by Noah Harris
Those in the rigging did their best to get the full worth out of the sails. The gap between the two ships closed more quickly. There was movement on the deck of the other ship. A large group of people appeared on deck. Thomas assumed they were preparing to repel boarders. Suddenly, a dark shadow arced over the ship’s stern like a black waterfall. Azenkua and the other Negroes let out a wail of despair and rage.
“They’re jettisoning their cargo!” Captain Seawolf cried. “Fire on her sails!”
“We’re at extreme range,” the female master gunner replied.
“I don’t care if we’re farther away than the moon! When I say fire, you fire!”
The master gunner ordered her crews to put the cannons at maximum elevation.
“What’s going on? What was that they threw off?” Thomas asked the pirate beside him.
“Men and women,” came the grim reply. “That’s a slave ship.”
“A slave ship?”
Another black wave washed over the stern of the slave ship. Thomas saw them now—arms and legs, faces—a hundred men and women all chained together, being cast off into the sea. His stomach turned.
“They’re dumping people to gain speed?”
“How else will they lighten their load?” the pirate asked. He started to say more, but his words got drowned out by six cannons firing in rapid succession.
All but one missed their target at such a long range, all except for the cannon at which the master gunner stood. Her shot tore through the edge of the main sail, leaving the back end flapping open like the mouth of a drunken man.
“That will slow them down. Reload!” she shouted.
It did slow them down. By the time the gun crews were ready for the next volley, the Manhunter had closed the gap well within medium cannon range.
“Fire!”
The next volley tore every sail to rags and much of the rigging. Cloth and ropes hung in shreds, a sad ruin of what had once been an ocean-going vessel. The ship foundered as it lost all of its speed. Thomas peered into the water, searching for any sign of the slaves who had been pushed overboard, but no—they had sunk into the deep, dragged down by their chains.
“Stow the cannons,” Captain Seawolf ordered. “We don’t want to hit any Africans who may still be on deck. If you fire your muskets, lads, aim true. Azenkua is in charge of the boarding party. His word is law until we have taken the ship.”
Thomas marveled a ship’s captain giving over command to a common sailor. These pirates ran their affairs in a strange way.
But who was man enough to stand in the way of these Negroes pushing their way to the railing? The hate and bloodlust in their eyes put fear in him, and Thomas moved away, taking his place in the middle of the crowd, far enough back that he doubted he would run any danger of getting into hand-to-hand combat but still close enough that he could see what would happen. He looked at the pistol in his hands. He’d fired a gun perhaps three or four times in his life. At least he knew how to use the cutlass.
“Trim the sails, come alongside!” the captain ordered.
The helmsman and the men aloft did their work perfectly, and the Manhunter slid up to the side of the slave ship. Peering through the crowd in front of him, Thomas could see the other crew crouched behind the railing. The pirates threw their ropes with grappling hooks over the railing and started hauling the two ships together.
The crew of the other ship rose up, muskets and pistols in hand, and slammed a volley into the boarding party. Several pirates toppled backwards just as they were climbing over the rails, pitching into the crowd behind.
But the tide could not be stopped. The pirates poured over the railings and onto the other ship, the Negroes in front screaming in some language Thomas did not understand.
The crew fought desperately with swords and axes, but it was over in less than a minute. The Negroes hacked at the slavers, cutting them to pieces where they stood. The other pirates did not dare to interfere but instead rushed all over the ship to guard the hatches and tiller and chase down the few slavers who tried to flee. These, they subdued and tossed back unarmed to the Negroes, who showed them no mercy.
By the time Thomas had arrived onto the deck of the other ship, it was all over. The slavers were all dead, dismembered and lifeless in vast pools of blood. Some of the Negroes continued to hack away at their ruined bodies, screaming in their own language, while the rest hurried to the hatches. Azenkua ran to a crate onto which a black woman had been tied face down, naked. From the look of her private parts and her thighs, the slavers had been violating her when the Manhunter had shown up. Thomas felt his stomach turn.
Azenkua, who had been a demon a moment before, now spoke in a soothing voice to the woman, cutting her bonds and giving her his own shirt. He stroked her hair as she wept, her face buried in his broad chest.
Thomas turned to the nearest hatch. A ring of Negroes and other pirates were looking down into the hold, their faces grim. As he approached the hatch, his nostrils were assaulted with the terrible stench of unwashed bodies and human waste. He edged his way through the ring of pirates and looked down, holding his nose.
At first, he couldn’t see into the unlit hold, so dark in contrast to the sunlit deck. But then he began to make out shapes. He searched around, looking for a sign of the slaves, but all he saw was some strange mass.
And then he realized that that mass was the slaves. They had been packed in with barely an inch to move, shackled onto long chains that ran the length of the hold, the chains bolted to the deck at regular intervals. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that the men and women sat in pools of their own filth. Swarms of flies buzzed around them. The slaves stared back up at them with weary eyes devoid of hope. Many looked half dead, and Thomas saw more than one corpse among them. He also saw a large empty area where a group of slaves had been removed and pitched overboard. He shuddered.
“Look closely, Englishman,” Azenkua said as he stomped up to the hatch. “This is how your empire has become rich.”
“I never knew it was so bad,” Thomas whispered.
He did, of course, know of the Middle Passage, where textiles, rum, and manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to the west coast of Africa and traded for slaves. The slaves would be brought to the colonies of the New World to do all the hard labor, including working in the fields growing sugar, tobacco, and cotton to be shipped to Europe. There the profits would in turn ship trade goods back down to Africa to purchase those of their tribe who still remained free back home. While many back in England thought the slaves had been treated more or less kindly, if they thought about it at all, Thomas was no fool. He had known they were subject to cruelty. He had seen the sugar cane plantations with their black workers toiling in the sun. But he had no idea they were treated like this.
“Out of the way, all of you,” Azenkua said in a manner that left no doubt as to who he meant. “We have work to do.”
All but the Negro pirates backed off, slowly returning to the Manhunter. Thomas looked back, watching Azenkua organized working parties among his band of pirates. Some dumped the remains of the slavers overboard and swabbed the deck while the rest went below to release the imprisoned. The slaves started coming up in groups, blinking in the light and walking stiffly from being so long in chains. Many had to be carried up. A work crew fetched water from over the side of the ship so the liberated slaves could wash themselves.
Someone nudged Thomas, who had unwittingly lingered to watch the proceedings. “It is always this way when we take a slaver,” the pirate standing next to him said. “The Black fellows want to do it all themselves. Best to stay out of their way. They’ll be in an ill humor for a day or two.”
“What will we do with them all?” Thomas asked. “We can’t fit them on the ship.”
“We’ll repair the ship and some of our black lads will crew it back to Africa, bringing those folks home. Azenkua will stay with us. He has no desire to return to his homeland. I don’t know why and I d
on’t have the stones to ask him.”
For the rest of that day and most of the next, the pirates worked hard to fix the rigging, replacing the sails with a spare set uncovered in the slaver’s hold. They also held a solemn ceremony for the five pirates who had died in the assault. Azenkua and the other Negroes presided over this, while the ship’s doctor, an educated and soft-spoken older man named Hartencourt, gave a short sermon from the Bible. Thomas found it curious that all those thieves bowed their heads with the same reverence that peaceful churchgoers did back home.
Once the slave ship was refitted, a portion of the Negro crew took command of the vessel and headed east, back to Africa. Azenkua and a few others stayed on the Manhunter.
“They’re sailing under a mighty thin skeleton crew,” Thomas said to Frenchie as the sail disappeared over the eastern horizon. “Can they make it?”
“They’ll make it,” the quartermaster said with a nod. “They’ll train the freed slaves to do the more basic tasks and work double shifts if they have to. They have a good navigator with them, and a fine helmsman. They’ll be all right.”
Frenchie glanced at the setting sun and then at the captain and a small group of pirates gathering at the aft hatch. Without another word, he walked over to them and led them below decks.
The mood that had darkened the ship for the past couple of days lifted that night as everyone got a double rum ration in celebration of the refitted slaver ship setting sail back to Africa. Azenkua and his fellow Africans had turned from wrathful to triumphant, and their simmering anger at any white face that got in their way had vanished. Someone broke out a fiddle and the men danced on deck as the moon rose, black and white together in a defiant victory celebration. Thomas found himself dancing with the rest of them, spinning Radbert around and around as the German laughed and kissed him. When the youth went off to dance with another man, Thomas felt a spike of jealousy, but he dismissed it as unworthy. Hadn’t Radbert told him he didn’t want to be owned by any man? He was the kind of fellow that a man would want to keep for himself, and he must have tired of that sort of attitude. He saw Seamus dancing nearby and grabbed him by the waist to give him a few turns around deck. Seamus had been the first to welcome him aboard the Manhunter, and he had been a good friend in the short yet intense time he’d sailed aboard this ship.
Several of the sailors had set up a “shooting range” on the other end of the deck. A row of pirates, their trousers at their ankles, were masturbating furiously, each man trying to shoot the farthest. Frenchie had returned from his task below decks and was measuring the shots, gripping a handful of doubloons for the winner.
“Care to compete?” Seamus asked Thomas, squeezing his ass. Thomas put an arm around his shoulder.
“I can shoot as well as any man and better than most, but my new shipmates have been draining me so much, I’m not sure I have a drop of fluid left in my body.”
Seamus laughed. “Radbert is the most to blame, I’ll wager. You’ve become a bit attached to him, haven’t you?”
Thomas blushed. “Is it so obvious?”
“Yes.”
Thomas grinned and shrugged. “It is an easy thing to do.” Then he grew troubled. “He pulls away from me a bit, though.”
Seamus clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t take it personally, my friend. He is that way with everyone, and he is mighty choosy about whom he lets into his bed. He likes you greatly.”
“So why does he push me away?” Thomas asked with more feeling than he realized he had. Was he falling for the young German? He’d never felt any emotion for a man except lust.
“I don’t know why he acts thus. But let me tell you that every man and woman is on this ship because they’re running from something. It’s not just that we are different. Most of us have more reason than that. There was enough fun to be had in London even for a grimy chimneysweep that I didn’t turn pirate just to sooth my cravings. I fled a job that paid a pauper’s wages and was slowly killing me. Others fled convictions for buggery. I don’t know what Radbert was fleeing.”
“How did he end up on this vessel?”
“He was a sailor on a ship we took and he begged to be taken aboard. Of course, he knew our reputation, so we knew he would never make such a request if he wasn’t one of us. He’s not the only one to join in such a manner.”
A cheer went up from the line of masturbators as Bill Husk won the doubloons with a fabulous shot that reached a good two paces beyond the rest.
“You are a fine marksman in more than just musketry, my friend!” Thomas called over to him.
“The secret is being sparing with your shots,” Bill replied with a grin. The quartermaster handed over his winnings and gave the man a bear hug.
Thomas found his response strange. Now that he thought on it, he had never seen Bill join in any of the play in the sleeping area. He always tucked himself away in a far corner and slept while others fornicated. The only other members of the crew who never joined in were the two female pirates, who had a small room of their own. Even the doctor, the oldest man by at least ten years, came out from his own private quarters and examined his patients in an intimate manner from time to time.
Before Thomas could puzzle over this further, Radbert and another pirate came over and each grabbed one of his hands. They pulled him back to the dance area, where a score of men had shed their clothing and frolicked under the moonlight.
Within a few moments, he had cast off his garments and was dancing as free and naked with the rest of them. His heart lifted high at the sheer boldness of the act. He had long since accepted that he was a lover of men, and had shed off the guilt that society tried to instill in him, but he had also resigned himself to never being able to fully express this side of his nature. He had felt sentenced to a lifetime of sneaking into privies and bathhouses, of hurried secret assignations with men whose names he would often never know.
But now he had entered a new world, a world where he could be himself, where he could cup his hands around a man’s ass and have no fear of the hangman’s noose. He could go up to a sweet German lad and kiss him full on the lips and get nothing but smiles and applause from those who witnessed it. And he never, in his wildest dreams, thought he could dance a jig with a massive erection as the moonlight shone on his bare body and the sea breeze cooled his sweating skin.
But this joy was tinged with a heavy dose of sadness. For these were not his people, not really. Yes, these were men who loved men. Yes, they were hunted by the law as he no doubt was too by now. But they were pirates. Professional criminals. Killers.
He was no such thing. He had never killed in his life until a few days before, and that was only to kill a man who himself was a murderer, someone who would have killed a dozen more times during his brutal, vile life if Thomas hadn’t put a stop to it.
Thomas didn’t fit in here.
Azenkua danced up to him, his ebony skin gleaming with sweat in the moonlight. He had a thick erection that waggled as he danced. The African stood a head taller than Thomas, so he had to look up to meet his eye.
“Your body is laughing but your face is stamped with sadness, white man. What is the matter?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Whatever it is, pay it no mind. Look at me - I am happy. I have been in the deepest pit of Hell and crawled out alive. One must always be grateful for every day. To dwell on the bad things is to risk madness.”
Thomas was about to object, but the vision of those men and women packed in the hold, sitting in their own filth, rose up before his mind’s eye. Azenkua had been one of them once. If this man could smile and dance, then Thomas should not complain.
And this man was doing more than smiling and dancing. He had moved right up to Thomas and pressed the length of his body against him. His chin rested on top of Thomas’s head, which made the Englishman chuckle. He stopped chuckling when he felt the firm rod of the African’s manhood against his belly, and felt the rasp of the man’s hairy thigh rubbing
against his cock as they moved in time to the music.
They embraced. As the music quickened, their dance quickened as well, and soon they were rubbing against each other furiously, working up to a frenzy. Thomas shot first, sending a gout of jism all over Azenkua’s thigh, cock, and balls. He was surprised by the amount of it. Perhaps he should have joined in that competition after all. The African warrior kept rubbing against him, using the Englishman’s cum as a lubricant, his slick cock moving against the flat of Thomas’s belly in time to the rapid tune.
Thomas felt a warm spray hit his chest and chin, then another shot almost as big laced across his shoulder.
“Ah, you make a good target, my friend,” Azenkua said, his eyes hooded with pleasure.
“Perhaps you should have done that inside me.”
“Next time, I promise.”
Someone pushing between them made them look down. Radbert was kneeling on the deck. His eager tongue licked the cum that soaked both men. He worked up and down Thomas’s belly, then cleaned Azenkua’s balls, before alternating between their half-limp cocks.
“Tastes the same from any man,” Radbert said, grinning up at them.
Azenkua bent down and kissed Thomas on the lips with surprising tenderness.
“I’m surprised you would kiss an Englishman,” Thomas said. As soon as the words passed his lips he regretted them. This man had been in a battle rage just two days before.
But he soon discovered he need not fear, for Azenkua only smiled.
“You have no country anymore, Thomas.”
Thomas could not sleep. Although his body tingled with the afterglow of a fine orgasm at the hands of one of the pirates that shared the giant bed they made every night, and although his arm was around a sleek German youth with whom he felt an increasing attachment, he could not rest.
That strange animal musk that he smelled the past few nights kept him awake. It was more than the product of the dozens of lusty bodies lying all around him, he felt sure of it. Plus, a strange sense of a presence beneath him kept tickling the edge of his senses. At times when the ship was quiet he thought he could hear noises below, loud thumps and scraping from the lower hold. It made no sense. As far as he knew no one slept down there, and the ship carried no animals. The captain and part of the crew descended that hatch every night. Frenchie had led them down the aft hatch again, too, just as the sun was going down.
