Casca 15: The Pirate (7 page)

Casca was free. He called to the Spaniards. There was an answering halloo in Spanish.
Now if these morons would only work together for a little while...

Human beings are the
damndest animals
, Casca thought, looking at the pirates grouped before him out on the open slope of the hill a couple of hundred yards from the fort but out of sight of it.
Spanish and English. An hour ago they had been at each other's throats. Now here they were, standing together.

Well, not exactly together. The Spaniards were more or less on one side, the English on the other. But they were more interested in what he had to say than in braining each other.

"Pero, thees ‘lure,’ Senor Capitan Loong," Garcia, the fat Spaniard (the only fat man on the island), was trying manfully to speak in English "who thees one she esta?"

Casca told him.
And Julio who had not hitherto been consulted on the matter yelled, "By the Mother of God, no! I will not! No! No! But never!"

"You want to stay on this
shitass island?"

"But
Honor!" Julio went off into Spanish so fervent and rapid that even Casca could not keep up with it. And that was when the lookout up on the mountain yelled, "Sail making for the island!"

Casca called: "What kind of ship?"

"Sloop."

"There! That does it! A sloop we can take." He turned to Julio and said in Spanish, "This is one we can handle. What about it?"

The young Spaniard looked despairingly around at the semicircle of pirates. One of the Brotherhood men spat to leeward and said: "Shit, kid, ain't nobody going to hold it against you." The words meant nothing to Julio, but he understood the tone.

"All right. Now
."

"Captain!" One of the quieter Brotherhood men, a
Yorkshireman by the look of him, interrupted. "I can improve on what you had in mind. I spent four years apprenticed to a portrait painter in London." The pirate's voice was soft and his diction unexpectedly above the servant class. Casca guessed he probably preferred boys to girls, but that was his business. Now his deep blue eyes were looking questioningly at Casca. "I want to get off this island, too," he added.

"What do you have in mind?" There wasn't much time. If the sloop was making any headway at all and judging by the stiff breeze coming in from the sea she ought to be they had less than an hour to set up an ambush.

"If the captain pleases, leave that to me."

Hell! Why not? There were other matters he had to tend to. "All right. But step lively, dammit!" He looked out to sea where the top of the sloop's mast was now becoming visible from the beach. He would have to get his men in position
; he had never seen the terrain farther down the beach where the sloop would land if it landed

If it passed by now
, that, dammit, would tear it all
. But he didn't mention his fear to the men. He headed them down toward the landing and then momentarily looked back out to sea. More of the sail was now visible. The sloop was making good time.

Casca wondered what the sloop's captain was doing at the moment. He certainly wouldn't be expecting twenty nine men to ambush his men and take over his ship.

The sloop's captain was standing aft by the rail, holding a half empty bottle of rum by the neck, idly watching the black slaves work his ship, and thinking of nothing in particular. The one female slave, naked from the navel up, was leaning against the rail to the leeward side watching the green shape of the island come up out of the water. The female slave was the captain's personal property, but at the moment he was not looking at her, nor was anyone else. The way she was standing the big teats on her full brown breasts pointed down at the whispering green sea and swayed with the roll of the ship. Leaning against the rail she had a little the look of a cow but of a cow that had been milked too often.

"Put yet into idt der Godt damn butts!" the captain suddenly roared at the slaves forward. His mulatto third mate obediently brandished his whip.

Slaves! The captain was in a foul mood, and he was more than willing to take it out on the slaves. He was running a cargo of sugar. The hold was packed with hogsheads, and there were even half a dozen or so lashed on deck. The sugar hogsheads were heavy, overloading the sloop, making her ride very low in the water, and the extra tonnage would probably have slowed her down had she not already been hampered by the heavy barnacle growth on her old hull. The captain was a mean, brutal, small minded lout but he was also a reasonably competent seaman. If this ancient sloop were not careened and the barnacles scraped from her she would take forever to make the passage to New Orleans if she made it at all. He had sailed these waters a long time. He could practically smell the storms that were coming. And overloaded as the sloop was she would founder. What he really needed to do was throw some of the sugar overboard. But the greed that had put the sugar on in the first place was the greed that would keep it aboard.

This island, now. Not on the charts but that didn't necessarily mean anything. What he could count on was that she was most certainly uninhabited otherwise she would be on a chart. And if there was a flat beach at all, then he could careen his vessel and get the barnacles off. At least that was what had gone through his mind, but there had been something else, too. If he was right in sensing that a storm was brewing, it would probably come about the time they finished the careening, and he could take shelter somewhere about the island if there was a suitable anchorage. None of this did he discuss with his first mate, the only other white man aboard, an old man, maybe over fifty, whose chief pleasure in life seemed to be seeing the blood run from the whip marks on a black slave's back.
Vell, to every man his pleasure
. 

He glanced casually, at the black female slave, and the left corner of his mouth lifted beneath the shaggy
mustache. She was the only woman aboard, and she was strictly for his use only. He could imagine how that galled the other officers and maybe even the slaves, too, though they, of course, were mere cattle, seeing those big brown tits and not being able to do anything about it.

Ah!
Momentarily the captain was almost happy. He swung the rum bottle to his lips and took a long pull....

They made the island at about the middle of the day, and, yes, there was an anchorage. More, there was a long stretch of gently sloping white beach backed by a stand of big coconut palms whose trunks were sturdy enough to take tackle. Soundings with the lead as well as the
color of the water showed a drop off and a gradient ideal for careening. All that momentarily bothered the captain. The site was too perfect. He swept his spyglass carefully over the entire area, looking for signs that other ships before him had careened here, but there was only the virgin land.
So! Vas not only yet der uncharted island, vas one nodt yet found.
Immediately he ordered the beginning of the careening, now in the hot middle of the day, seeing with pleasure the dark looks he got not only from the slave crew but from his own officers. Any reasonable captain would have waited until the cool of the evening. Ah! The boat he now sent ashore he put in the charge of the first mate, knowing that that individual hated the boatswain's guts, and the two of them would not be likely to get together against him. Besides, the first mate had an odd passion for weapons. If he behaved as he usually did, he would be wearing a double brace of pistols, a long dirk, cutlass, and carrying a musket double loaded. Not the kind of man to let a slave get away.

Ja
!

Damn all slaves! Carter Jenkins, first mate of the sloop Odysseus, lounged in the stern sheets of the ship's boat, pulled up on the white sand of the beach, and waited while the wiry little mulatto boatswain organized his slave crew. There was the matter of the big hawser to be carried to the line of coconut palms and sundry other matters. Jenkins paid very little attention to that. Though he thoroughly despised the little boatswain he was satisfied that the mulatto knew his job. As a matter of fact he envied the little bastard his competence; that was one of the reasons for his hatred. The boatswain would take care of things nicely. Oh, after everything was set up he, Jenkins, might be able to find some little something to bitch about and make life a little unpleasant for the boatswain but let that come later. Right now Jenkins had other things on his mind.

What he mostly had on his mind was the women he was going to have when they got to New Orleans. Silently he cursed the captain for dangling that female slave in front of them all the time particularly the bit about taking her out on deck and having her bathe under the ship's pump. He knew exactly why the captain did it and the son of a bitch had succeeded. Well... He would have been horny enough anyway.

Jenkins was past fifty and that made a difference in the execution but not in the anticipation. As a matter of fact, he admitted to himself, maybe there was more anticipation now than when he was young. After a long voyage he dreamed of women, thought of women, even imagined sometimes that he saw their phantom images, like the mirages on the desert that time the Tripoli pirates had held him captive.

So now, in the noonday tropical sun, only partially protected by the wide brimmed hat he wore the sun no reasonable white man would ever go out in
, he half expected to see the images of naked women in the dancing air over the hot beach. He didn't, though, so his attention came back to the second pleasure in his life, the possibility of killing one of these damned slaves. They were like children. Now that they were ashore they were probably dreaming of making a dash for the underbrush. Which was really the reason Jenkins was still sitting out here in the stern of the longboat broiling his brains in the sun. He wanted them to think they had a chance. Then he would get the first one who tried to run away. In Jenkins' experience, there was always at least one who tried it. He looked forward to shooting slaves or anything else for that matter. Jenkins did not particularly like using a blade. He was pretty good with a cutlass if he had to be, but he never liked it. Truth was, he wanted to stay just a little distance away from whatever he killed, and a blade meant too close contact.

Now a woman, though... Close contact was fine there. Yeah... Real fine...

Jenkins sighed and stood up unsteadily in the longboat. It was pulled up far enough on the beach not to be washed out, but it still swayed a little as he stood upright.
Hell!
he thought.
I got too much going through my mind.
His nerves were on edge and he suddenly felt like something was going to happen but he didn't know what. But he thought it was going to be something good, something to look forward to. That was the trouble about getting old. There wasn't all that much to look forward to. Jenkins spat into the water and got out of the longboat.

He had spotted a smooth rock in the shade of a tree and headed for it. The rock would make a good place to sit and watch that little bastard mulatto boatswain struggle with his slaves to get the hawsers around the trees and the tackle set up. It was a nice flat rock with an open space behind it and underbrush coming up on both sides. In a way it was kinda like a stage. After he got his fill of women in New Orleans, maybe he'd go to a
theater, watch a play. Wouldn't be as much fun as bedding a whore, but it would be something to do. Now if only–

Damn!

He had seen one! An image of a woman! Right behind the rock on which he was going to sit.

Just for a moment, but real as you please. And damned if she wasn't a white woman! Naked from the waist up. Big boobs. Damn! but they were big! And round! Biggest, whitest boobs he had seen on a woman real, dream, or fantasy in years. Young face or at least that was the way he remembered it. Even had a big flower in her hair.

By damn, if these were the kind of daydreams he was going to have on this island, why, hell, this was going to be a nice time. Jenkins made for the rock.

When he sat on it, it occurred to him he'd better take another look at the slaves. But they were hard at work, and he saw that, even if the image he had seen had been no more than his own private fantasy none of the slaves nor the boatswain could have seen it because of the underbrush beside the rock. That was the trouble with a daydream that vivid. Seemed so real you always felt somebody else could see it
.

What the hell?

Jenkins would have sworn he could smell the flower that had been in the woman's hair. There it was again. Strong. Must be flowers behind him. He turned his head to look.

But there was only green underbrush, and, in the opening, a path leading back up the hillside. A path that must have been there for some time because it was loose sand, and
–

In that loose sand, clear as the nose on a man's face, was the imprint of a bare foot.

Damn!
Jenkins decided he had better lay off that cheap rum that they had put aboard when they took on the cargo. Not only was he dreaming of seeing naked titted women where there were no women, now he was seeing her footprint. For a fraction of a second he started to reach out and touch the footprint in the sand to see if it were real or not, but he jerked back his hand before it was halfway there. He just didn't want any hard evidence interfering with the truth he already knew existed: that both the image of the woman and the footprint were mere figments of his imagination.

Unfortunately he did look back up the hill into the shadows under the trees
, and saw the naked woman again passing quickly across his view, big boobs and all.

That was just a little too much. Jenkins glanced at the slaves, called to the boatswain: "Watch them. I'm going to look for a spring up here
," and started up the path.

Almost immediately it made a sharp turn to the right, and again he smelled the strong perfumed
odor of the flowers. When the path turned back again it was in a relatively dark, narrow space between another high rock and the close growing underbrush, and there was something white on the path. Involuntarily Jenkins looked down at the patch of white. He had not quite finished identifying it for what it was a pile of flower blossoms when Casca's club hit the back of his head....

The boatswain was not fond of the first mate, Jenkins, though he did not share the older man's hatred. To the boatswain hatred was a luxury a stupid man could not afford, and the boatswain knew he was not the smartest fellow afloat. What he did he did well, but that was because he had worked at it a long time and because there was always somebody over him that he could go to if it looked like there might be a problem. The boatswain had no intention of being left by himself.

The first ten minutes Jenkins was gone "looking for a spring" were no problem for the boatswain. The next five were. And the five after that threw him into a panic. Being in sole control of the gang setting up the hawsers didn't bother him. He'd done it many times. But being in sole control of the landing party with the first mate unaccountably missing was something else. He kept looking over at the rock, expecting the mate to appear. When the mate didn't, and the boatswain knew he had to do something about it, he had a problem with what to do with the slaves. His solution was not all that bright. He ordered all of them to stand in a group out on the open beach, but not too close to the boat. He edged over the rock, trying to keep his eyes on the men, holding both pistols aimed at them, and at the same time trying to grab quick glances back into the forest.

Naturally this whole activity was of substantial interest to the slaves who had not heretofore thought their boatswain mad.

It was of considerably more interest to the captain who had chosen that particular moment to turn his brass spyglass onto the island to see if the boatswain and first mate were making as much progress there as his second and third mates were with shifting the big hogsheads of sugar out of the hold and onto one side of the deck.

What the hell!

The captain was momentarily speechless. What he saw in the spyglass was the band of slaves grouped together on the open beach. Neither the boatswain nor the first mate were in evidence since the angle at which the shoreline cut in hid the rock where the first mate had disappeared from the captain's view.

The captain called the second mate to his side and thrust the spyglass into his grasp. "Look! Und,
vill you tell me v'at d' dom hell you see?"

Meanwhile, the boatswain was having his problems. Trying to keep his eyes on his slaves, look up the hill, and get over the rock was all just a little too much for him. So, where the underbrush was thinner he backed into it so that he could still see his men.