no longer paid attention to it; he knew his ship was being slowly and inexorably destroyed, but he remained fixed on the enemy vessel, which moved closer with each passing second.

His losses were heavy. Seven men were dead, and twelve wounded; two cannon emplacements were destroyed. He had lost his foresprit and all her sail; he had lost his mizzen top and his mainsail rigging on the leeside; he had taken two hits below the waterline, and
El Trinidad
was shipping water fast. Already he sensed she rode lower in the water, and moved less smartly; there was a soggy, heavy quality to her forward progress.

He could not attempt to repair the damage. His little crew was busy just holding the ship on a manageable course. It was now a question of time before she became impossible to control, or sank outright.

He squinted through the smoke and haze at the Spanish ship. It was becoming hard to see. Despite the strong wind, the two ships were surrounded by acrid smoke.

She was closing fast.

“Seven hundred yards,” Lazue said tonelessly. She had been injured already; a jagged shaft of wood had creased her forearm on the fifth volley. She had quickly applied a tourniquet near the shoulder, and now continued her sightings, oblivious to the blood that dripped onto the deck at her feet.

Another volley screamed at them, rocking the ship with multiple impacts.

“Six hundred yards.”

“Ready to fire!” Hunter shouted, bending to sight along the crosshairs. He was lined up for a midships hit, but as he watched, the Spanish warship moved forward slightly. He was now lined on the aft castle.

So be it, he thought, as he gauged the rocking of
El Trinidad
through the crosshairs, getting a sense of the timing, up and down, up and down, seeing clear sky, then nothing but water, then seeing the warship again. Then clear sky as
El
Trinidad
continued her upward roll.

He counted to himself, over and over, silently mouthing the words.

“Five hundred yards,” Lazue said.

Hunter watched a moment longer. Then he counted.

“One,” he shouted, as the crosshairs pointed into the sky. Then the ship rocked down, quickly passing the outline of the warship.

“Two,” he called, as the crosshairs pointed into the boiling sea.

There was a brief hesitation in the motion. He waited.

“Three!” He called, as the upward motion began again.

“Fire!”

The galleon rocked madly, a crazy upward heave as all thirty of her cannon exploded in a volley. Hunter was thrown back against the mainmast with a force that knocked the breath from him. He hardly noticed it; he was watching for the downward movement, to see what had happened to the enemy.

“You hit her,” Lazue said.

Indeed he had. The impact had knocked the Spanish vessel laterally in the water, swinging the stern outward. The profile of the aft castle was now a ragged line, and the entire mizzenmast was falling in a strange, slow motion, sails and all, into the water.

But in the same moment Hunter saw that he had struck too far forward to damage the rudder and not far enough forward to hit the helmsman at the tiller. The warship was still under control.

“Reload and run out!” he shouted.

There was much confusion aboard the Spanish ship. He knew he had bought time. Whether he had bought the ten minutes he needed to prepare a second volley, he could not be sure.

Seamen were everywhere in the aft of the warship, cutting the fallen mizzenmast away, trying to get free. For a moment, it looked like the debris in the water would foul the rudder, but that did not happen.

Hunter heard the rumbling beneath his own decks as, one after another, his cannon were reloaded and run back to the gunports.

The Spanish warship was closer now, less than four hundred yards to port, but she was angled badly and could not get off a broadside.

One minute passed, then another.

The Spanish ship came under control, her mizzen with its sails and rigging drifting away in the wake of the ship.

The bow swung into the wind. She was coming about, and moving to Hunter’s weak starboard side.

“Damn me,” Enders said. “I knew he was a clever bastard!”

The Spanish ship lined up for a starboard broadside, and delivered it a moment later. At this closer range, it was miserably effective. Spars and rigging came crashing down around Hunter.

“We cannot take any more,” Lazue said softly.

Hunter had been thinking the same thing. “How many cannon run out?” he shouted.

Don Diego, below, peered up onto the deck. “Sixteen ready!”

“We will fire with sixteen,” Hunter said.

Another broadside from the Spanish warship hit them with devastating effect. Hunter’s ship was shattering around him.

“Mr. Enders!” Hunter bellowed. “Prepare to come about!”

Enders looked at Hunter in disbelief. To come about now would bring Hunter’s ship through the bow of the Spanish ship — and much closer.

“Prepare to come about!” Hunter shouted again.

“Ready about!” Enders yelled. Astounded seamen ran to the lines, furiously working to unsnarl them.

The warship closed.

“Three hundred fifty yards,” Lazue said.

Hunter hardly heard her. He no longer cared about the range. He sighted down the crosshairs at the smoky profile of the warship. His eyes stung and blurred with tears. He blinked them away, and fixed on an imaginary point on the Spanish profile. Low, and just behind the bowline.

“Ready about! The helm’s a-lee!” Enders bellowed.

“Ready to fire,” Hunter shouted.

Enders was astonished. Hunter knew it, without looking at the sea artist’s face. He kept his eye to the crosshairs. Hunter was going to fire while the ship was coming about. It was unheard of, an insane thing to do.

“One!” Hunter shouted.

In the crosshairs, he saw his ship swing through the wind, coming around to bear on the Spaniard . . .

“Two!”

His own ship was moving slowly now, the crosshairs inching forward along the warship’s hazy profile. Past the forward gunports, onto bare wood . . .

“Three!”

The crosshairs crept forward on the target, but it was too high. He waited for a dip in his own ship, knowing that at the same moment the warship would rise slightly, exposing more flank.

He waited, not daring to breathe, not daring to hope. The warship rode up a little, then—

“Fire!”

Again his ship rocked under the impact of the cannon. It was a ragged volley; Hunter heard it and felt it, but he could see nothing. He waited for the smoke to clear and the ship to right herself. He looked. “Mother of God,” Lazue said.

There was no change in the Spanish warship. Hunter had missed her clean.

“Damn me to hell,” Hunter said, thinking that there was now an odd truth to the words. They were all damned to hell; the next broadside from the Spaniards would finish them off.

Don Diego said, “It was a noble try. A noble try, and bravely done.”

Lazue shook her head. She kissed him on the cheek. “The saints preserve us all,” she said. A tear ran down her cheek.

Hunter felt a crushing despair. They had missed their final chance; he had failed them all. There was nothing to do now but run up the white flag and surrender.

“Mr. Enders,” he called, “run up the white—”

He stopped cold: Enders was dancing behind the tiller, slapping his thigh, laughing uproariously.

Then he heard a cheer from belowdecks. The gun crews were cheering.

Were they mad?

Alongside him, Lazue gave a shriek of delight, and began to laugh as loudly as Enders. Hunter spun to look at the Spanish warship. He saw the bow lift in a wave — and then he saw the gaping hole running seven or eight feet, wide open, below the waterline. A moment later the bow plunged down again, obscuring the damage.

He hardly had time to recognize the significance of this sight when clouds of smoke billowed out of the forecastle of the warship. They rose with startling suddenness. A moment later, an explosion echoed across the water.

And then the warship disappeared in a giant sphere of exploding flame as the powder-hold went off. There was one rumbling detonation, so powerful that
El Trinidad
shook with the impact. Then another, and a third as the warship dissolved before their eyes in a matter of seconds. Hunter saw only the most fragmentary images of destruction — the masts crashing down; the cannon flung into the air by invisible hands; the whole substance of the ship collapsing in on itself, then blasting outward.

Something crashed into the mainmast over his head, and dropped onto his hair. It slid down to his shoulder and onto the deck. He thought it must be a bird, but, looking down, saw that it was a human hand, severed at the wrist. There was a ring on one finger.

“Good God,” he whispered, and when he looked back at the warship, he saw an equally astonishing sight.

The warship was gone.

Literally, gone: one minute it had been there, consumed by fire and hot spheres of explosions, and yet there. Now it was gone. Burning debris, sails, and spars floated on the surface of the water. The bodies of seamen floated with them, and he heard the screams and shouts of the survivors. Yet the warship was gone.

All around him, his crew was laughing and jumping in frenzied celebration. Hunter could only stare at the water where the warship had once been. Amid the burning wreckage, his eye fell on a body floating facedown in the water. The body was that of a Spanish officer; Hunter could tell from the blue uniform on the man’s back. The man’s trousers had been shredded in the explosions, and his naked buttocks were exposed to view. Hunter stared at the bared flesh, fascinated that the back should be uninjured and yet the clothing below torn away. There was something obscene about the randomness and casualness of the injury. Then, as the body bounced on the waves, Hunter saw that it was headless.

Aboard his own ship, he was distantly aware that the crew was no longer jubilant. They had all fallen silent, and had turned to look at him. He looked around at their faces, weary, smudged, bleeding, the eyes drained and blank with fatigue, and yet oddly expectant.

They were looking at him, and waiting for him to do something. For a moment, he could not imagine what was expected of him. And then he became aware of something on his cheeks.

Rain.

Chapter 31

T
HE HURRICANE STRUCK with furious intensity. Within minutes, the wind was screaming through the rigging at more than forty knots, lashing them with stinging pellets of rain. The seas were rougher, with fifteen-foot swells, mountains of water that swung the boat crazily. One moment they were high in the air, riding the crest of a swell; seconds later they were plunged into a stomach-wrenching trough, with water looming high all around them.

And each man knew that this was just the beginning. The wind, and the rain, and the seas would become much worse, and the storm would last for hours, perhaps days.

They sprang to work with an energy that belied the fatigue they all felt. They cleared the decks and reefed shredded canvas; they fought to get a sail over the side, and plug the holes in the ship below the waterline. They worked in silence on the slippery, shifting wet decks, each man knowing that at the next instant he might be swept overboard, and that no one would even see it happen.

But the first task — and the worst — was to trim the ship, by moving the cannon back to the starboard side. This was no easy matter on calm seas with dry decking. In a storm, when the ship was taking water over her sides, with the deck pitching to forty-five-degree angles, with every deck surface and line soaked and slippery, it was plainly impossible and a nightmare. Yet it had to be done if they were to survive.

Hunter directed the operation, one cannon at a time. It was a problem of anticipating the pitch, of letting the angles do the work as the men wrestled with the five-thousand-pound weights.

They lost the first cannon; a line snapped, and the gun shot across the slanted deck like a missile, shattering the hull railing on the far side and crashing into the water. The men were terrified by the speed with which it happened. Double lines were lashed around the second cannon, yet it also broke free, crushing a seaman in its path.

For the next five hours, they battled the wind and the rain to get the cannon in position and safely lashed down. When they were finished, every man on
El Trinidad
was exhausted beyond endurance; the sailors clung like drowning animals to stays and railings, exerting every last ounce of energy to keep from being washed over the side.

And yet, Hunter knew, the storm was just beginning.

.   .   .

A HURRICANE, THE
most awesome event in nature, was discovered by the voyagers to the New World. The name — hurricane — is an Arawak word for storms that had no counterpart in Europe. Hunter’s crew knew of the awful power of these giant cyclonic events, and responded to the terrible physical reality of the storm with the oldest sailor’s superstitions and rites.

Enders, at the helm, watched the mountains of water all around him, and muttered every prayer he had ever learned as a boy, while he simultaneously clutched the shark’s tooth around his neck and wished he could raise more canvas.
El Trinidad
was struggling with three sails at the moment, and it was unlucky to sail with three.

Belowdecks, the Moor took his dagger and cut his own finger, then drew a triangle on the deck with his blood. He placed a feather in the center of the triangle, and held it there while he whispered an incantation to himself.

Forward, Lazue threw a casket of salt pork over the side, and held three fingers into the air. Hers was the most ancient superstition of all, though she knew only the old seaman’s tale that food over the side and three fingers in the air might save a foundering ship. In fact, the three fingers represented the trident of Neptune, and the food was a sacrifice to the god of the oceans.

Hunter himself professed to despise such superstition, yet he went to his cabin, locked the door, got down on his knees, and prayed. All around him, the furniture of the cabin crashed back and forth from one wall to another, as the ship rocked crazily on the seas.

Outside, the storm screamed with demonic fury, and the ship beneath him creaked and groaned in long, agonizing moans. At first, he did not notice any other sound, and then he heard a woman’s scream. And then another.

He left his cabin and found five sailors dragging Lady Sarah Almont forward, to the companionway ladder. She was screaming and wrestling in their grip.

“Hold there,” Hunter shouted, and went up to them. Waves crashed over them, smashing against the deck.

The men would not look him in the eye.

“What goes here?” Hunter demanded.

None of the men spoke. It was Lady Sarah who finally shrieked: “They’re going to throw me in the ocean!”

The leader of the men seemed to be Edwards, a rough seaman, veteran of dozens of privateering campaigns.

“She’s a witch,” he said, looking at Hunter defiantly. “That’s what it is, Captain. We’ll never last this storm if she’s on board.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hunter said.

“Mark me,” Edwards said. “We’ll not last with her on board. Mark me, she’s a witch as ever I saw.”

“How do you know this?”

“I knew it first I seen her,” Edwards said.

“By what proofs?” Hunter persisted.

“The man is mad,” Lady Sarah said. “Stark mad.”

“What proofs?” Hunter demanded, shouting over the wind.

Edwards hesitated. Finally, he released the girl, and turned away. “No use talking of it,” he said. “You mark me, though. Mark me.”

He walked away. One by one, the other men backed off. Hunter was alone with Lady Sarah.

“Go to your cabin,” Hunter said, “and bolt the door, and stay there. On no account come out, and do not open the door for any reason.”

Her eyes were wide with fright. She nodded, and went to her room. Hunter waited until he saw the door to her cabin close, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, he went on deck, into the full blast of the storm.

Belowdecks, the storm seemed fearsome, but on the main deck it exceeded all preparation. The wind tore at him like an invisible brute, a thousand strong hands pulling at his arms and legs, wrenching him away from any handhold or support. The rain struck him with such force that at first he cried aloud. He could hardly see in the first few seconds. He made out Enders at the tiller, lashed firmly into his position.

Hunter went over to him, holding to a guideline strung along the deck, finally reaching the shelter of the aft castle. He took an extra line and looped it around himself, leaned closer to Enders, and shouted, “How fare you?”

“No better, no worse,” Enders shouted back. “We hold, and we’ll hold some while longer, but it’s hours. I can feel her start to break.”

“How many hours?”

Enders reply was lost in the mountain of water that surged over them and smashed down on the deck.

It was, Hunter thought, as good an answer as any. No ship could take such a pounding for long, especially not a crippled ship.

.   .   .

BACK IN HER CABIN
, Lady Sarah Almont surveyed the destruction caused by the storm, and the seamen who had burst in upon her as she had been making her preparations. Carefully, as the boat rocked, she righted her candles on the deck, and lit them one after another, until there were five red candles glowing. Then she scratched a pentagram on the deck, and stepped inside it.

She was very afraid. When the Frenchwoman, Madame de Rochambeau had shown her the latest in the fads of the Court of Louis XIV, she had been amused, even scoffed a little. But they said in France that women killed their newborn babies in order to secure eternal youth. If that was so, perhaps a little spell might preserve her life . . .

What was the harm? She closed her eyes, hearing the storm howl around her. “Greedigut,” she whispered, feeling the words on her lips. She caressed herself, kneeling on the deck inside the scratched pentagram. “Greedigut. Greedigut, come to me.”

The deck pitched crazily, the candles slid one way, then the next. She had to pause to catch them in their slide. It was all very distracting. How difficult to be a witch! Madame de Rochambeau had told her nothing of spells aboard ship. Perhaps they did not work. Perhaps it was all a lot of French foolishness.

“Greedigut . . .” she moaned. She caressed herself.

And then, she fancied she heard the storm abating.

Or was it just her imagination?

“Greedigut, come to me, have me, dwell in me . . .”

She imagined claws, she felt the wind whipping at her nightdress, she sensed a presence . . .

And the wind died.