Casca 15: The Pirate (6 page)

Dawn had just reddened the eastern sky when Casca and his group reached the fort. They hid themselves about a hundred yards from it. The fort itself was not a very prepossessing affair. Actually it looked more like a shack of weathered logs.

Casca stepped out into the open. He was holding a white rag tom from his own cravat tied to a stick as a flag of truce.

He was met by a barrage of stones thrown from the fort. Fortunately, the aim was not too good.

"Knock that shit off!" he yelled, and kept going closer.

The English words got him in. Inside proved to be little more than a stockade since there was no roof. The Brotherhood maroons were carbon copies of the Spanish except that they had a leader, a real leader, a big, dour, one armed Scot who must have been several inches over six feet tall.

Casca had to look up to him, and that didn't do his disposition any good. "Don't you know what a flag of truce is?" he demanded.

"Aye"

"Then, why–"

Casca did not get to finish the sentence. He had gotten too damn confident. Whatever it was that now hit him on the back of the neck took care of that. The last thing he saw was the smile on the face of the one armed giant.

When Casca came to, he found he had been tied up with vines and thrown against the wall of the fort. He looked down at the vines holding his feet. They didn't seem too tough. He ought to be out of them in no time. His hands were tied behind him. He tried stretching his arms to pull the lashing apart.

"Damn!" The vines were tougher than they looked. No luck at all. Behind him he could feel an opening in the wall, a wide space between the logs, and he tried to feel if there was a sharp edge he might cut the vines with. No. The logs were smooth as polished marble.

The Brotherhood castaways had not bothered to gag him. As a matter of fact they seemed to have forgotten him entirely; tied him up, thrown him against the wall, and left him alone. That was a hell of a note. Casca had been in tight spots before plenty of them but he couldn't remember when he had been completely ignored.

He looked at the pirates, trying to decide which ones might have hit him, but there was really no way of telling. Oh, hell, he would just give it to all of them.

The big one armed Scotsman was gone. So were half a dozen of the others – the ones who had been there when he came in with his flag of truce. The fort had been relatively crowded then with all fifteen men. Now he counted only eight. Had they made some kind of deal with the Spaniards? But just when he had the thought there came a shouted curse in Spanish from somewhere outside the walls, followed by a small shower of stones. The Brotherhood men paid no attention. They were hunkered down in a rough semicircle, and Casca saw one of them pound a large object on a stone. Coconuts! It must be breakfast time.

But where had the others gone? And how had they gotten past the Spaniards outside?

He looked around the fort. Actually it was simply an area enclosed by crudely stacked trees with the smaller limbs broken off where possible and the open spaces filled in with brush and stones – evidence that the men who built it had no tools, no axe, hatchet, or saw. In fact, Casca could see that the ends of the logs were burned. So that was the way the men who had built the structure had downed the trees: built a fire around the base and burned them down. To Casca it seemed like an awful lot of unnecessary trouble. But if the predecessors of these men had the patience to go through all that trouble, maybe he could get these to storm the first ship that landed.

But he had to get loose first.

He still had not figured out how the others had left. But suddenly old memories came back into his brain, memories of the lands where he had first served, memories of shepherd camps he had seen in the past...

There ought to be
– Ah! There was.

The spring was not in the
center of the stockade, but over to one side, and there were a couple of rough lean-to’s against the stockade walls. The spring came out of rock, out of a kind of hillock that rose up there, and the wall on that side was built up over a spur of rock laid down by some long dead volcano, and Casca had known about volcanic rock since his childhood. He didn't really expect to find a cave here on this Caribbean island, but –

"Hell!" It wasn't much of a cave, just a small tunnel in the rock only a little larger than it took for a man to wriggle into. And it was partially hidden by trash, branches and rocks the pirates had pulled over it. But the ground showed that the brush had been moved repeatedly. And if this was like the ones Casca had known elsewhere the passageway would get wider inside. A "blowhole" would have formed in the molten lava when the volcano had last erupted a long, long time ago. And somewhere out in the forest, up on the side of the hill, probably now hidden by trees, there would be an opening where the earth had fallen through. An easy way out. Now, why hadn't the Spaniards known about that? It bothered Casca. He had been counting on the Spaniards to be smart. But, then, he hadn't been too smart himself, getting taken by the big one armed Scot
.

"Captain Long..."

The voice behind Casca, outside the wall, was so soft he barely heard it. But the words were in Spanish.

Julio!

All Casca could do was rub his bound wrists against the log behind him.

"
Silencio, senor
." This time the whisper was little more than a breath.

Casca could feel the f
ingers of the young Spanish boy probing gently into the open space between the logs, touching his wrists and exploring the knotted vine. Casca considered the logs he could see opposite him. They were crudely stacked, yes, and there was space between them, but he doubted that the boy would have room enough to untie the vines. The probing stopped.

"
Un momento
." This time the whisper was louder, and Casca worried that the youngster would get too loud, loud enough for the pirates to hear. Besides that, how had the boy, in broad daylight, gotten to the wall in the first place? And how had he known where to find Casca?

Casca began to sweat.

Then he felt the fingers back in the log opening, and something cold and hard touched his bound wrists. A knife? Did any of these men have knives? The glint of metal he thought he had seen on the one armed man's chest, was it a hidden knife?

There was a sawing motion on the vines holding his wrists. Evidently Julio was trying to cut him loose. At that moment one of the pirates in the group opposite looked straight at Casca, and Casca felt instinctively that the man knew something was going on. He tried to return the pirate’s gaze with a non-
commital look of his own, and he saw that the pirate was holding a broken shard of the black volcanic rock, the stuff that looked like glass, obsidian. As Casca watched, the pirate used the rock flake like a knife to cut off a slice of the white coconut meat and stuff it into his mouth.

So that was what Julio had, a sharp rock. It would take a long time to cut through the vines. No, that wasn't right. The glass rock was sharper than steel. Casca had seen men shave with it. His wrists would be free shortly. But there would still be the problem of the vines around his ankles. Well, he
would worry about that when the time came. In the meantime, if there was obsidian on the island, why hadn't the men used it to make better weapons? The only explanation Casca could think of was that the pirates who were marooned were not necessarily the smartest men in the world. But that didn't hold water either. What about young Julio? He seemed like a pretty sharp kid.

Shit!
Casca complained to himself.
Here I go thinking again. And every time I do it I get my ass in a sling
. Thinking about his ass reminded him that he needed to piss, but that didn't seem to be something that he was going to be able to do in the immediate future. He glanced furtively at the ground around him to see if there was a sharp rock on which he might try cutting his ankles loose. No luck. There were a couple of clubs lying on the soft earth within easy reach of his hands, but nothing useful for freeing his feet. Damn! He couldn't go for the clubs until his feet were free.

At the moment he came to that conclusion, he felt the vines loosen from around his wrists. His hands were now free, but that was all Julio could do for him. Almost all
– he felt the sharp rock, warmed by Julio's hand and the friction of sawing the vines, being pushed into his opened palm. Well, he had a weapon of sorts but there was damn little he could do with it.

At that moment, the brush hiding the tunnel entrance moved aside and the one armed Scot wriggled out into the stockade, followed by four of his men.

Outside the palisade wall, Julio, having freed Casca's wrists, now found himself in a tough situation. He had gotten to the fort in the first place by crawling through the grass that lay in the deep shadow cast by the early morning sun and the stockade wall. He had found Casca by his scent
– the scar faced stranger was so soon from a ship that he still smelled of things not on the island: rum and tobacco and the other elusive but well remembered odors of life aboard ship, as well as the tarred ropes that had bound him. It wasn't hard to find him outside the wall, and Julio felt proud of himself for using his nose. He also felt proud for having brought the sharp stone along and for having cut Casca 's wrists loose.

But now he was trapped. The sun had climbed up in the sky. There were no more shadows to hide in, not so long as the noon approached.

He huddled against the wall, knowing he had a long, long time to wait.

"Who the hell are you?" The one armed Scot had come over to Casca and now hunkered down in front of him but well out of reach. The Scot had black, feisty eyes under heavy eyebrows. He carried an air of constant suspicion. Casca considered him. The big man looked like a troublemaker all right, and it wasn't hard to figure out how he must have gotten himself marooned.

"I asked you a question, you bastard. Who are you?"

Now that was something Casca would have to think about. Again he did not answer right off but continued staring into the Scot's eyes until something happened.

He could see mirrored in the feisty black eyes something of what the Scot saw in him, and instantly he knew that the Scot had seen the iced water coldness of death in his own
gray blue eyes. He had looked deep into the utter ruthlessness that could be Casca, and had the shit scared out of him, even though Casca was bound and apparently helpless but the Scot did not show his fear. Casca knew he had him, so he answered him: "Captain Cass Long, late a passenger aboard
The Queen's Revenge
, Captain Teach commanding, Israel Hands, master. En route to the command of Captain Tarleton Duncan." He rolled the words out of his mouth in the stately manner that was now the fashion, all the while his eyes fixed sharply on the Scot.

The big man scowled, looked back over his shoulder, and called, "McLean!"

A scrawny little fellow with darting, rat eyes detached himself from the group and scurried over to the Scot.

"You're the latest one to come aboard, excepting, of course, this one with the scar on his face.
D'ye recall kenning a mon name o' Captain Teach?"

McLean 's rat eyes grew wide, and his small mouth smirked. "Aye.
'Tis the devil himself. Blackbeard.” 

"Blackbeard?"

“Aye”

“Ah”

"Look," Casca interrupted, "let's cut this shit. I want to get off this godforsaken island" - he deliberately made his voice rise in volumes "and I know damn well your men want to get off it too."

"Laddie,
y're in naw position t' get off nawt."

"Like hell. I know how to do it, and you've been sitting on your butt."

The Scot started to hit him, then thought better of it. "Talk," he growled.

"All right. What I say you do is stop this damned fighting shit between you and the Spaniards. Get together. Organize. Lay for the next ship that puts in here from the look of how many of you there are on this asshole of an island there must be more damn ships sailing here than there are tits in a Bristol whorehouse
– take her, and get back to the sea where the plunder is. Ain't a goddamn man among you's going to get rich squatting on his duff on this hunk of sand eating coconuts."

Casca had been loud enough. The men had come up. Now they were
in a semicircle ranged around the big Scot, grinning. One big fisted, red haired, ruddy faced fellow even said: "Fucking good thinking, mate."

The big Scot raised his one hand and scratched his nose with his thumb. "And how
d'ye plan to take a ship, seeing as how we've nawt to fight wi '? Nae sword, nae gun, nae weapon o' any kind, me bucko."

"There are fifteen of you. There are thirteen Spaniards. More than enough men to take on the crew of a ship particularly if you lure one of them away and take his weapons."

"Lure? It's going to be luring, aye? And how d'ye think y're about t' lure a mon wi' a wee gun or so?"

C:asca told him and the men roared with laughter.

But the Scot was dubious. "It'll nee work. There's not a mon here…"

"You forget the Spanish. "

"But we fight the Spanish."

"Damn your fighting. You want to get your ass off this damn island, don't you?"

The Scot hesitated. That was when a distant voice came from somewhere high up on the mountain behind them.

"Halloo the fort! Halloo! Sail
ho! Sail ho! East-south-east by east. Sail ho! Sail ho!"

"Now!" Casca shouted. "Now's the opportunity. What about it?"

But the Scot still hesitated.

Oh, shit!
Casca thought. He didn't have the time to argue. He brought his hands around, pushed himself unsteadily erect on his bound feet, picked up a club, and smashed the Scot in his thick skull before the dumbfounded pirates shocked motionless by his apparently magical eruption could react. "Dammit!" he said. "There's no time to waste! Call the Spaniards! Look lively, you bastards! It's now or never!"

He bent over, and with his left hand began sawing at the vines on his ankles, using the stone Julio had given him and keeping a weather eye out for the crew.

For half a dozen heartbeats it all hung in the balance. Then the red haired Englishman bellowed: "You heard the captain! Hop to it, mates! Lively, now! Lively!"