The Dagger X (The Dagger Chronicles) (10 page)

“No,” Kitto said. “But . . .” He hesitated.

“What is wrong?”

Kitto was not sure.
Should this place remain a secret?

“This tunnel. I do not think we should tell the others,” he said finally.

“Not your mother?”

Kitto considered. Was it some sort of revenge, keeping it from Sarah? And why not tell Van?
Because he has betrayed me in the past?
A possible answer, but that was not it. He knew Van toiled with his guilt.

“Not just yet,” he said. “Please do not ask me why. I do not know, but I think I am right.”

“I will not tell,” Ontoquas said, and Kitto knew he could trust her.

Together they headed back out the way they had come, Ontoquas in the lead this time. She took care to tuck the cross of her necklace into her tunic to protect it before crawling out the opening. As soon as she emerged among the barrels that stood over the tunnel like stern sentinels, she scrambled for the main chamber and the bright sunlight that now shone directly through the crack in the ceiling. She was still inspecting the necklace when Kitto limped over to her.

“Can we sit down?” he said, one hand holding Ontoquas’s shoulder for balance. The muscles in Kitto’s left leg throbbed. Ontoquas lowered herself and Kitto to the ground, then held out her hand before them. The necklace draped across her palm. The chain was gold, untouched by its dubious storage, as shiny and perfect as the day it was forged.

“Beautiful,” she said. The chain was quite thin, with delicate gold links, elegant enough for a fine lady. But the crucifix was truly remarkable.

“May I?” Kitto said. He reached over and plucked the chain from her palm.

“You want me to put it back?” Ontoquas said for the second time, but Kitto shook his head. His brow thickened as he inspected the piece.

Back in Falmouth, Kitto attended church each week with either Sarah or his father. At Sarah’s meeting house there were no crosses whatsoever, but at his father’s church there were both crosses and crucifixes adorning the chapel. Kitto expected to see a similar image here, with Jesus impaled on the cross with a crown of thorns on his head.

“I have never seen one like this,” he said. There was a cross, plain enough, but at the base of the cross was a figure, a kneeling figure. A woman, her head covered in some sort of veil, but her face revealed.

“Who is she?” Ontoquas said. Kitto rubbed at the image with his thumb as if that could reveal an answer to her question.

“I assume . . . well, it must be the Virgin Mary.”

“Who is this?”

“The mother of Jesus Christ.”

Ontoquas shook her head in confusion. “He is God, and he has a woman mother?” Kitto shrugged. Christianity might well sound strange to someone who did not know it. The girl reached over and pointed carefully at a detail of the kneeling figure.

“She cries.”

Kitto peered closer, then ran his thumb over the
piece again. The kneeling woman was portrayed in profile, her palms pressed together in front of her as if in prayer. Sure enough, a tiny teardrop of gold descended from her eye.

“Why does she cry?”

“Because the Romans, they just killed her son.”

“He is God, and he is killed?”

Kitto smiled at her and wagged his head. “It is a bit hard to explain.”

Ontoquas accepted this answer. Much about the
wompey
made little sense.

She took the necklace back from Kitto and held it out with both hands so that the dangling cross and figure glinted in the light.

“I would like to wear it,” she said. She was not sure why she felt such a compulsion. Maybe it was because of the mother, weeping over her child. It made her think of her own mother who must be somewhere very far away feeling sad for Ontoquas. She knew she would never see her mother again. The white soldiers had made sure of that. They burned the village, stole the horses, and sold them all off to different slave traders, splitting mothers and grandmothers from their children, sisters from brothers—unless the brothers were old enough; those were taken away and never heard from again.

“Yes, wear it.” Kitto said. “It is yours.” Ontoquas handed the necklace to Kitto and bowed her head low. It took him a moment to realize that she meant for him to put it around her neck. He did so, feeling all thumbs.
She raised her head and placed her palm at her chest over the cross.

“Remember,” Kitto said. “ ’Tis a secret. Keep it hidden.”

“The barrels, too? They are secret?”

“No. That we can tell them about. We should tell them now.”

“Y
our mother can barely keep from crying when she looks out to sea,” Van said. He and Kitto leaned back against the trunk of a palm tree, taking a break from the hot sun. Kitto whittled at a stick with his dagger, appreciating how easily the patterned Damascus steel stripped the bark away. The last hour he and Van had devoted to shooting practice on the beach, as they had done every day since Kitto had been able to limp to the beach with his new crutch.

“I know it,” Kitto said. “She worries for Duck.” They were quiet a moment, each considering the chances that the squirrely six-year-old would have been able to keep himself hidden on a ship overtaken by killers. Neither spoke his thoughts. Kitto flicked a few nicks of wood from the stick onto the matted leaves beneath them.

Van shrugged. “She is a strong one, that mother of yours. We’ll break before she does.” Van had never met
a woman like Sarah, never knew that a person could be both gentle and loving and yet strong as steel.

A cooling breeze stirred the leaves of the little glade. Kitto stabbed at one and speared it with the dagger. He lifted the leaf up to inspect it absently.

“I wish my father would have told me,” Kitto said.

“Told you what?”

“About my past. His past. My uncle. My mother. Any of it if not all.”

“He never did?” Van said. Kitto shook his head.

“Hardly. I knew I lived in Jamaica when I was very young. And I knew my mother died, though not the real reason why. He let me go on not even knowing my real name.”

“Maybe he was just trying to protect you.” Van tossed a stick out onto the sand.

“I am sure that’s what he told himself,” Kitto said. “But look at what my life was.” Kitto pointed the dagger tip toward the wrapped stump of his leg, tracing the point in the air as if outlining the clubfoot that was no longer there. “A cripple, an eyesore everywhere I went. A shame. Would have been something to know I had a mum who loved me but was murdered, or that I had somehow been involved in ripping off the great Henry Morgan.” His lips curled into an ironic smile. He tore the leaf from the dagger’s blade and flipped it aside. “And I wonder who this Henry Morgan is?” He shook his head in wonder. “Everyone seems so afraid of him. My uncle told me he almost drowned me when I was very young.”

Van’s eyes darted to Kitto for a moment, then looked away. Kitto did not notice. There was something Van had overheard about Henry Morgan—and about Kitto—back in Falmouth, from William Quick’s lips. But he must have heard it wrong. It could not be possible.

“He’s a very powerful man,” Van said.

“Powerful . . . and evil,” Kitto said. “And before all is said and done I believe I will come face to face with him.”

Again Van fought the urge to tell him what he had heard.
Should I?
he thought.
No. Of course not.
He decided to change the subject.

“Too bad your mum never taught you how to shoot,” Van said with a smile.

“No,” Kitto said. “She had good enough reason to keep it secret. Likely my father did not know she could shoot either. I am not angry with her.” Kitto paused in thought. “Mad, I suppose, but I think I have never stopped being angry with my father. It feels terrible to say that aloud, now that he is dead, murdered right before my eyes. All he wanted in his last moments was to get me to safety.” Kitto drew a deep breath. “But it
is
true. I’ve been angry at him a long time.”

“Since when?”

Kitto shrugged. “Probably since the time I really understood that I could never spend my life at sea, and that instead I would be chained to the dull life of a cooper.”

“I’ve spent my life at sea, mostly,” Van said. “I think I
would have traded places with you.” Van held no romantic notions of the bitter and often vicious life of a common sailor.

“Maybe when you know you can’t have something, it becomes the thing you want most of all.”

Van plucked a blade of grass and stuck it between his teeth.

“I hope that don’t mean that the thing you want most of all is the thing you can’t really have,” he said.

Van’s syllogism left them quiet. Kitto thought about what he most wanted as he scraped the flesh of his thumb across the razor-sharp blade of the dagger: Duck and Sarah safe—and William, too, he realized, if still his uncle lived—making a life somewhere together with the fear of Morris and Spider and Henry Morgan far behind them.

Van pondered the thing he desired most of all, to find his sister Mercy—wherever she was—and be able to offer her a life far from whatever drudgery had become hers after she had been taken from the orphanage so many years ago.

To consider that such futures might be impossible was a depressing notion to each of them. They were due another round of shooting, but instead they remained in the shade of the broad palm leaves and let the cool breeze wash over them.

Kitto closed his eyes and found his thoughts drifting back to life in Cornwall. How hard it had seemed then. . . . Bullies like Simon Sneed tormenting him in
the alleyways because of his clubfoot, people crossing cobbled streets so as not to pass him by, and all the while the mind-numbing future of being a cooper looming over him. Somehow the struggles that had defined him for so long seemed petty and selfish to him now.

So childish I have been, haven’t I? How little time has passed, but I feel . . . changed, somehow. What I most desire now is not for my own benefit, but for those I love. Is that what it means to be a man?

It was a puzzling question, and after muddling it for some time, Kitto’s tired brain gave up the struggle. He had drifted into a dreamless sleep.

Kitto awoke to the painful sensation of something pointed and hard thrust into his left nostril. He startled and whipped his arm up as he opened his eyes, but a hand caught him at the wrist and held him in an iron grip. Before him stood a man, a grinning man with a single gold tooth that glinted smartly, and pale blue eyes so wide—and with such tiny pupils—that Kitto thought a madman had emerged from the jungle.

“Where . . . what?” Kitto said, terrified, the words tangling in his throat.
Am I dreaming this?
No, the pain in his nose was too real for fantasy. His free hand swept about the mat of leaves on which he lay.

Where did I drop the dagger?

He could not find it.

The figure leered above him. The man wore a weathered black frock coat and a tricorne hat, and a thick
black beard strung with colorful beads dangled from his chin. Kitto craned his eyes downward and saw that the man had no right hand, and that the thing inserted into his nose was the hook end of the appendage that stood in its place. The man jerked his arm up, wrenching the hook end of the instrument deeper into Kitto’s nostril. Kitto gasped and started to reach up with his other hand, but the man kicked out with a boot and pinned Kitto’s arm to the tree against which he lay.

Oh, God, please don’t let him kill me!

“I am not a learned man, I admit,” the man said in a thick accent. “I speak the English, along with the French and the Dutch, but they tangle themselves to knots in my mouth.” He winked and leaned in closer to Kitto. “But this brain I have! Many questions occur to me, and my mind—it is so very inquisitive! I must know the answers. I must! It is like an itch from a mosquito that never goes away.” Kitto craned toward Van to see that a burly man pressed the barrel of a pistol to Van’s eye socket. Van gritted his teeth in anger and fear. Now other figures were stepping into the glade behind them.