The Dagger X (The Dagger Chronicles) (37 page)

“The food is about to get much better, my boy!” X said, grinning. “My Nanny, she can cook.”

“She is . . . she is your wife?” Sarah said, rising from the streambed.

“She is my love,” X said. “My
raison d’être.
And the reason I will never be anything but a pirate.”

“I would think most women would desire that you take a less dangerous line of work,” Sarah said, wringing out the wet cloth.

“She does worry for me. But she needs me to continue. So much of what she does depends on my work,” X said, stroking his beads. “If I could just convince her to give it up, then we could be together so much more.”

“And what is this work that she does?” Sarah said.

X smiled at her. “We wait. Soon you will have your answer to that.”

Kitto stepped forward. He said nothing, but stroked his hand lightly over the top of Bucket’s head.

“His hair is getting longer,” he said. It was true. The tight black curls that had hugged so close to the baby’s scalp were thickening into an opaque fringe. Sarah smiled down at the baby in the crook of Ontoquas’s arm. He looked up at Sarah with watery black eyes.

“Heh! Heh!” Bucket said, and grinned a wide, toothless smile.

“Bucket will never know who his parents were,” Kitto said. Sarah looked up at him. “I suppose I should feel lucky.”

“You have had two mothers who loved you, Kitto, and one father who loved you and who was there for
you. That the man who sired you is fearful, evil even, does not reflect upon you.”

X stroked his beads and nodded thoughtfully. “My own father, he was a demon. I would have been better raised by wolves.” He rose to walk away, not feeling that such a discussion was welcome to him, but Kitto’s words stopped him.

“I wonder if it was my clubfoot that drove him away.”

X cleared his throat and turned. He made his way back over to Kitto, sitting down in the path next to Bucket, who he chucked under the chin.

“Your mother was common, Kitto. Low, even. Morgan married her in secret, perhaps because he was already troubled by her status. John Morris berated Morgan for it, told him he would regret the decision. So, by the time you were born, Morgan was already putting some distance between himself and Mercy.”

“And then after?” Kitto said. X nodded.

“After you arrived, he took steps,” X said. “He had me break into the clerk’s office and steal the certificate of marriage. I did—along with some other documents I found.” X winked. “I showed Morgan some blackened parchment and told him I had burned it.”

“Why did you lie to him?” Sarah said. “Why not just do as he asked?”

X ran his fingers along the curves of his black hat. “I knew then,” he said. “I knew that if Morgan were a man to turn his back on his love—on his own son, even—to improve his state in the world, he would not
hesitate to turn his back on me someday as well.”

Kitto was silent a moment.
So there it is. My father by birth abandoned me because of my twisted foot. And the father who raised me, the one I spent much of my life resenting, he took me in. Even with my clubfoot, even being the son of another man . . . he took me in and loved me.

The knowledge was awful and unforgiving and true. He turned back to Exquemelin.

“So you kept the documents to use against Morgan someday?” Kitto said.

“If necessary,
oui
.”

“I would like to see that happen.”

Van and Akin wandered back to them from where they had dangled their feet in the cool water of the creek.

“About ready?” Van said. He smiled at Kitto, searching his face for some clue as to his mood, glad to see that Kitto seemed less dark of aspect.

Kitto looked to his friends, at this eccentric pirate before him, and at his mother—yes, she was his true mother, his parent, more so than either of his fathers.

“Thank you, Mother,” he said softly.

Sarah searched his eyes questioningly, then she nodded in understanding.

“No. Thank you, son.”

T
hree hours later the party ascended slowly through a switchback pass when from far up the slope came the sound of two voices shouting.

“X is here! X! The pirate is returned!”

“What in the world?” Van said, holding up the cutlass in alarm.

Two dark-skinned young men clad in nothing but breeches came hurtling down the mountainside. They held weathered muskets over their heads as they ran headlong through the brush, ignoring the switchbacks of the path and instead launching themselves through the air with abandon.

“I hope those are friends,” Van said.

X let out a whoop.

“We thought you dead! Huzzah!” one shouted.

“I am too pigheaded to die!” X shouted back at them, laughing and holding his arms wide. The first man broke through the brush near them, tossed his musket to the ground on his last step, and without slowing launched himself into Exquemelin. The two
tumbled together off the trail, X swearing and laughing.

The second man caught up, fired his musket into the air, tossed it aside, and threw himself into the tumult. The embrace evolved into a wrestling match, the younger men pummeling Exquemelin while the captain attempted to put them each into headlocks.

“As odd as I would have expected,” Kitto said.

Finally the three wrestlers collapsed in a heap of groans and giggles.

“I am too old!” X yelled up to the treetops from where he lay on his back. Akin stepped forward to retrieve the captain’s hat, which had been knocked well down the slope. The two young men, all smiles, pulled X to his feet and helped him back up to the path where Kitto and Sarah and Ontoquas watched, wide-eyed.

“Introduce yourselves, you knaves,” X said, sweeping out an arm. The one who had tackled Exquemelin stepped forward. He was the younger of the two, dimples set into his bright cheeks.

“I am Amos,” he said. “And this one is Joseph,” he said, thumbing to the other man, whose features seemed carved from a slice of onyx, lean and strong. He gave them something of a salute with his smile.

“We know the pirate,” Joseph said, as if to explain their antics.

“Sadly, this is true.” X introduced his companions, and Amos and Joseph hugged each of them in turn as if they were old friends. Akin they lifted up in their embrace and slapped his shoulders as if he were a
brother, and Akin looked so happy he might burst. Then the young men crowded around the baby in Sarah’s arms and cooed in wonder.

“Ooh, Nanny loves a baby!” Joseph said. “Where you get this baby, X? You steal him away?”

“Not me. That one.” X pointed to Ontoquas, who stood her ground and held her head high.

“You Arawak?” Amos said, naming the tribes he knew. “Carib?”

Ontoquas shook her head. “Wampanoag,” she said.

Amos shrugged. “You saved the baby?”

Ontoquas nodded. “We were on a slave ship,” she said quietly. “We jumped.”

Amos smiled wide and clapped his hands. “Then I love you!” he said. “
And
your baby! And Nanny, she going to love you too.”

“How far are we,
mes frères
? These old legs grow tired,” X said.

Without another word Joseph gathered up all their meager bundles into his hands and Amos reached to take Bucket from Sarah with a smile.

“No, you mustn’t,” she said, but Amos had already snatched him from her weary arms. He spun the little baby skillfully so that Bucket perched in the crook of his elbow looking out.

“I am good with the babies!” Amos said. “They love me!”

Seeing Bucket’s dark skin against Amos’s, nearly the same tone, Sarah felt a momentary pang of sadness
that she did not quite understand. She forced herself to smile.

“Very well. Lead on.”

Two hours later the path wound on over steep terrain. They trudged through massive fields of boulders that X explained provided excellent cover should the English ever be foolish enough to try to attack them.

“Ten men could hold off an army,” he said. “And we are more than a hundred strong.”

Kitto would not have been able to keep up were it not for Van and Akin. The boys stood astride Kitto so that he could drape an arm over each of their shoulders. Together they forged their way. Even so, the going was difficult, and just when Kitto thought he could endure no more, the rise of the hillside tapered off. Up ahead of them Joseph called out to someone farther up the trail.

“A village ahead,” Akin said, catching a glimpse of some huts in the distance.

A few steps in front of them Sarah gave out a sharp cry. She stopped cold, her hand raised to her mouth. Kitto and Van caught up to her.

“Mum! What is it?” Kitto said. Sarah was looking farther up the trail.

“Is it . . . is it real?”

There in a grassy clearing, perched atop the shoulders of a very tall black man, was Duck, with the monkey Julius in his arms.

“Duck!” Kitto yelled.

“Julius!” Van said.

Duck turned and saw them: his mother and brother, walking out from the Jamaican jungle.

Duck shrieked and tossed Julius into the air before hurling himself from the man’s shoulders. He hit the dirt belly first but bounced up grinning. Duck ran for them.

They were all running now, Sarah and Kitto and all of them.

Sarah was the first to reach Duck. The little boy leaped into her arms and would have knocked her over backward had Kitto not been there to throw himself into the embrace as well.

“Oh, Mum! I thought I might never . . .”

“Duck! Duck, can it be!” Together they hugged one another and wept.

“I am so sorry, Duck!” Kitto said. “I left you alone on the ship.”

Duck pulled back from the embrace, grinning.

“I wasn’t alone! I had Julius!” He turned and made a kissing noise. Julius ran forward, leaped up to Kitto’s head, and walked over to Duck’s shoulder.

“Hey! You’re
my
monkey, remember?” Van said, snatching Julius away and nuzzling their foreheads together.

“Mum, don’t cry,” Duck said, but Sarah could not stop the tears. Duck wiped them from her cheeks.

“We thought we would never see you again,” Kitto said. “We thought maybe Morris had hurt you.” Duck reached out and gave Kitto’s nose a tweak.

“I was too fancy for old Black Heart,” Duck said. “And I knew you would come find me, Kitto. I always knew it.”

Kitto felt his heart swell. If he could only live up to the person his brother knew him to be, what great things could he do with his life?

Farther ahead in the clearing X had snatched his hat away to plant a huge kiss on a tall, dark woman. She also wore a man’s tricorne hat, but it was knocked to the ground by the kiss. X lifted the woman into the air and whooped.

“Nanny! I am home,
mon amour
!”

“Where you been, you mad pirate!” Nanny said, flashing a brilliant smile of white teeth.

Amos paraded Bucket on into the village.

“Feast!” he called. “Kill a pig, quick! We must have a great feast!”

Kitto stood. He pulled Sarah to her feet and tousled Duck’s matted hair.

“Come on, family. Let us find a cool spot in the shade. We have many stories to tell.”

Duck wrapped an arm around Kitto’s waist, and so doing he felt the dagger at the small of his brother’s back.

“What’s this?” Duck said, and pulled the dagger out. The blade was sheathed in the reed covering that Ontoquas had made.

“You know it,” Kitto said.

Duck smiled as he cast the reed sheath aside and
slashed the dagger through the air as if it were a sword.

“This is the one Da gave you!” he said. Kitto nodded. Splashes of sunlight played off the polished steel.

“There is a lot to that dagger, as it turns out,” Kitto said.

It belonged to my birth father, my birth mother, my father who hardly thought me capable of wielding it . . . My mum used that dagger to save me from a certain death by the sharks, and it has put me in league with a notorious pirate who might have taken my life when I was just a lad. And still, I do not think that dagger’s tale is yet told.

“Much indeed,” Sarah agreed. The motion of Duck’s arm ceased, the dagger poised in the air. He lowered it slowly.