Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (10 page)

“Then let us begin,” Thatch commanded.

Men had climbed the rigging and clung to the masts. Men were in the rat-lines, on the rails and the top decks of all three ships—every man-jack of them craning to get a better view. Playing to the crowd, Blaney stripped off his shirt so that he was down to his breeches. Conscious of my puny torso, I did the same. Then we dropped our elbows, raised our fists, eyed each other up.

My opponent grinned behind raised forearms—his fists were as big as hams and twice as hard. His knuckles like statues’ noses. No, this probably wasn’t quite the sword fight Blaney wanted, but it was the next best thing. The chance to pulverize me with the captain’s consent. To beat me to death without risking the taste of a cat-o’-nine-tails.

From the decks and rigging came the shouts of the crew keen to witness a good bout. By which I mean a bloody bout. Just from the catcalls it was difficult to make out if they had a favourite, but I put myself in their position: what would I want to see if I were them? I’d want to see
sport
.

So let’s give it to them. I brought my own fists up and what I thought about was how Blaney had been a huge pain in the arse from the moment I had set foot on board. Nobody else. Just him. This thick-as-pigshit cretin. All my time on ship I’d spent dodging Blaney and wondering why he hated me because I wasn’t snot-nosed and arrogant then, not like I’d been back home. Life on board had tamed that side of me. I dare say I’d grown up a bit. What I’m saying is, he had no real
reason
to hate me.

Right then it came to me the reason why. He hated me
because.
Just because. If I hadn’t been around to hate, he would have found someone else to fill my shoes. One of the cabin boys, perhaps, one of the black sailors. He just liked hating.

And for that I hated him in return, and I channelled that feeling, that hate. Perplexed at his hostility? I turned it into hate. Staying out of his way day after day? I turned it into hate. Having to look at his stupid, thick face day after day? Turned it into hate.

Because of that, the first strike was mine. I stepped in and it seemed to explode out of me, using my speed and my size to my advantage, ducking beneath his protecting fists and smashing him in the solar plexus. He let out an
oof
and staggered back, the surprise more than the pain making him drop his guard, enough for me to dance quickly to my left and drive forward with my left fist, finding a spot above his right eye that, just for one delicious second, I thought might have been good enough to finish him off.

A roar of approval and blood-lust from the men. It had been a good punch, enough to open a cut that began to leak a steady stream of blood down his face. But no, it wasn’t enough to stop him for good. Instead, the look of angry incomprehension he always wore became even more uncomprehending. Even angrier. I’d landed two punches, he precisely none. He hadn’t even moved from his spot.

I flitted back. I’ve never been one for fancy foot-work, but compared to Blaney I was nimble. Plus I had the advantage. First blood to me and with the crowd on my side. David versus Goliath.

“Come on, you fat bastard,” I taunted him. “Come on, this is what you wanted to do the minute I came aboard the ship. Let’s see what you got, Blaney.”

The crew had heard me and shouted their approval, perhaps for my sheer gumption. From the corner of my eye I saw Thatch throw back his head and laugh, with his hand at his belly. To save face, Blaney had to act. You have to give it to him. He acted.

Friday had told me that Blaney was skilled with his blade and was an essential member of the
Emperor
’s boarding party. He hadn’t mentioned that Blaney was also good with his fist and I, for some reason, never assumed he had much in the way of boxing skills. But one bit of nautical wisdom I had learnt was “never assume” and, on this occasion at least, I ignored it. Once again my arrogance had got me into trouble.

How quick the crowd was to turn as Blaney struck. Never go down in the fight. It’s the one golden rule. But I had no choice as his fist made contact and bells rang in my head as I went to the deck on my hands and knees and spat out teeth on a string of blood and phlegm. My vision jarred and blurred. I’d been hit before, of course, many times, but never—
never
—as hard as that.

Amid the rushing of my pain and the roaring of the spectators—roaring for blood, which Blaney was going to give to them, with pleasure—he bent to me, putting his face close enough for me to smell his rancid breath, which spilled like fog over black and rotted teeth.

“‘Fat bastard,’ eh?” he said, and hawked up a green. I felt the wet slap of phlegm on my face. One thing you have to say about a “fat bastard” taunt—it always gets them going.

Then he straightened, and his boot was so near to my face I could see the spider-cracks in the leather. Still trying to shake off the pain, I lifted one pathetic hand as though to ward off the inevitable kick.

The kick, though, was aimed not at my face but squarely at my belly, so hard that it lifted me into the air and I was deposited back to the deck. From the corner of my eye I saw Thatch, and perhaps I had allowed myself to believe that he favoured me in the bout, but he was laughing just as heartily at my misfortune as he had been when Blaney was rocked. I rolled weakly to my side as I saw Blaney coming towards me. The men on the decks were shouting for blood by then. He lifted his boot to stamp me, looked up to Thatch. “Sir?” he asked him.

To hell with that. I wasn’t waiting. With a grunt I grabbed his foot, twisted it and sent him sprawling back to the deck. A tremor of renewed interest ran through the spectators. Whistles and shouts. Cheers and boos.

They didn’t care who won. They just wanted the spectacle. Blaney was down and with a fresh surge of strength I threw myself on top of him, pummelling him with my fists at the same time as I drove my knees into his groin and midriff, attacking him like a child in the throes of a temper tantrum, hoping against hope that I might lay him out with a lucky blow.

I didn’t. There were no lucky blows that day. Just Blaney grabbing my fists, wrenching me to the side, slamming the flat of his hand into my face and sending me flying backwards. I heard my nose break and felt blood gush over my top lip. Blaney lumbered over and this time he wasn’t waiting for Thatch’s permission. This time he was coming on for the kill. In his fist shone a blade . . .

There was the crack of a pistol and a hole appeared on his forehead. His mouth dropped open, and the fat bastard fell to his knees then dead to the deck.

When my vision cleared I saw Thatch reaching to help me from the deck with one hand. In the other a flint-lock pistol, still warm.

“I got a vacancy on my crew, lad,” he said. “Do you want to fill it?”

I nodded yes as I stood and looked down at Blaney’s body. A wisp of smoke rose from the bloody hole in his forehead.
Should have killed me when you had the chance
, I thought.

MARCH 1713

Miles away in a place I had never visited and never would—although, after all, it’s never too late—a bunch of representatives of England, Spain, France, Portugal and Holland were sitting down to draft a series of treaties that would end up changing all our lives, forcing us to take a new direction, shattering our dreams.

But that was to come. First I found myself adjusting to a new life—a life I liked very much.

I was lucky, I suppose, because Edward Thatch took to me. A scrapper, was what he called me and I think he liked having me around. He used to say that in me he had a trusted hand, and he was right, he did, for Edward Thatch had saved me from embarking on a life of crime under Captain Dolzell—well, either that or be thrown overboard like those other poor fellows. It was thanks to his intervention and being taken under his wing that I could make something of myself, return to Bristol and to Caroline as a man of quality, head held high.

And yes, just because you and I know that it didn’t work out that way doesn’t make it any less true.

Life at sea was very much the same as it had been before, but with certain attractive differences. There was no Blaney, of course. The last I’d seen of that particular barnacle on my life was him slipping into the sea like a dead whale. There was no Captain Alexander Dolzell, as he ended up being condemned to death by the British in 1715. Without those two, life on ship was an immediate improvement. It was the life of a privateer. We engaged the Spanish and Portuguese when we could, and took prizes when we were victorious. Along with the skills of a sailor I began to refine the craft of combat. From Thatch I learnt better sword skills and how to use pistols.

Also from Edward Thatch, I learnt a certain philosophy on life, a philosophy that he in turn had learnt from another, older buccaneer, a man under who Edward served and who would also be my mentor. A man named Benjamin Hornigold.

And where else should I meet Benjamin but at Nassau.

 • • • 

The Port of Nassau on New Providence Island was a kind of heaven for us. I’m not sure that we ever thought of that port, that little bit of the Bahamas, as ever really “belonging to us,” because that wasn’t our way. Nassau featured steep cliffs on one side flanking its long, sloping beach that swept down to a shallow sea—too shallow for Her Majesty’s men-of-war to get close enough for a bombardment. Its fortress on the hill overlooked a motley collection of shanty homes, huts and crumbling wooden terraces, the quayside where we discharged our booty and supplies. Benjamin Hornigold was there—of course he was, he had helped establish it with Tom Barrow. Nassau had a wonderful harbour, where our vessels enjoyed shelter from the elements and from our enemies. Making an attack even more difficult was the ships graveyard, where beached galleons and men-of-war—ships grounded by shallow waters—grounded, looted, burned, in many cases, their skeletal remains a warning to the unwary.

I liked Benjamin, of course. He had been Blackbeard’s mentor just as Blackbeard was mine, and there was never a better sailor than Benjamin Hornigold.

Although you may think I’m only saying this because of what subsequently happened, you’re going to have to believe me when I swear it’s true. I always thought there was something apart about him. Hornigold had a more military bearing, a hawk nose like a tuft English general, and he dressed more like a soldier than a buccaneer.

But still, I liked him, and if I didn’t like him as much as I liked Thatch, well, then I respected him as much, if not more. After all, Benjamin was the one who had helped establish Nassau in the first place. For that, if nothing else, I liked him.

I was sailing with Thatch in July 1713 when the quartermaster was killed on a trip ashore. Two weeks after that we received a message and I was called to the captain’s quarters.

“Can you read, son?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and I thought briefly of my wife back home.

Thatch sat at one side of his navigation table rather than behind it. His legs were crossed and he wore long black boots, a red sash at his waist and four pistols in a thick leather shoulder belt. Maps and charts were laid out beside him but something told me it wasn’t those he needed reading.

“I need a new quartermaster,” he said.

“Oh, sir, I don’t think . . .”

He roared with laughter, slapped his thighs. “No, son, I don’t ‘think’ either. You’re too young, and you don’t have the experience to be a quartermaster. Isn’t that right?”

I looked at my boots.

“Come here,” he said, “and read this.”

I did as I was asked, reading aloud a short communication with news of a treaty between the English, the Spanish, Portuguese . . .

“Does it mean . . . ?” I said, when I had finished.

“Indeed it does, Edward,” he said (and it was the first time he’d ever called me by my name rather than “son” or “lad’—in fact, I don’t think he ever called me “son” or “lad” again). “It means your Captain Alexander Dolzell was right, and that the days of privateers filling their boots are over. I’ll be making an announcement to the crew later. Will you follow me yourself?”

I would have followed him to the ends of the Earth but I didn’t say so. Just nodded, as though I had a lot of options.

He looked at me. All that black hair and beard lent his eyes an extra penetrating shine. “You will be a pirate, Edward, a wanted man. Are you sure you want that?”

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t go back to Bristol. I didn’t dare go back without a pot of money, and the only way of making money was to become a pirate.

“We shall set sail for Nassau,” said Thatch. “We pledged to meet Benjamin should this ever happen. I dare say we shall join forces, for we’ll both lose crew in the wake of this announcement.

“I’d like you by my side, Edward. You’ve got courage and heart and skill in battle, and I can always use a man with letters.

I nodded, flattered.

When I went back to my hammock, though, and was alone, I closed my eyes for fear that tears might squeeze out. I had not come to sea to be a pirate. Oh, of course, I saw I had no other choice but to follow that path. Others were doing it, including Thatch. But even so, it was not what I had wanted for myself. I’d wanted to be a man of quality, not an outlaw.

Like I say, though, I didn’t feel I had much choice. From that moment on, I abandoned any plans I had of returning to Bristol as a man of quality. The best I could hope for was to return to Bristol as a man of means. My quest became one of acquiring riches. From that moment on I was a pirate.

JUNE 1715

There is nothing quite so loud as the sound of a carriage-gun blast. Especially when it goes off in your ear.

It’s like being pummelled by nothing. A nothing that seems to want to crush you, and you’re not sure whether it’s a trick of your eyesight, shocked and dazzled by the blast, or whether the world really is shaking. Probably it doesn’t even matter. Probably both. But the thing is, it’s shaking.

Somewhere the shot impacts. Boat planks splinter. Men with their arms and legs torn off and men who look down and in the few seconds they have before dying realize that half of their body has been shot away, begin screaming. All you hear in the immediate aftermath is the shrieking of the damaged hull, the screaming of the dying.

How close you are will determine how handsomely you react. I wouldn’t say you ever get used to the blast of a carriage-gun, the way it tears a hole in your world, but the trick is to recover swiftly and recover from it more swiftly than your enemy.

We’d been off the coast of the Cape Buena Vista in Cuba on a ship led by a man known as Captain Bramah when the English had attacked. We called those upon the brigantine the English even though English made up the core of our crew and I myself was English by birth, English in my heart. That counted for nothing as a pirate. You were an enemy of His Majesty (Queen Anne had been succeeded by King George), an enemy of the Crown, which made you an enemy of His Majesty’s Navy. So when we saw the Red Ensign on the horizon, the sight of a frigate foaming across the ocean towards us, figures running to and fro on her decks, what we said was, “Sail ho! The English are attacking! The English are attacking!” with no bother for the small details of our actual nationalities.

We were too busy trying to stay alive.

This one came at us fast. We were trying to turn and put distance between us and her six-pounders, but she bore down upon us, slicing across our bows, so close we could see the whites of the crew’s eyes, the flash of their gold teeth, the glint of sun on the steel in their hands.

Flame bloomed along her sides as her carriage-guns thundered. Steel tore the air. Our hull shrieked and cracked as the shot found their mark. The day had been full of rain but the powder-smoke turned it into a night full of rain. It filled our lungs and made us cough, choke and splutter, throwing us into even more disarray and panic.

Then that feeling of the world crashing in, that shock, and those moments of wondering if you’d been hit and if maybe you were dead, and perhaps this was what it felt like in heaven. Or most likely—in my case at least—in hell. Which, of course, it must be, because hell is smoke and fire and pain and screaming. So whether you were dead or not, it made no difference. Either way you were in hell.

At the first crash-bang I’d raised my arms to protect myself. Luckily. I felt shards of splintered wood that would otherwise have punctured my face and eyes embed themselves into my arm, and the force was enough to send me staggering back, tripping and falling.

They’d used bar-shot. Big iron bars that would blast a hole in virtually anything provided the distance was close enough. They’d done their job. The English had no interest in boarding us. As pirates we would inflict as little damage upon our target as possible. Our aim was to board and loot, over a period of days if needs be. It was difficult to loot a sinking ship. But the English—or this particular command, at least—either they knew we had no treasure aboard or they didn’t care—they simply wanted to destroy us and they were doing a bloody good job of it.

I dragged myself to my feet, felt something warm running down my arm and looked to see blood from a splinter blob to the planks of the deck. With a grimace I reached to tear the wood from my arm and tossed it to the deck, barely registering the pain as I squinted through a fog of powder-smoke and lashing weather.

A cheer went up from the crew of the English frigate as she churned past our starboard side. There was the pop and fizz of musket and flint-lock-pistol shot. Stink-pots and grenadoes came sailing over, exploding on deck and adding to the chaos, the damage, and the choking smoke that hung over us like a death shroud. The stink-pots in particular let out a vicious sulphur gas that sent men to their knees, making the air so dense and black that it became difficult to see, to judge distance.

Even so, I saw him, the hooded figure who stood on their forecastle deck. His arms were folded, and he stood still in his robes, his entire demeanour emanating unconcern at the events that were unfolding around him. I could tell all this from his posture and eyes, which gleamed from beneath the cowl of his robes. Eyes that, for a second, were fixed on me.

Then our attackers were swallowed up by smoke. A ghost ship amid a fog of powder belch, sizzling rain and choking stink-pot fumes.

All around me was the sound of shattering wood and screaming men. The dead were everywhere, littering torn planks awash with their blood. Through a gash in the main deck I saw water on the decks below, and from above heard the complaint of wood and the tearing of the shroud. I looked up to see our mainsail was half-destroyed by chain-shot. A dead lookout with most of his head shorn away hung by his feet from the crow’s nest and men were already scaling the rat-lines to try and cut the broken mast free, but they were too late. She was already listing, wallowing in the water like a fat woman taking a bath.

At last, enough of the smoke cleared to see that the British frigate was coming round, describing a long circle in order to use its starboard guns. But then she ran into a spot of bad luck. Before the ship could be brought to bear, the same wind that had dispersed the smoke dropped, and her plump sails flattened and she slowed. We had been given our second chance.

“Man the guns!” I shouted.

Those members of our crew still on their feet were scrambling to the mounted guns. I manned a swivel gun and we delivered a broadside that the attacking frigate could do nothing about, our shot doing almost as much damage to them as they had to us. It was our turn to cheer. Defeat had turned, if not quite to victory, then at least to a lucky escape. Perhaps there were those of us who were even wondering what treasures might be on board the British vessel, and I saw one or two of our men, the optimistic few, with boarding hooks, axes and marlinspikes, ready to lash the ship close and take them man-on-man.

Their plans were dashed by what happened next.

“The magazine,”
came the cry.

“She’s going up.”

The news was followed by screams and as I looked from my post at the swivel gun towards the bow, I saw flames around the breach in the hull. Meanwhile, from the stern came the cries of the captain, while on the poop-deck of the ship opposite, the man in the robes leapt into action. Literally. He unfolded his arms and in one short jump was on the rail of the deck, then in the next moment had jumped across.

For a moment the impression I had of him in the air was like an eagle, his robes spread out behind him, his arms outstretched like wings.

Next I saw Captain Bramah fall. Crouched over him, the hooded man’s arm pulled back and a hidden blade sprang from within his sleeve.

That blade. I was transfixed by it for a second. The flames from the burning deck made it alive. And then the hooded man drove it deep into Captain Bramah.

I stood and stared, my own cutlass in my hand. From behind I vaguely heard the cries of the crew as they tried in vain to stop the fire spreading to the magazine.

It will go up
, I thought distractedly, envisioning the barrels of gunpowder stored there.
The magazine will explode
. The English ship was close enough so that the explosion would surely blast a hole in the hull of both ships. All of this I knew, but only as distant, distracted thoughts. I was spellbound by the hooded man at work. Mesmerized by this agent of death, who had ignored the carnage around him by biding his time and waiting to strike.

The kill was over, Captain Bramah dead. The assassin looked up from the dead body of the captain, and once again our eyes met, only this time something flared within his features and in the next instant he had bounded to his feet, a single lithe jump that took him over the corpse, and he was bearing down upon me.

I raised my cutlass, determined not to go easily into the great unknown. Then from the stern—from the magazine, where our men had obviously failed to douse the fire whose fingers had found the stores of gunpowder—came a great explosion.

I was blasted off the deck, flung in the air and finding a moment of perfect peace, not knowing whether I was alive or dead, whether I still had all of my limbs and in that moment not caring anyway. I didn’t know where I would come to rest: whether I’d slam to the deck of a ship and break my back or land impaled on a snapped mast or be tossed into the eye of the magazine inferno.

Or do what I did, which was slap into the sea.

Maybe alive, maybe dead, maybe conscious, maybe not. Either way I seemed to drift not far below the surface, watching the sea above, a shifting mottle of blacks, greys and the flaming orange of burning ships. Past me sank dead bodies, eyes wide open as though surprised in death. They discoloured the water in which they sank and trailed guts and stringy sinew string like tentacles. I saw a smashed mizen-mast twirling in the water, bodies snared in rigging dragged to the depths.

I thought of Caroline. Of my father. Then of my adventures on the
Emperor
. I thought about Nassau, where there was only one law: pirate law. And, of course, I thought about how I was mentored from privateer to pirate by Blackbeard—Edward Thatch.