Samurai and Other Stories (14 page)

Dave the Bosun’s mate and Eye-Tie Frank stayed quiet. I saw they were already eyeing the grog. I allowed each man another half-cup.

“It’s up to you, Cap’n,” the First Mate said after swallowing a mouthful that would have floored a smaller man. “If you say we should go back and put them in the ground, then I’ll make sure we all go as one.”

May the Lord God forgive me; I left them there, lying out under the sun beside the empty graves.

“No,” I replied. “Pull up the gangplank. We will spend this night on the Havenhome. I will sleep on it, and make a decision on the morrow.”

But sleep was the furthest thing from my thoughts. I am ashamed to admit it, but I took to the grog, swilling it down as if the morrow did not matter, as if I had no responsibilities in the world. I know I promised you, dearest, but my solemn vow was not enough to keep me from it. I can only say in my own mitigation that I was far from hearth and home, and sore afeard. And if it is any consolation to you sweetest, I have no memory of the act, and I suffered the most fearful of headaches on awakening.

It was the First Mate who brought me out of my stupor.
 

At first I thought I had taken enough grog to blind me, but it was only that the sky outside had grown dark. Another night had fallen. There was a chill in the air.

“Cap’n. You need to see this,” he said.

“Can’t it wait?” I said, groaning as the result of my drinking gripped my head like a vise.

“Afraid not, Cap’n. If I left you asleep, you might never wake again.”

“That might be no bad thing,” I moaned.

He slapped me in the face, hard. I was so astonished I almost fell on my arse. I probably would have done had he not put out a hand to steady me.

“I’m rightful sorry, Cap’n, but your men need you sober and in charge. We are in perilous waters, and hard times. That is a mixture that requires a captain, not a drunken sot.”

In all our time together he had never raised his voice to me before, let along strike me.

I was of a mood to be affronted, but one look at the fear in his eyes melted all passion away.

“You have the right, sir,” I said to him. “If you see me lift another flagon of grog you can throw me in the brig and toss the key over the side.”

“Best save your vow of abstinence for a bit,” he said with a grim smile. “You might need a brew after you’ve seen what waits out on the dock.”

He led me up on deck.
 

Moonlight shone down, illuminating the dock.
 

A single figure stood there, staring up at us.
 

It was our first sighting of an aboriginal, one that froze the very breath in my throat. He wore a headpiece of feathers that rose in a crown above his head and fell in a long tail down his back. His clothing looked to be animal skin roughly sewn together. His feet were bare.
 

But that wasn’t what drew the eye. I had heard tell that the natives of these shores were red, almost the colour of blood, but this tall man was white as ivory, as cold as a stone. White eyes without a pupil stared up at us.
 

He raised his arms.
 

It snowed, out of that clear starry sky.
 

The First Mate looked past the native, down into the colony. “Dear Lord preserve us,” he whispered.
 

I turned to follow his gaze.
 

The dead walked along the dock towards us, each of them staring with that white-eyed gaze. And there, at the front of the mob, stood a bulky man in a woman’s skirt. Alongside him strode a tall grim-faced preacher dressed in black.
 

Bald Tom and the pastor had come back to visit their old shipmates.

*
   
*
   
*

The First Mate roused the remaining crew, all save Stumpy Jack who was so far gone in stupor that Gabriel’s Horn itself is unlikely to have called him out of sleep.
 

Our first thought, nay, our only thought, was to raise anchor and head for open water, but we were denied even that chance. In less time than the blink of an eye a storm blew up, a wind so cold it would have frozen us to the deck if we hadn’t had the foresight to wear our winter furs. Even at that, the cold bit at my nose so hard it felt like a nip from an excited dog.

“Up anchor,” the First Mate shouted, but too late.
 

The sea had frozen solid around us.
 

We were stuck hard in place. Old timbers creaked and moaned as the ice gripped tight.
 

“Will she hold?” I asked the Mate.

“She held together when the ice was three feet thick off Newfoundland two years back,” he said. “She’ll hold now.”

But I was starting to believe that it was colder yet than that day. I had to keep shifting from foot to foot; otherwise my soles would have frozen to the deck. By now snow fell so thick that I could no longer see the buildings of the colony beyond the dock.

“What purpose does it serve?” I said. I thought I had merely spoken to myself, but the Mate heard.

“The pastor used to say that everything, good or evil, was God’s will, all part of a scheme of things, and that we would only ever understand when we were risen up on the Day of Judgment, and the veils would fall from our eyes.”

“Then I wish the Day of Judgment would hurry upon us,” I replied. “For I am sore perplexed, and have long since tired of this mummery.”

“Be careful what you wish for, Cap’n,” the Mate said. “Be very careful what you wish for.”

Jim Crawford came up beside us on deck, musket in his hand. It fell unused to the deck when he saw what faced us across on the dock. Stout fellow though he was, Jim Crawford fell to his knees, struck down in terror.

“We’re done for,” he squealed.

The First Mate raised him to his feet.

“Not if we stand together as men,” he said. “For truly that is the only way we will see home again. Cap’n... do I have your permission to break out the powder?”

“You have a plan?”

“More of an idea, but mayhap it will come to something.”

“Then have at it man, have at it.”

The Mate went below, while Crawford and I stood and watched the figures on the dockside.
 

They did not move. Their stares did not wander from where we stood. The snow got heavier yet, and still they did not stir.

“What do they want from us, Cap’n,” Crawford wailed beside me. “What do they want?”

In truth, I could not answer him, for fear had taken hold deep within me. It would not be shifted, no matter how many prayers I uttered up to the most high. My eyes were fixed on the pastor and Bald Tom, two men as far apart in temperament as you are ever likely to meet. Yet here they were, standing side by side, joined in a new hatred against their former shipmates that I was at a loss to understand.
 

The wind howled. The snow bit into my cheeks, but I was loath to move, loath to take my eyes from the host on the dock lest they creep up on me unawares.

The First Mate came back onto deck, joined by Eye-Tie Frank. They carried between them a half-barrel full of thick pitch.
 

“I’ve mixed in the powder,” the First Mate said. “Remember yon corsair we met off the Azores?”

And indeed I did. In a flash I saw his plan.

“Will it burn against yon cold flesh?” I asked as I helped manhandle the barrel.

“I know nothing else that might,” the Mate said.
 

He wrapped a linen cloth around the end of a broom-stick and dipped it in the pitch. He lit it from a small tinder box he kept in his waistcoat pocket.

“I trust no one but you with the flame,” the Mate said, handing it to me.

I looked him in the eye, this man who had been my friend for past twenty years.
 

“It’s risky,” I said. “I have mind of what happened to Slant-Eyed Jock,”

“And I,” the Mate said. “But I fear we have little choice.”

He thrust his arm into the pitch. He came up with a handful of black ooze in his hand.

“Do it quick,” he said. He thrust his hand towards me.

I lit the pitch. The Mate threw the lit mass away from him and it spluttered and spat as it sailed into the night. It hit Bald Tom on the chest, and ran down his torso, burning all the time.
 

The frozen man looked down, as if bemused. His whole face went up like a torch as the flame reached the powder that had been mixed in with the pitch.
 

Bald Tom fell to his knees, dropped forward. He tumbled off the dock and down to the frozen water below. He hit it hard, dropping through the ice with a sizzle and fountain of steam before he sank away out of sight, silent, like a stone.

Jim Crawford shouted in triumph, but the Mate hushed him sternly.

“I just killed a good man,” he said grimly. “Tis no cause for celebration.”

“He were dead already,” Crawford said.

“That don’t make me feel any better about it,” the Mate said grimly.
 

He stuck his hand in the pitch again, and came up with a second ball.

“You were lucky with the first,” I said. “Mayhap it is best not to chance it again?”

“We both know we have no other choice, Cap’n. Light it up.”

For a second time his arm seemed to grow a flame. The powder in the pitch spluttered before it left his hand. He threw it towards the dock, but it exploded and fizzled out well short, dropping away out of sight to the ice below.

“I can do better than that,” Crawford said.

Before either of us could stop him he plunged his whole arm into the pitch, coming up with a far bigger ball than the Mate. He leaned forward and touched the flame to the oily mixture.
 

His arm immediately burst aflame, fire roaring up the side of his head, flesh crisping and melting. He screamed, just once, and fell away from us. The powder went up and the whole right hand side of Crawford’s body burst, like a ripe fruit, a dead, smoking ruin before he hit the deck.
 

The Mate looked down at what was left of the man.

“Be careful,” I said.

The Mate bent to get himself another handful, when Eye-Tie Frank stepped in front of him.

“Mayhap I have a better method,” he said. He removed his cap, then his belt. He filled his cap with the pitch, and then tied it up with his belt. He was left with a two foot length of belt with a ball of pitch on the end.

“Shame on you,” he said to the Mate and me, his slight accent showing through. “Do you not do this yourselves at home to bring in the New Year?”

He lit the pitch, swung it around his head and sent in winging over the dock.
 

“That we do,” the Mate said, unbuckling his own belt. “Although I am usually too far gone in my cups to remember it.”

The fireball exploded just above the heads of the throng of the dead, sending burning flame over five of them.
 

The Mate sent one of his own after it. The air filled with black acrid smoke as flesh burned. The ranks of the dead did not move, even as their neighbours burned.

“All very well,” the Mate said. “But we have a limited supply of belts and caps. And I’d rather my breeches didn’t fall down... not in this weather.”

Dave the Bosun’s mate arrived on deck. We set him to finding twine and cloth, the better to make more fireballs.
 

For a while the air was full of flame and fury.
 

The snow got heavier still. Sometimes we could not even see the dock, but the smell of burning meat told us we still hit our targets.
 

We lost ourselves in a world of burning pitch and whirling snow, the only sound being the coughing, spluttering rattle of powder starting to fizzle, and the whoosh of flame as we hit our targets. The night went on without end.

I know not when the snow finally stopped, only that I looked up to see stars and a full moon overhead.

“My eyes deceive me, Cap’n,” the Mate said beside me. “For surely the moon was on the wane when we hove-to here.”

“There is deception here, right enough,” I replied, “But it is not your eyes. It comes from that one.”

Out over the dockside, the white native with the feather chest still stood tall and un-burnt. Around him the ranks of the dead lay, finally at rest, a smoking chaos of limbs and torsos piled higgeldy-piggeldly in a hellish landscape strewn across the dock.
 

The native thumped at his chest. He made an expansive circle with his arms before thumping his chest again.

He did this twice before I realized his meaning.

This land is mine.

He pointed at Dave the Bosun’s mate. The man jerked, as if jolted by lightning.
 

To our astonishment he threw himself off the boat, towards the pier.
 

It was a prodigious leap. I would not have placed a bet on him achieving it, but he seemed to have been given wings. He landed, a few feet in front of the white native.
 

The native thumped his chest again. He stroked Dave’s face, gently, as if romancing a woman. Once more we had to watch a colleague freeze. His body went stiff, and a last plume of breath left him, floating high in the air. I could only hope it was his soul, fleeing to its place in Paradise, for the thought of a man being frozen but yet imprisoned, mute, in his own body, was almost too much to bear.
 

Finally Dave turned back towards us, blind white eyes staring out of a blue face. The native once more made the circle with his arms.

“He’s showing us,” the Mate said. “He’s showing us that all this is his... including us.”

“It does not include me,” Eye-Tie Frank said. He leapt off the ship, screaming his defiance. Whether he intended to reach the pier itself we shall never know. His leap was well short and he fell away below our sight, never to be heard of again.

The native stared at the two of us, his black-lipped mouth raised in a smile. He thumped his chest again. Somewhere, out in the wild reaches of the night, a wolf howled at the moon. It was answered, much closer, by a pack, a wild, ululating wail that seemed to pierce my very skull.