Cinnamon and Gunpowder (25 page)

This is how men spend their days on earth.

I was considering my leap to freedom, reassuring myself that, despite this furious attack, Laroche was Ramsey’s man, like me, when my thoughts were stopped by the sight of Feng swinging from a severed stay line across the divide and landing in the shrouds of Laroche’s ship. From there he dropped to the deck and, evading Laroche’s crew (who had not yet truly appreciated his presence among them), made straight for the solar weapon. Producing a cooper’s hammer from his belt, he shattered, with lithe and efficient strokes, the glass lenses one by one and moved on to the central dish itself, where he put two great divots into the silver before he was beset by Laroche’s marines. They surrounded him and he used his hammer as a weapon, making short swift arcs that landed with staggering speed on one sailor after another, now breaking a knee, now caving a temple. This crowd moved about the deck, for Feng would not let them corner him, and they left behind them a trail of broken men, some impaled on their own swords. He ducked and leaped like a flame, dodging the falling bodies, all the while writing invisible ideograms in the air with the hammer, each punctuated by apostrophes of blood.

My vision obscured by smoke and the rolling of the deck, I was able to witness only brief moments of this melee, but it was time enough to see Feng cut down a dozen men. They would have had more luck catching the wind; he had a manner of slinking askance, slipping behind them even as they lunged. The sailors seemed confused to find their wrists broken and their jaws unhinged by that appalling hammer. One, taking desperate action, dropped his sword and lifted his blunderbuss, but Feng did not flee nor flinch. Rather, in a wink, as the gun was aimed, Feng went to the soldier as easily as one hugs a friend. The gun fired safely under Feng’s arm, and three soldiers behind him dropped, gripping their red bellies, felled by their comrade’s shot.

All the while, rifles and cannon continued to mutilate the air, scattering wood and bone like confetti. As more men moved to intercept Feng, our gunners gained advantage and many of Laroche’s men found themselves riddled with crossfire.

Only when a net was thrown over Feng did his choreography slow. I heard Bai’s steady voice addressing Mabbot behind me: “Captain, with your permission?” Mabbot must have nodded, for Bai flew to
La Colette
in the same manner and began to disperse soldiers, severing Feng’s net with his tasseled sword. The brothers, unstoppable and moving as one, cut the tether on the spanker boom and swung it out over the gap. This they used as a bridge, dancing across the narrow spar to the cheers of our crew and returning to Mabbot’s side. I saw that Feng had suffered blows and lacerations. Still, the glow upon the twins’ faces showed their satisfaction with the foray.

During these events, I became aware of the figure of Laroche himself, a long shadow on the foredeck, using his sword to punctuate his orders. The brass buttons, running in parallel rows down his coat, glinted in the sun as he orchestrated the vicious assault.

Our ships were even closer now, the rails half a dozen feet apart, but I saw with horror that we were passing Laroche’s ship quickly. We would get no closer. This was my only chance. I set my timid heart aside and focused on the receding glimmer of my promise to myself. To return! Nothing else mattered.

I rose in panic, my prayers to individual saints abandoned for one single, childish refrain—“Heaven help, heaven help…”—and I ran, though the waves were against us and the deck rocked beneath me. I ran as straight as I could toward
La Colette
with no other plan than to leap, grasping at the beams and ropes of the liberated yardarm that swung drunkenly near our rail, or to fall into the water and swim if need be.

As I reached the rail, the waves brought our vessels level and there, standing opposite me upon the French deck, was a young naval officer, with the salamander upon his breast and the pink of battle upon his round face. My savior. I stood full at the railing, arms raised in excitement and shouting my own name: “Owen Wedgwood! Owen Wedgwood!” But I saw no kindness in his face. A breath before he raised his rifle, I imagined how I must look to him: hair matted, beard untrimmed, eyes wild with desperation. Was I not the picture of a bloodthirsty pirate? I dove to the deck just as he shot, and rolled, hugging the shadows of the quarterdeck.

Only when I tried to scurry to more promising shelter did I ascertain that the ball had passed through my lower leg; there was a sickening grinding when I put weight on it. I slid in a slick of blood, fairly pinned to my position by rifle fire. For minutes I was racked by an infantile melancholy; if the pope himself had shot me, I could not have been more disappointed.

Then pain broke into me, the cacophony of war again filled my ears, and I was reanimated by the desire to live. With pandemonium severing the stays of creation around me, I crawled to the galley, where, in agony, I squirmed into Conrad’s enormous cauldron for shelter, pulling my useless leg behind me and praying for a smashing victory by the attackers, but not so smashing that it resulted in my death. My last thought before darkness took me was that Mabbot’s warrant had said nothing of taking her alive.

I woke to a chorus of moaning of which I was the baritone. I was chilled to the bone, though my neck and fingers felt as if they were on fire. Someone had been pouring rum into me; my beard reeked of it. The moaning of the others, burned or shot around me, came and went with the light.

Days passed as fevered minutes. I had, at one moment, clarity enough to know that I had been rescued when I felt on my skin the blessing of sunlight and beneath me a bed of down. Real down! Further, I was no longer among the dying but alone. I daresay I smiled despite the pain, which had grown to consume my entire right side. Fever rattled the shutters of my mind.

Then my dreams of rescue scattered like bats when one of the twins, those agents of suffering, hovered above me, pulled back my eyelids, and clucked, “He is dying.”

Mabbot responded, “Do not stop your ministrations.” Her voice was soothing and calmed me, and I found myself wanting her near, which only confirmed the severity of my delirium.

Yea, do not stop your ministrations, my heart pleaded. Whatever occult arts you possess, whatever bitter herbs and incantations, spend them on this body. I no longer cared where the body lay, in an English bed, upon a pirate ship, on a desert island, or floating upon an iceberg—only that I should not die.

This was Saint Anthony’s agony. Various demons presented themselves to me. Chief among them was the ship’s surgeon. I would have preferred a gargoyle perched above my face. I could not tell who stank more; we were, both of us, positively soaked in spirits. I realized, with a clarity available only to the fevered, that the good doctor was, in fact, Death himself, passing as a member of the crew this whole time, patiently waiting to gather us up. I spent myself cursing and trying to beat him away. These spells were periodically interrupted by slaps or cold water splashed upon me.

I learned later that we had barely survived Laroche’s assault by reaching the black coral channels, as Mabbot had hoped. These channels can be navigated only by toothless Pete, the cryptic ancient who sits at the bow.
La Colette
’s hull was compromised by the shallows, and we limped to this island river, deep in the convoluted bays of Selat Nasik, where we’ve hidden to make repairs.

In my fever, I was also visited by gentler phantoms: A plump hare ran through a dark forest pursued by something malignant. I ran to protect it, or at times became it, feeling the evil at my heels. I quite exhausted myself trying to keep up as it ducked behind giant trees and turned down narrow paths. And when I spotted its white tail disappearing into the muzzle of a cannon, I lunged in after it, shouting. The cannon was much longer on the inside, and I crawled for some considerable time before emerging out of an oven, unscathed, in the small kitchen of my journeyman days. My beloved Elizabeth was there, alive and young and real in every detail, from the loose sweep of her hair to the lavender hue of her apron. I wept to see her and kept at it until she offered me some of the soup she had been preparing and soothed my back with her soft hand. She was encouraging me to swallow the thick dumplings floating in the soup, saying, “If you don’t chew them, you’ll choke.”

This was my old life, before pirates, before even Ramsey. My first position was working at the inn for the widow Hamilton, who always had something to say about my “French airs” but who paid me well. This was the season, perhaps even the very day Elizabeth finally conceived, that downhill slope that would take them both from me. But here she was, well and vibrant. In my anxiety that fall would come and snatch her away, I looked up from my soup and saw, through a window, the hare caught in the jaws of a large reptile. I watched as it was swallowed, passed as a grotesque lump through the serpent, and emerged on the other side slick and black as bitumen.

At this I woke.

I heard the surgeon say, “It must be done.”

Mabbot replied, “Then, steady and clean, do it.”

My leg, when I was conscious to it, was swollen and lay heavy as a slaughtered pig upon the wooden cot, for now I was no longer on the down bed and must have dreamed that too. The pain was ungodly, and I was grateful when they filled me again with rum until darkness asserted itself.

When I next woke, the surgeon was gone and one of the twins was spooning a foul ocher tonic into my mouth. There was, beside me, a crate of Spanish moss or cobwebs or the like, and this they were applying to my wounds. The sharp pain had been replaced by a crushing weight, as if my foot had been clamped within a carpenter’s vise.

I heard one of the twins say, “No more rum. He must feel this to heal.”

The pain worsened and I wept. I cried out and groaned until I slept, for I was sorely exhausted. Without the rum’s kind parasol, I was exposed to a torrent of pain. The twins forced gruel and their foul potions between my clenched teeth. I begged them to release my foot from the vise.

Then it was morning, which morning I could not say, and I was truly awake for the first time since the attack. I was again on down; in fact, I was in Mabbot’s cabin, in her bed, with nothing but a sheet wrapped around my loins. The twins were nearby. Mabbot was reading in her chair next to the bed and, I realized, holding my hand gently. When I snatched my hand away, she looked up from her book and smiled.

“You certainly curse like a pirate,” she said.

“Lie still,” Bai said. “The needles.”

I looked upon my body and with mounting anxiety saw that my belly, knees, and forearms had been perforated with needles like the map of a conqueror. On my chest sat small mounds of smoldering incense.

“What witchcraft—?” I coughed.

“This witchcraft,” said Mabbot, “bore you through a fine fever; your foot was full green before the surgeon did his part.”

My foot was hidden somehow, sunk into the down mattress. I lifted it and saw that there was nothing there but a stump, bound thickly. Just below the knee my foot and calf were gone.

“What have you done to me?” I cried.

“You didn’t want that old thing,” Mabbot said. “It smelled so bad even the sharks won’t eat it. What a bother. Your escape attempts aren’t so good for your health; let’s skip them altogether from now on.”

“Fiends! Devils!” I tried to rise, but Feng placed his palm on my forehead and pinned me where I was. I swept my hand across my body to remove the needles and incense.

“These good men have performed a miracle,” said Mabbot.

“Took my foot!”

“The surgeon took your foot and promised me you’d be dead in a day. You are not dead. You owe that to the twins and their medicine.”

“Return my foot!”

“Well,” Mabbot said. “Our guest is unsatisfied with our hospitality. Get him out of here.”

After plucking their machinations from my skin, the twins lifted me toward the door.

“Wedge,” Mabbot called, stopping us. “Don’t imagine that you’re excused from your contract. Now more than ever we must stick to our tasks. I’ll give you a week to collect yourself; the following Sunday I shall dine as usual.” I saw then that her cheeks were blistered and her arm was bandaged from the battle.

“I’ll pitch myself into the sea before feeding you again!” I spat.

“Of course, that is your choice. Oh, and the men will gossip about your time here. If you encourage any untoward rumors, I’ll rip your equipment off to verify your story.”

Leaning upon Joshua once again, I saw, on my way from Mabbot’s cabin, that we were anchored in a river surrounded by lush jungle. The ship was in pieces, the bowsprit cut entirely away, its lines loose in the wind, and a great log on the main deck was being lathed to replace her. Men sat in circles repairing the sails, which were beginning to look like a child’s first quilt.

I was locked in my cell, dim and cramped after Mabbot’s luxurious cabin. Over the course of the next few days, I mostly slept. My fever returned in fits. Joshua appeared to wet my forehead with rags, to empty my chamber pot, and to feed me gruel and more of the bitter sauce that the twins concocted.