by Alex Scarrow
Please don’t let me find Liam or Rashim in here. All of a sudden finding them was the last thing Maddy wanted. Because with this smell …? It meant only one thing surely.
Bob ducked down low and squeezed into the small shack beside her, squinting to make sense out of the gloom. A tatty curtain of stained, threadbare linen hung across the room, suspended from a sagging rope. She looked at him, knowing that behind that material they were going to get an answer. As she reached for the curtain, her mind flashed up a possible scenario: Liam’s rotting carcass.
No, not that, please.
She swept the material aside. The rear of the shack contained little more than a hammock strung from one creaking wall to the other. It bulged with the deadweight of a body. Maddy took a tremulous step forward, not wanting – but needing – to see what was in there. She leaned over the hammock and in the dim light could make out a barefoot man in dark leggings and a pale linen shirt which perhaps, once upon a time, had been white, but now looked a sweat-stained shade of lemon, punctuated with a dozen other stains of varying colours. She forced herself to look up at the body’s face.
And heaved a sigh of relief. It was neither Liam nor Rashim.
‘Thank God!’ she blurted.
At the sound of her voice the body lurched suddenly, the hammock swinging, the shack’s entire timber frame creaking; dust cascaded from the dirt and straw roof. The man’s eyes snapped open wide as he sat bolt upright. ‘Who … the devil –?’
Maddy stepped back. ‘Sorry! Sorry! I thought you were dead.’
The man swung a bare foot over the side to steady himself and got up, but he misjudged his step and tumbled to the ground. She caught a waft of stale spirits, mixed with the cloying stench of a body and clothes that hadn’t seen water or soap in a while. He pulled himself up on his elbows and looked up at her through yellow dry stalks of light-starved grass and weeds. Then vomited. And then passed out.
‘He’s blind drunk,’ said Maddy. She squatted down over him, mouth-breathing once again. Bob hunkered down beside her, studying him. ‘The transponder is on him somewhere.’ He began to rifle through the man’s clothes and pockets.
‘My God! Look! It’s there!’ She reached out for the man’s left ear. The transponder was dangling from a hoop of metal. ‘He’s wearing the thing as a frikkin’ earring!’
It took them the better part of an hour to rouse the man from his drunken stupor. Bob went back to the high street and returned with a leather bucket of drinking water, which they used to douse him. After he’d come to, he drank feverishly, slurping from the bucket’s ladle, washing away a bad case of dry-mouth. He was badly dehydrated, not just from the booze; the heat inside this shack had been slowly cooking him. He drank several pints’ worth of water before he was halfway ready to speak to either of them.
Sitting outside on the stoop of his shack was better than enduring the stench inside, but not much better. Maddy decided it was about time for some answers. She held out the transponder in the palm of her hand. ‘Where did you get this?’
He blinked bleary, unfocused eyes at it. ‘Tha’s mine,’ he slurred and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand that was shaking.
‘No, it’s not. It actually belongs to a friend of mine. Where did you get it?’
He scowled at her. ‘’S all I got left, Goddamn you. It’s mine … give it back.’
She grabbed the collar of his shirt in her fist. ‘You can have it back when you tell me where you got it!’
He looked up at her. A pitiful sight. He was emaciated and clearly hadn’t eaten for days, if not weeks. An unkempt beard was hiding cheeks hollowed out from malnutrition, and glassy, red-rimmed eyes sunk deep into dark sockets glinted wetly up at her.
‘You got any of the decent stuff, m’dear?’ He smiled pathetically. ‘Just a li’l drop to tide me over?’ His hands were trembling with the shakes.
‘What? You mean something like rum?’
‘Yes! R-rum … just a drop … ’
‘Bob?’ She looked up at the support unit. ‘Go and intimidate someone, will you?’
‘You want me to acquire some alcohol?’
‘Yep.’
‘Affirmative.’
She watched Bob until he turned out of the rat run and on to the high street. ‘So, while we’re waiting, you can tell me where this earring came from.’
‘Aye, I’ll tell ya.’ The man snorted drily, humourlessly. ‘From a man I’ll kill with me bare hands if the good Lord ever sees fit to place him before me.’
‘What man?’
‘A treacherous, devil-eyed snake. Evil incarnate. The Devil himself, so help me.’ He hawked up some phlegm and spat it out on to the dirt beside him.
Maddy was getting exasperated. ‘Describe him to me.’
‘Dark as night, with the smell of sulphurous Hell about him.’
‘Dark? You mean dark-skinned?’
‘Aye.’ He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘You know they say the good Lord burns dark the skin of sinners, so he does. Burns the skin black as night to mark ’em as evil.’
She had no time for that kind of stupid. ‘Tall? Thin?’
He nodded. ‘Aye … I’d s-say tall.’
Rashim? Had to be. ‘Was he with someone else? Another man? Young, white?’
‘Aye, there was the two of them. The pair were a p-partnership of evil.’
Maddy sat back, relieved. That had to be Liam. Then at least the pair of them were together. That was something. ‘Where are they? Do you know? Are they alive?’
‘T-took everything I h-had, so they did. Everything.’ The man’s face began to crumple and tears leaked out of puffy eyes down his sallow face into the bristles of his beard. ‘T-turned them all a-against me. And after I trusted them … after I rescued them.’
Maddy heard raised voices coming from the high street followed by the crash and splinter of something landing on something else. A moment later she saw Bob’s lumbering outline returning down the rat run with a clay jug swinging from one hand.
She wondered whether it was a good idea to let this poor wretch descend back into a drunken stupor. But then she could see he was trembling badly with the shakes: withdrawal symptoms. Here was a man intent on drinking himself to death; someone with nothing left but a desire to waste away to a pickled stick; to vanish from the face of this earth amid a spirit-infused fog. So be it.
Bob joined them and squatted down beside Maddy. ‘I am reliably informed the beverage in this container is rum.’
The man’s eyes widened with childlike glee at the word. He beckoned the jug towards him with gimme-gimme hands that flexed open, closed, open. Maddy took the jug, picked up a battered tin mug and poured a small measure out and handed it to him. Just a bit to deal with the shakes, no more than that. For now.
‘Now, please … start at the beginning.’
The man gulped it down and almost immediately seemed a little better for it.
‘I’ll start with me name, which is Jacob Cuthbert Teale. Although, for a while, before those two demons took my ship off me, I used to be known as Captain Jack Teale of the Clara Jane. My ship, my crew … my venture.’
He sighed. ‘Then things began to go wrong … ’
Chapter 26
1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa
For the second time, Liam found himself coming to with a head that felt like some small malicious troll with hobnail boots was marching bloody-minded loops round the inside of his skull. He opened his eyes to see Will leaning over him, damping his forehead with a wet sponge. The young boy’s face creased into a grin.
‘Master Liam, sir … how do you feel?’
His mouth was dry, tacky, thick with mucus. ‘Like hell. Is there any water?’
William nodded, dipped a ladle into a water bucket beside the hammock and lifted it to Liam’s lips. He slurped from it thirstily.
‘We thought you was goin’ to die,’ said Will quietly. ‘There was so much blood.’
>
Liam hesitantly raised a hand to feel his head. His shaggy hair was matted with dried blood. He could feel a ridge of puckered flesh atop a large swelling and winced as he probed it.
‘Ouch.’ A few more head wounds like this one and he figured his skull was going to end up looking as misshapen as an old potato.
‘Master Rashim said you was very lucky, sir. The musket ball was a glancing blow, he says.’
Liam wondered. Perhaps it was that. But then again, perhaps, like the support units, he’d been designed with a thicker skull. That left him with a queasy follow-on thought that perhaps the inside of his skull was just like Bob’s: a largely empty space in which sat a small nub of brain tissue linked to a dense silicon-wafer computer. Something Maddy had wondered about before.
He sat up in the hammock. It creaked under his weight. He looked out past one of the Clara’s cannons through the open gunport at darkness outside. Night.
‘What … what happened?’
‘We escaped them Moors,’ replied Will. ‘The men are all saying it was a brave and clever thing Master Rashim did, setting that ship afire.’
Brave? Clever maybe. But brave? Liam vaguely recalled Rashim had been quaking in his boots just before the fight. If either of them could actually be described as brave, surely it was him, hurling himself into the thick of that fight alongside all the other men of the Clara. Inwardly he sighed.
‘Yes, Rashim’s a very brave man.’
‘Master Henry says we was awful lucky. Says they was probably slavers. If them other two ships had caught up with us, we’d all be dead or slaves in chains by now, bound for Arabia.’
‘How long have I been out?’
Will cocked his head. ‘Out?’
‘Unconscious.’
‘Just been this afternoon and this evening, sir. We only lost sight of ’em sails an hour ago.’ Will shook his head. ‘Was a frightful frantic chase out to sea, sir. Frightful.’
Liam nodded. ‘I can imagine. Where’s Rashim?’
Will looked uneasy.
‘What’s up?’
‘Everyone’s all havin’ a meet up on the deck.’ Will was speaking in a whisper. ‘They’re not very happy with our captain.’
Captain Teale glared through the open door to his cabin at Rashim and Old Tom standing outside and at the men assembled sheepishly down on the main deck. ‘And what is this about?’
Rashim could smell alcohol on his breath.
‘The lads ain’t happy,’ said Tom. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Even though he too had been quietly grumbling about Teale’s incompetence, the thought of a ship’s natural order of hierarchy being called into question made him unhappy. Mutinies were never a good thing. Mutiny led to chaos. Chaos aboard a ship at sea was a recipe for disaster.
‘Unhappy, are they?’ Teale looked questioningly at them both. ‘And they have sent you two as their spokesmen to bring me this news, have they?’
Rashim nodded. ‘They … well, they’re concerned with some of the tactical judgement calls you’ve been making … sir.’
Both Tom and Teale frowned, confused, and Rashim mentally kicked himself for using such an anachronistically modern phrase. ‘Concerned with some of your decisions.’
Teale scowled. ‘It’s not their damned business to question my decisions. I am the captain of this vessel, their superior, and they will jolly well do as they are commanded!’
Old Tom pressed his lips together grimly. ‘The men won’t … ’ he started.
‘The men won’t what?’
Tom shuffled uncomfortably. ‘The men won’t have that, sir.’
Teale’s cheeks pinked with rage. ‘They will do as they are blasted well ordered to do or, so help me God, I will have any man who refuses arrested for mutiny and insubordination! And on our return to England he shall be tried and hanged as a mutineer!’
‘I suspect these men won’t really care about that,’ said Rashim.
Teale’s bluster was looking thin.
‘They don’t see this ship as being covered by naval, maritime … or any law for that matter.’ Rashim glanced back over his shoulder at the men gathered silently on the main deck. Several oil lamps flickered among them, catching the impatient glint of eyes.
Teale seemed to sense that bellowing and bluster weren’t going to get him anywhere right now. ‘A word in private, Mr Anwar?’ He smiled courteously at Tom. ‘If that’s all right with you?’
Old Tom was taken aback by Teale’s sudden polite deference. He cleared his throat and shuffled. ‘All right, sir. If that’s what you want.’
Teale stepped back into his cabin and gestured for Rashim to come in. Once inside, Rashim gently closed the door. ‘I should caution you,’ he began, ‘the men are very angry that you led us into an ambush.’
Captain Teale’s stern scowl evaporated in an instant. ‘Oh God have mercy on me!’ He took four steps across his cabin and slumped down in the chair beside his navigation table. ‘I … I thought I had the measure of this captaining-a-ship foolery! I … I thought – damnation!’ He glanced up at Rashim. ‘I have confessed to you already … I daren’t steer this ship all the way across the Atlantic!’
‘But,’ Rashim persisted, ‘that was your original goal, was it not? To sail to the Caribbean and obtain a privateer’s licence?’
‘Yes!’ Teale snarled angrily. ‘Yes! Dammit, man … that was the intention, so help me. But I … I simply can’t!’
‘Why not?’
Teale reached for a tankard and slurped at the dregs of wine in the bottom. ‘Curse you, Rashim! Do I need to spell it out to you, man? I am afraid! I have a mortal fear!’
‘Of what?’
The captain turned in his chair to look out of the aft windows. Outside it was all but dark now and there was nothing to see. ‘Land! Or more to the point, losing sight of it!’ He slammed his fist against the table. ‘I can make no sense of these navigation devices! The charts and maps confuse me! But above all … I cannot cope with the notion of nothing but sea within my sight!’ His skin glistened with nervous sweat. ‘Look at me! I am undone! I am in pieces!’ He glanced back again at the windows, but they merely reflected the gloomy cabin, the oil lamp on the table and Teale’s glistening face. ‘We must turn back soon. Back towards the land! Before we are too far out to sea!’
‘But the men won’t accept that. They won’t turn back. They’re afraid of the corsairs.’
Teale was beginning to rock backwards and forwards. ‘They must be told! We have to go back!’
‘The men will almost certainly mutiny if you go out there and issue that order! More than that, I suspect they’d kill you. Or at least throw you over the side.’
‘My God, man! Can they not see? Can you not see? We may lose our way and never see land again!’
Rashim took a step forward. He looked down at the charts and navigation devices. ‘Is this your problem? You’re afraid of being lost? Forever?’
‘Yes! Worse than damnation in Hell! To be forever at sea! My God, just look at all the blue ink on that chart, sir!’
‘No, look, see … the ocean isn’t infinite,’ Rashim said with a smile. ‘Actually it’s not as big as you think. Really.’ He traced his finger across the map. ‘At the very least, if you just keep heading west, you’ll hit land eventually. You can’t miss the Americas.’
Teale sat forward. ‘Rashim, you said before … you said you could navigate us there. Can you truly?’
He shrugged. He’d already figured out the principles of navigation. It was just elementary arithmetic after all. But the practice of taking accurate readings on a swaying boat … that was another matter entirely.
‘I suspect I could get us roughly, I suppose, roughly in the region of the Caribbean.’
Teale reached out and grasped his wrist. ‘Then you, sir … you should be my first mate. Take charge of this navigation!’ He nodded, encouraged by his idea. ‘And the men would approve of that! You are well liked by them! Aren’t you?’
>
‘I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m liked –’
‘After today’s heroics –’ Teale grinned a little maniacally – ‘they will, I’m sure, and they will welcome you as my second-in-command!’
Chapter 27
1667, aboard the Clara Jane, somewhere off the west coast of Africa
‘I really don’t understand,’ said Liam. ‘I don’t understand why you’re helping him. The fella’s a complete idiot, so he is.’
Rashim braced his elbows against the rail of the foredeck as the Clara rolled energetically over the back of a languid ocean swell. He squinted into the backstaff’s horizon-vane viewing slit as he tried to take another reading. ‘He is not a fool, Liam. But –’ he shrugged – ‘he is definitely no sailor either.’
‘But you could be the captain of this ship right now. You, not that pompous twit.’
Liam knew the mood of the men aboard the Clara. They easily shared their thoughts with him now. He was well and truly one of them; he had earned their respect and confidence fighting those Moors, battling shoulder to shoulder alongside them.
‘They were all ready to vote you in to replace Teale as captain. That’s what they wanted.’ Liam nudged his arm affectionately. ‘They obviously think you’re naval officer material.’
Rashim sighed. The nudge had put him off. He hunkered down once more, bracing himself against the rail to try and get his reading.
‘But we need Teale,’ he said. ‘He is the one that has valuable family connections with the governing authorities in Jamaica.’
Liam took Rashim’s point. No Teale, no letter of marque … no privateer’s licence and the moment the Clara Jane attacked a merchant ship, Spanish or otherwise, they’d be branded as pirates and would forever more be fugitives from the law. None of the crew had signed up for that. And that one thing was the only reason they were prepared to continue tolerating Teale as captain. This uneasy situation was eased somewhat by the fact that Teale was keeping a very low profile, staying in his cabin, letting Rashim take charge of navigation and Old Tom, as quartermaster, manage the crew. Most of the time, Rashim said, he was either drunk or asleep. That’s how he was dealing with his morbid fear of being out of sight of land – his nautical agoraphobia – blotting it out of his mind with rum.
