The Smell of Telescopes (13 page)

Muscovado Lashes

Because parrots know how to tell happy stories, he wore an onion on his shoulder. On deck, while the other men joked with guitars, he preferred to weep. He sabotaged every song with spices. His right ear was deaf to the howls of soup; his left to the moans of stew. He refused to flavour beans, claiming salt cracked them like knuckles. His stove was directly beneath Morgan’s cabin, and the pounding of the captain’s boots walking ideas into a cutlass stirred the pot for him. In rough weather, he fell asleep with a spoon; in calm, with a fork. Only when the waves were too indecisive for comment was he lonely. 

He resigned from piracy after Panama, as they all did. The doom of the Cup of Gold had left him taller, so often had he jumped with terror at the blast of cannon. The streets were full of burst sacks of coffee, steaming in the sun, forming breastworks behind which the Spanish aimed bombards and pedereros. His forehead was peppered with grapeshot, enough to keep him permanently drunk on mulled whine. But others suffered more than he. The sailmaker’s leg kicked him in the teeth as it flew without the rest of the fellow into the least salubrious quarter of the city. A kneejerk reaction, equal and opposed.

Pairs of knives and hours: that is how he best recalled the throes of the Cup. His galley utensils cut through armour more neatly than any military blade. So frantic was the fighting that the traditional habits of battle were reversed: he was soon cleaning his apron by wiping it on his wounds. At noontide, Morgan ordered the burning of the cedar houses and the Genoese slave market, with the auctioneers still inside. Plates of flaming rum truffles were slung through windows; his recipe. The few defenders who held out detonated barrels of powder in their attics to prevent the overrich conflagration spreading.

How the crew snorted and nodded as the city ruptured itself! Fuses hissed everywhere, like grilled eggs, and rubble and antiques were spat high, to knock on the eaves of the cathedral. As the houses burst open, the opportunity for a new game also arose. Two objects had been lost in the siege, names and gambling cards, and now there was a substitute for the latter. The residences of the richest traders were furnished in one of four contemporary styles—Moorish, French, Venetian, Basque—and thirteen expensive colours. Suits of shades. And certainly other ghosts shuffled in the murk, like croupiers.

So each player was allotted a street in turn, and the abrupt bloom of form and hue down its length constituted a hand in cribbage. As cook to rascals, he had often concealed mistakes and hid trumps, or turnips, up his sleeve. But abodes were too awkward to fit. He was no cheat when dealt a Panama. It was the barber who kept winning. His whisks, skewers and spoons were gone within the span of an alley. Spermaceti Whiskers pocketed the lot. Suddenly, Morgan himself cut the pack, racing into the muddle with a nude sword. With his sickly Welsh eyes he had seen a prize to be sheared but not shared.

A woman on a balcony, her tongue long and pale as a plume of smoke. But this was only a type of scream, wrapped in rags by the sulphurous air; her beauty would have been legendary had these not been the days before legends. Wine curls, so much deeper than vintage that Morgan vowed to forsake biting corks. Green eyes, never to be compared with emeralds in his presence, for his career had been long in the handling of gems, but the feeling her gaze inspired in him was a facet of a life wholly new. Climbing the orange tree in the garden to join her, he loaded his lips with kisses.

The carpenter set up a spyglass on a tripod to study developments. Morgan’s mouth eclipsed hers; then they both moved back into the lavish bedroom. There were Spaniards in the rafters. An eruption; the building came apart, according to the sailmaker, like a typhoon’d jib. Omophagia Ankles insisted the pair had survived, propelled toward the stars, hand in hand. Nobody else noted this, but the navigator could not be doubted in matters of degree, whether of burns or trajectories. And Morgan, the canniest pirate alive, would not die so easily; the devil often claimed to have his luck. So the crew waited.

He was away for a week and when he finally returned the fires were out and the men had drunk themselves into a nervous stupor on the spilt coffee. Unable to sleep, they listened to him relate the details of his most remarkable conquest, though he was much given to frowning while he spoke, as if his heart wanted to keep the adventure private. Buccaneers must confide secrets to each other, the Custom of the Coast demands it. Even Morgan would not flout these laws, drawn up in northern Hispaniola while he was a babe in a Llanrumney cot. So who was she? La Santa Roja, the wife of a noble merchant from Tobago.

His charms had not worked on her below the waist. When they landed safely on the far side of the city, she accepted his mouth down only to her shoulders and his hands down only to her hips. Her coyness inflamed his lusts the more. He grew insistent; she challenged him to a duel for her virtue, the winner keeping also the weapons employed. He selected a cutlass; she chose a mirror and firearm. She was a traveller with exotic guns holstered in her garter. Ten paces they walked before turning to discharge. She blinded him with his image, and he lost. But then she offered him the tools of her victory.

“Gather round, men. Look now, the blunderbuss from her collec- tion. And the glass. What irks you, ’Vado?”

“Smells of hemlock. Glints like a pterosaur bone.”

“From Pennsylvania, she said. A new country in the north. A flying galleon jettisoned both at her feet.”

At once, Morgan discarded his traditional buckler and carbine, and adopted these quintessentially feminine pieces. The cook did not accept the existence of aerial ships, and declared so aloud, to the monumental rage of the captain, who had recently flown himself and could vouch for this method of transport. So he was expelled for a night from the camp, and banned from hearing the conclusion of the tale. But before he went, Morgan gave him a kiss to demonstrate La Santa Roja’s technique. With a chuckle, he disengaged. Then all the men wanted one: barber, sail- maker, carpenter, navigator. And he obliged.

“Off with you, chef! Watch the sky for schooners.”

“Terrible barque in the Gemini Bight.”

As he walked away, he heard Morgan practising with the new gun and also with an old pistol. A grunt in the ricochets of the first made him further doubt that arms were ever manufactured in, or dropped from, the clouds. To his ear, schooled in the bash of spoon on pan, it sounded like a product of Asturias. Yet a clever corsair will say little to contradict his master. Besotted with his new love affair, the Welshman was picking fruit from trees with balls, a curl of his sweetheart’s hair knotted to his own forelock. There was a lesson in this brute harvest, one croaked by the cruel hero in a stage whisper:

“What the pistol won’t salt, the blunderbuss may pepper. Bigger is really better, my friends. And Panama’s the widest reward of all. Where shall we go from here? Where indeed?”

There was only one more siege to scheme: retirement. The cook left the circle of merriment and picked his way through the ashes of the Cup with a horrid suspicion that he was no longer himself. What he did was broil and bake for pirates; such was his identity. The options now were those of a different man. Shuddering, he reached the outskirts of Panama, and wandered some way into the forest. There was a commotion in a clearing. A group of
Indios bravos
, formerly hired by the Spanish as mercenaries, were crouched over food. With a serrated knife, they were sacrificing a dish of raw vegetables. Beastly race!

The cook squinted. He knew that supplies had been destroyed in the retreat, to save them from the gullets of the buccaneers, but this must surely be a darker ritual. He recalled ’Phagia lecturing him on how the future was a yarn written in entrails. Here, under a nose accustomed to drip more steam than sweat, a quiver of savage prophets were engaged in gross saladomancy. What should he do? Ebony skin glistening, he hurried out from his vantage, waving his arms. The warriors scattered, seeing a demon from their own mythology, a scorched man in a white hat. Thus the seeds of prediction became his alone.

When dawn bloodied the swamps, he stumbled back to his comrades, a sacred vegetable bulging in every inner pocket. The men were silent and no sentry watched over them, or so he thought at first: but he stepped into another forest, of pikes and muskets leaning together, and was confronted with a duel. Not Morgan and his woman, nor any rogue he recognised, but figures of wood and cloth, armed with rapier and arquebus. Puppets they were; rivals worked by strings. And he could empathise more keenly with this struggle than that of skin men. His trespass distracted the wooden doll, and the other puppet shot it in the spine.

The naïve contest between sailmaker and carpenter to win the right to amuse the buccaneers was over. ’Tology hopped in triumph while ’Lin sulked. The cook was not blamed for ruining the sport; his intervention was deemed to be down to fate. And he grinned, because the tubers and leaf of what was to come, the ingredients of the soup of time, truly were on his person. Morgan welcomed him, all insults forgotten, and requested a farewell banquet for Panama. He fried a supper from Yucatan more fabled than griffins; chillies stuffed with grated coconut; determined not to cut his prophetic groceries too soon.

Morgan decided to lick his portion from La Santa Roja’s mirror, so that his reflection would emerge just in time for dessert. But the heat damaged the unusual ornament. From that instant, it ran slow; a looking glass not to be trusted. The captain had no use for a sluggard, even if ashore, and presented it to the sailmaker. ’Tology angled it toward his stump, hoping to glimpse his missing leg, but to dawdle that far behind the present was a feat, or foot, beyond any magic surface. Next in line was the barber and ’Ceti greeted it like a convex brother. Now he could catch, on a nape, an itch in the act.

While he alarmed the crew by showing them the backs of their heads to their faces, Morgan divided the requisitioned sherry. From the crypt of the cathedral, which they had converted into a prison for the papist dogs and macaws of the city, bottles of Oloroso were lifted on pulleys. During the sack, these had rolled to the grumbling of cannon, betraying their presence. Now they were required to surrender their corks for the benefit of the wounded. A hundred glasses should be adequate to collect a limb’s worth for the sailmaker, to tipple him from legless to steady, against all the usual laws of intoxication.

Bellies full of food, the rovers doused the spices with the pale fire. Only the cook was busy elsewhere, washing up in the bowl of a fountain. The juice of the nut of the barrel sent all others into a dream, but they finished the false limb first. It was hollow and lacquered with ’Ceti’s favourite restorer, to encourage hairs to grow on the calf, which was golden as an idol. ’Tology clutched it tight to his chest as he snored. Though he allowed himself a toast while he dried up the dishes with a flag, the cook had sipped too much coffee for his senses to be similarly soothed. Sober he stood, and troubled, under a rack of plates.

When he had finished his chores, and turned to settle down, a dreadful sight made his eyebrows dance like hung felons. An odious shape, a bald ghoul, was stooping low over the sailmaker to slot something inside his leg. This apparition wore three capes abillow, but seemed in a peculiar sort of way to be a double of the cook. White instead of black, lacking an ear, breath strung with toxins rather than savours, but possessed of a Malagasy daring. It looked up, held a finger to its lips and vanished into the landscape of burnt spars and charred stone. Too embarrassed to cry aloud, the cook boiled his faith.

He was still unable to protest when the men woke in the late afternoon and the sailmaker fixed his new leg to his stump, securing it with screws to the bone. Too late now; the chance had gone. So what was in the knee other than stale Panama air? A bomb? A spy? Nothing was too devious at this latitude. Keep quiet and forget; ’Tology was no genuine friend. He felt closer to ’Ceti and ’Phagia. But when curiosity pinched too hard, he peeled one of his oracles, an avocado, to gauge the facts. The stone was reticent until smashed; then it babbled nonsense. He cast the fragments again, for a full hour.

Finally he achieved a coherent sentence. It repeated the captain’s dictum with a pithy variation.
The bigger same is a better same
. By the soul of soup, what did that mean? This divination business was a potted pantomime, not a panacea. Dusk fell, realisation dawned. The cook could hardly deliver the sailmaker, because it was he himself, or a magnified version thereof, who had performed the act of leggy subterfuge! That apparition was a double in truth, a doppelganger as they say in Prussia, a mirror image of the cook, but one warped, running as fast as ’Ceti’s glass ran slow: his identity stretched forward.

Having grown up with tales of assorted frights—penanggalans and werelemurs—he thought himself seasoned to all chills of supernature. But the doppelganger he had not previously considered, and thus had not dreaded; it was a fresh abomination. Morgan’s rhetoric with blunderbuss and pistol had urged him up this speculative creek. The two weapons are normally perceived as separate objects, not superior and inferior variations on a single theme. But here was a truer way of regarding all guns and cooks: bleary or clear reflections of one perfect form. Pistol was he; blunderbuss, the infiltrator.

When they left Panama, on the 24th February 1671, with 175 mules weighed down with treasures, prisoners to the tune of 600 and a flute, blisters and bouts of amnesia, the cook watched the sailmaker from a distance. A force inside the cork leg seemed to tug ’Tology off the path, which ran along a bank of the river, so that Morgan had to tie a leather thong to his thigh to keep him on the straight. They reached the village of Cruz and here, as they provisioned the canoes, the captain threw a slow wink at the cook, which disconcerted him hugely. Then he kissed the barrel of the blunderbuss with his wide tongue.

“Ah, ’Vado. A wife who transforms into a mistress is better than a mistress who transforms into a wife.”