Jan smiled.
“I’m sure at least one of them has,” he said excitedly, going to the ruinous carcass of the fat headman. He swept up the fallen headdress and held it out to Timóteo. Dangling amid the various small animal skulls and gewgaws was a horn such as could not have come from any animal likely to be on the island. It was the horn of a cow—the kind that might have toiled in the harness of a Cordovan plough, cutting furrows and upturning worms to the delight of attendant seagulls. Its tip was fitted with a greenish copper butt-plug, and the faint scrimshaw design of a hart hunt was etched all over it. To a primitive, this was a relic of the gods, the fantastic remnant of some demon spirit or mythic monster. To a Marine of the 61st Foot, to a Spaniard raised in a countryside abounding with rampaging harts where such implements were commonplace, it was clearly a powderhorn.
It was empty of propellant, but a sniff inside the hollow container caught acrid traces of gunpowder.
Bunop visibly flinched when Jan popped the stopper.
He at least knew something of its purpose.
Now, how to find out where the headman had gotten it? Had Vigoreaux given it to him as a present? Somehow he doubted the pirates would play at Prometheus with their commissary.
* * * *
Sampari saw the cowed look Bunop got when Jan broke open the strange horn he had taken from her uncle’s headdress. She’d seen the garish headdress before. Her uncle always brought it out when the people who were to be given over were bound. She’d never even noticed the strange horn before.
“Bunop,” she said. “What is that thing?”
“The thunder tooth,” he whispered reverently. “Early on, your uncle took Yokar and the other hunters out into the jungle and told them if they didn’t help him he would destroy them with magic the laleo had given him. I was a boy learning to hunt with my father then. I saw your uncle take fire and thunder from the tooth. He put a hole in the hillside with it. Yokar and the others never opposed him again. Your uncle made them swear never to tell about the thunder tooth while he lived.”
Sampari nodded. She knew the laleo would never have given any power to her uncle. He had been a trickster and a liar, as were his children.
Then she knew how to find out where this “thunder tooth” had come from.
* * * *
Jan and Timóteo were still puzzling over how to ask about the powderhorn when Sampari abruptly walked away into the village. They glanced querulously at the equally perplexed Bunop, then fell in line behind her.
Small faces peered down at them from the platforms of the treehouses and ducked out of sight. Piglets tethered to the bases of the trees squealed at their strange smell as they passed. Behind them, the villagers followed at a safe distance, not daring to even speak to one another.
The procession came to a halt before the tallest, most opulent-looking dwelling.
Sampari said nothing, but began scaling the trunk of one of the support trees, nimble as a gibbon.
In another minute she pulled herself onto the platform and was out of sight somewhere in the headman’s house.
Jan and Timóteo looked at each other. They looked at Bunop. He shrugged.
They heard muffled voices coming down to them. Then, a young girl’s cry made them jump.
The girl who had cried out, a pudgy girl of about seven, was there suddenly, hanging fully over the edge of the platform, eyes bulging, mouth agape and shrieking as Sampari dangled her by both ankles.
“My God!” Timóteo gaped. “Stop it! Stop!”
Jan didn’t know quite what to do. Obviously this was the headman’s young daughter. He wondered if he could catch her without seriously injuring both of them.
The young girl screamed and cried, and somewhere in her terror, formed words.
Sampari hoisted her back up onto the platform.
In another minute she descended with the fat little girl clinging to her back, and stood before them once more, setting the wailing child down and silencing her with a sharp swat to the top of her head.
She pointed to the horn in Jan’s hands.
She squatted quickly and sketched the pictograms of Vigoreaux and Badham into the dirt.
Then she straightened and drove her bare foot into the drawing and smiled at Jan.
“Werewolf–khakhua!” she said, and pointed out into the jungle.
“Amen, daughter,” said Timóteo.
* * * *
In the cache they found a greater treasure than any mountain of pirated gold. The headman’s sniffling little daughter guided them to a wide pit dug on the north side of the island, covered with bamboo and palm. It was loaded with coils of hemp, bolts of canvas, a half dozen barrels of gunpowder, one of which, Jan noticed, had a tiny hole cut in its base, stacks of iron and lead bars, only a handful forged into balls, two drums of whale oil, a crate of British naval uniforms, all of them bearing the holes and tears that had paid for their relinquishment, a case of rifles and spike bayonets, and a pair of rusty spades. The headman had shown cunning to purloin only one of the carved horns and sift a small amount of powder. This was not the sort of treasure whose outright theft would have gone unnoticed.
“With this, these people could have fought off those creatures at any time,” Timóteo remarked. “If the headman would’ve shared his knowledge…”
“All we’ve got is us against forty men, remember,” Jan said, cracking open the rifle case and inspecting one of the muzzleloaders. “And no time to make ammunition.”
Timóteo pulled on a pair of breeches and fastened them, staring up at the sky.
“We are running short of time.”
Fishing among the cache, Jan found a brass and leather spyglass with a cracked lens and tested it, spotting a bright, nesting bird high in a cocoanut tree. It leapt into the open air as a breeze from the sea kicked up, stirring the palms, and he thought once more of his Hussar grandfather.
How many nights had his father told him the wild stories of his grandfather? Of the thunderous charges and rattling szable, until he, as a wide-eyed boy with his chin in his hands and his small heart thudding against the floor, felt sure he could hear the booming of the antique bandolet gathering dust over the mantle like the beckoning echoes of a destiny narrowly missed? He’d followed the same faint echo into service with The Old Americans of the 61st Foot. He’d followed it with Captain Washington and Old Grog Vernon across the sea on the Princess Caroline, and seen the Caribbean night sky lit with the fire of cannon, smelled it heavy with the reek of powder and heard it cacophonous with the crash of iron shot on wood and stone.
Finally, it had led him here, pitted him against a savage, unthinkable enemy with two islanders and a Catholic priest at his side.
“Let’s make do with what we have,” he said. “Padre, have you ever heard of a fladdermine?”
“I know what a mine is,” the priest admitted.
“A Hessian I served with showed me how to make them. We can bury them on the beach where they land. It could account for some of them if we’re lucky.”
“We have the powder, but do we have sufficient shot?” Timóteo mused.
“We can use seashells, set our man here to gathering them. Plenty of bones lying around the village too.”
“Won’t they be watching the beach through their spyglasses?”
“Well, we shall have to pray they are not. If they’re planning a night hunt, it may be that they’ll be dozing throughout the day. The only one among them with an eye to the glass would be the captain.”
“If he is as you told me, and what I have seen leads me to believe it is so, then we need not worry that he will be on deck during the light of day,” Timóteo said. “Sunlight is the bane of his kind.”
“That’s good to know,” Jan said. “From the beach, we can try to split them up in the jungle. I could lead them into the hills, leave some loaded muskets and the rest of the powder up there to use. I’m a fair shot. You and the girl could set some snares in the jungle.”
; “But how to entice them?”
“I’ve hunted wolves in my day,” Jan said. “If they don’t follow our scent, maybe we could fool them with some of the village pigs. Slaughter a few, put them in those uniforms.”
“It may work.”
But when they had taken the time to sign their plan to Sampari and Bunop, there was much shaking of the heads and drawing back and forth.
Sampari, for her part, thought the Trivias would smell the powder buried in the sand. Even she could smell it just being close to it.
“We’ll need to put some bait there at the tree line to distract them then, and hope that the wind is with us, or that blood smells stronger than powder in their noses.”
“What will be the bait? Pigs might be too suspicious. Although if they are succumbed to a kind of feral madness they may not notice,” Timóteo reasoned.
Jan shrugged and hastily scrawled the crude but unmistakable shape of a pig in the sand, near where he’d previously drawn the powder barrels and the shoreline and the wolfmen for their benefit. He looked at Sampari and Bunop and snorted once or twice for further emphasis.
Sampari shook her head again and leaned forward, blotting out the pig with her hand.
“Well what then, goddammit?” Jan snapped, throwing up his hands in exasperation. He glanced sideways at Timóteo. “Your pardon, Padre.”
Timóteo waved him off.
Sampari smiled, ignoring his outburst. She pointed to the little girl, who was sitting on the edge of the cache pit, kicking her legs and rubbing her red eyes.
“She can’t be serious!” Timóteo scoffed. “It’s unthinkable! She’s a child!”
Jan shrugged.
“But then again, she might be too tempting for them to pass up, Father.”
Jan caught Timóteo’s glare and grinned reassuringly.
“I’ll not truss her up from a tree to be sure, but perhaps…” Thoughtfully, he found himself gazing up at the trees just then. “Perhaps there is another way.”
* * * *
The clouds parted from the gibbous moon and sent silvery, mystic light down through the palms and over the stones and the waters. It brought too the sounds of baying. This drove the villagers to their knees in their huts. Out in the dark jungle each of the four who dared to face the source of that hellish noise quivered slightly and readied themselves.
The only other sound was the crying of the little girl who stood at the point where beach became the jungle, staring out at the dark ship in the distance as it lowered its launches and then at the boats as they cut across the crashing waves to shore.
Everyone on the island knew the portent of the howling.
The crew hit the surf running, stripping off their clothes, shredding them, stumbling to their hands in their eagerness, splashing beneath the surf, trampled by their blood-mad fellows, arising from beneath the water furred and sharp eared, fanged and long snouted, neither wolves nor men, but things somewhere between, coursing swiftly on bent haunches and ape-like arms strung with powerful sinew, ending in terrible claws.
The little girl felt the beating of their charge across the sand beneath her feet. The warm breeze blew into the jungle. She could smell their animal musk, tinted with the sweet stench of rum. She shuddered uncontrollably in her fright, her fat cheeks splashed with tears, her face red, no sound coming from her gaping mouth, only strands of saliva and a sort of hissing.
She perceived them through slitted, watery eyes, great bristling forms mostly animal, tapering, upthrust ears spangled with glinting pirate gold, hulking shoulders draped with scraps of garish fabric and tinkling necklaces of human bone. Carnivorous teeth snapped in long jaws, eager to crack her little bones.
Even if she were not bound she did not think she could move.
The wind was at their backs, rolling in from the sea to stir the jungle. They could smell her fear like a fragrant meal. But they did not smell the powder.
The wave of bounding, slavering creatures was only paces away when a knuckled paw touched off the improvised fladdermine Jan had buried there. The flintlock mechanism clicked, there was a spark, and then the fougasse blew open, sending its makeshift cocoanut shrapnel spilling up out of the earth, each packed with its own volatile charge.
The huge explosion lit up the werewolves before blowing them to pieces. Cluster bombs bounced through their midst, sending fragments of hard nuts, small stones, fistfuls of animal teeth and broken shells gathered from the beach tearing through their flesh.
When the smoke billowed into the jungle, fifteen lay still and smoking in the sand, and another four kicked and yelped about, whining like chastised dogs.
The great red-haired monster Thomas Badham was not one of these. His fangs bared, he raged and howled, tearing through the fading smoke to find the little village girl gone without a trace. There was no rustling ahead in the underbrush, no miserable mewling, no scent of fear or sweat on the ground. He growled, perplexed, then saw the stamped down grasses leading northwest and crashed into the forest with the remainder of his pack whining and howling at his haunches.
None of them noticed the girl high in the interlocking branches where she had been hoisted by the length of rope. Bunop held her tightly, one hand clamped across her working lips, watching the khakhua tear across the floor of the jungle below. He silently blessed the fortunate wind hissing through the trees, waited till the barking of the wolfmen was distant, and only then lowered Sampari’s trembling half-sister Mivai back down and cut her free.
Chapter 3
On the deck of The Trivia, Captain Absolon Vigoreaux watched the fire burning on the shore and gripped the rail, deliberating. Obviously they had found the stores, and Badham had taken the launches. It was a wetting or a gamble. He peered down at the inky water, saw the moon lying there like a china plate. The moondoggers had their hunts to keep the fires stoked in their hearts. After so many years, what did he have?
He smiled to himself and lit his pipe.
* * * *
Timóteo thanked the Lord for the wind. His calves ached and his bladder was heavy, but he had heard the tremendous explosion from the beach and knew the Trivias were coming. He knew it was sinful to pray for vengeance, but he thought of poor Abbot Ramón breathing his last on a heathen table, and he thought of his brothers’ suffering, and he did so anyway. He prayed too for resolve. He had never killed a man before. He held his musket close.
He thought of the woman somewhere to his left in the dark watching the same path for signs of the creatures. She would kill without hesitation. He had seen her. Poor, savage little thing with no knowledge of God’s love, no regard for her fellow creations. Yet another feeling rose in him, one long buried in incense and abstinence; the exercise of manhood. Neither he nor his father, nor even his grandfather had ever been soldiers, but as a boy he had thrilled to the exploits of Ambrosio and Olivares, and sometimes wondered had he been born into another life, if he should have been able to fight. He supposed this was a musing common to boys, and he felt it in his breast again now, like the discovery of a fond and forgotten plaything.
But this was not boyhood play, it was the everlasting game of God and the Devil, and immortal souls were the wager at stake. This was the work to which he had sworn himself, the eternal conflict, stripped down to a literal, elemental level. He prayed he had prepared Jan enough.
An animal noise came to his ears, as of a pack of hunting dogs. Then the signal fire lit up high on the point above the waterfall, and was met by primeval howls from below.
A great snarling went up among the milling creatures, which he could only perceive by their sound, too far away to see them. It reached a ferocious crescendo and then one of the things let out a bloodcurdling sound somewhere between a canine yowl and the shriek of a man in agony. The sound dwindled, and the pack of beasts set up a terrible baying, drowning out the lone casualty entirely. A great body of them tore across the jungle toward the far off firelight, and the remainder came in their direction.
Timóteo steeled himself, then saw the dark shadows rushing low ahead like Satan’s dogs come to hound the damned. There were six crashing through the bushes. More than they had hoped would come after the fire.
To his left, Sampari yelled a strange, keening sort of cry. The creatures instantly veered toward her position, jaws snapping in anticipation.
Two were caught up by the snares and launched into the trees with a whipping sound of the ropes drawing tight. He saw their shaggy bodies rise suddenly from the underbrush, moonlight shining through the long hair on their flailing limbs. They struck the trees and hung suspended.
The other four only began to take notice of their fellows’ fate when they crashed into the concealed pit and onto the bed of muskets with their spike-tipped socket bayonets.
Timóteo broke from his concealment and ran toward the pit. He saw Sampari do the same, and they met on opposite ends.
He could see them down below, writhing in the moonlight. Some of them were transfixed, and these howled insanely and thrashed, clawing at the earth and their own brethren, trying to escape.
Some broke free and leapt, gripping the edge of the pit. Timóteo and Sampari drove them back, Sampari sticking them with the spike bayonet in the face and hands until they let go, Timóteo savagely bashing their misshapen heads and long, clawed hands, giving the bayonets below a second chance.
It was bloody work, and ten minutes passed before the terrible shriek-howling from the pit ceased. When it was done, four naked men lay speared to death in the hole. Timóteo made the sign of the cross swiftly over their bodies.
Then they marched to where the two werewolves still hung thrashing upside down in the snares. Sampari ran the first through with her musket-spear, jabbing it repeatedly as it whined pitiably.
Timóteo muttered a Psalm as he approached the second, and nearly bit his own tongue as it suddenly dropped from its rope and flopped on the ground, then turned and scrabbled at him.
He drew the musket over his head like a club and brought it down with a crack on the thing’s head, but it managed to hook its claws into his leg and shred his calf, dragging him to the ground. He pummeled it ferociously, but it crawled up his torso, weathering the blows, hooking and digging its nails in his flesh like an inexpert climber’s pitons and working its way up to his throat.
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