by Noah Harris
Thomas rolled his eyes. He promised himself that he would never ask that question again.
As Captain Seawolf predicted, the weather quickly grew worse. The rain began to drive down and the wind picked up, swelling the waves and making the ships thump into one another. Work became hazardous. The passengers were allowed to go below.
As Thomas clambered from one ship to the other, carrying a particularly heavy crate, the ship hit a sudden wave and he stumbled, dropping the crate on the deck of the Manhunter.
The top burst open and out tumbled a boy.
The boy knelt on deck, staring up at Thomas with wide eyes. He looked about thirteen.
“Captain!” Thomas called. “Get over here.”
A group of pirates gathered, encircling the boy, who looked uncertainly around at all the hard faces. Captain Seawolf shouldered through the crowd.
“What’s this?” he demanded.
“A stowaway,” Thomas replied. “He was hiding in this crate.”
“Are you the captain?” the boy asked Captain Seawolf in a timid voice as he got up.
“What are you thinking, boy?” the captain said. “Get back to your family where you belong.”
“This is the Manhunter, isn’t it? The ship for men who are…different. You’re famous!”
“A pirate ship is no place for you. Now get to your mother. She must be frantic.”
To everyone’s surprise, the boy put his thin arms around the hulking pirate. Captain Seawolf looked more shocked than when Thomas had smacked him across the face with his cutlass.
“Take me with you. I’m different, too. I…well…” The boy blushed deeply, then he seemed to gather his resolve. “I like the other boys. When we go swimming, I’m always looking at them. Cathy at school is sweet on me and I don’t care, and everyone says she’s the prettiest girl in town. The schoolmaster says liking other boys is wrong but I know it isn’t. It isn’t wrong, is it?”
“Send him back, Captain,” Seamus said. “He makes Radbert look like a grandfather.”
The captain detached himself from the boy.
“You’re too young. If word got around that we were plucking boys off ships, every man o’ war on the Seven Seas would come after us, and rightly so. Go back to your family.”
“I don’t want to. They don’t understand me!”
Thomas thought the boy had started to cry, but in the heavy rain, everyone’s cheeks ran with water.
“Go!” Captain Seawolf said, shoving him towards the railing.
Thomas took the boy by the shoulder and led him to the other ship, lifting him over both railings and putting him safely back on the merchant vessel. He leaned over from where he stood on the pirate ship, the ship the boy was staring at with such longing, and took the boy’s chin in his hand. The rain lashed down on them. Thomas turned his up face to look him in the eye.
“There is nothing wrong with what you are. God made you this way and there is nothing to be ashamed of. But you have to be careful. I’ve seen a man whipped to death for loving another man. Keep it inside until you find a safe place where you can be yourself. And when you’ve grown to manhood, if you still want to be a pirate, come looking for us. You’ll find a place where you can belong.”
Until Thomas said it, he hadn’t realized that it was the truth.
He turned away. Something, perhaps a faint sound, perhaps gut instinct, made him look up.
Bill Husk was just pulling his wheellock musket back from the edge of the crow’s nest where he had braced it, but Thomas caught the movement in time to guess where he had been aiming.
He couldn’t be sure and did not want to believe, but he could have sworn the marksman had been aiming at the captain.
Cutlass Cove was a snug, crescent-shaped harbor on the shore of one of the islands in the southern Antilles, only a day’s sailing east of Tobago. The island chain was nominally owned by the Dutch Empire, but few of the many islands had any settlement. It was rumored that some of the islands still held hidden bands of their original native peoples, but most of the pirates believed they had been wiped out by disease and conquest in the previous generation.
The cove was well sheltered from the winds by thickly-forested hills on all sides. At the entrance to the harbor, atop a rocky promontory at the end of a spit of land, a small stone fort stood, armed with several cannons. A flat sandbar stretched across the other side of the cove’s entrance, where the pirates had built a stout earthwork armed with a few more cannons. From the dark blue of the water, Thomas saw the passage into the harbor was a deep one, but the way was narrow, providing room for only one large ship at a time. The gun emplacements commanded the cove’s lone entrance from both sides. Thomas judged that even the Royal Navy’s finest ship of the line would have trouble fighting its way into this harbor.
Several ships were anchored inside the bay. Rowboats plied the waters between the ships and the piers, offloading a variety of goods. Beyond the pier and a row of warehouses lay a rambling town. The homes and shops were built in a haphazard pattern, with no straight streets or neat rows of houses, unlike many of the colonial towns that had been planted by various governments and had sprung up in the course of a year or two. In Cutlass Cove, it was obvious that there was no overall plan, although the crowds in the streets seemed orderly enough. Thomas suspected that, like the pirate ships themselves, there was no one in true command, and yet things ran relatively smoothly out of necessity.
The crew of the Manhunter weighed anchor and assembled on deck. Instead of Captain Seawolf, Frenchie addressed the crew.
“The Weasel should be here within the hour. It’s time to discuss what to sell from our hold and what to keep in hope of getting a better price elsewhere.”
“Who’s this Weasel fellow?” Thomas asked Roaring Randy, who sat by him, twisting his long moustache.
“Halsey ‘The Weasel’ Bartholomew,” the first mate replied. “He’s the harbormaster and the closest thing Cutlass Cove has to a mayor. It’s his men who run the forts and warehouses. He enforces order of a sort and keeps the town and port running well enough, but no better nickname was ever laid on any a man. He’s a slippery sharper with a forked tongue and a disposition that makes the Devil look like a saint.”
“Is he a pirate?”
“He was until a French broadside took his leg. Lost his taste for the sea after that. He took all the treasure he had stowed away and founded Cutlass Cove, and a smart investment it was, too. Now, he’s richer than any pirate on the Seven Seas.”
Thomas nodded and turned his attention back to the discussion. As the men debated how best to sell their goods, he learned that the Manhunter was a regular visitor to Cutlass Cove, and so were unscrupulous buyers. Many of the vessels in the port were merchantmen, not pirate ships, and had come to purchase cut-rate goods with no questions asked. The problem was that the Weasel never gave a decent price to the pirates. He relied on the fact that it was much easier and safer for a pirate crew to sell to him than to trade on the high seas or another port. The pirates were not allowed to trade directly with the merchant vessels moored nearby. That was one of Cutlass Cove’s few laws. Another was that all merchant vessels that frequented the port were safe from molestation. The Weasel had his own fleet of three good ships that patrolled the waters nearby.
After much debate, the crew decided to sell the sugar and some of the rum taken from the Virtue, the calico from their previous victims, and a portion of the manufactured goods taken from the last ship. The coin and jewels they had collected would be divided among the crew, as well as whatever they earned from the Weasel.
It then came time to draw straws to see who got to be on the first shore party. Thomas had the luck of drawing a short straw and getting to go but was disappointed when Radbert drew a long straw. He felt the urge to exchange straws with another man but decided against it. He had a feeling the young German would be angry if he hovered over him like that.
Despite the first shore party being eager to go,
no one suggested shoving off until the business at hand was accomplished. Halsey “The Weasel” Bartholomew made his appearance at the head of a flotilla of six long rowboats, each fitted with a small cannon on its prow. All the oarsmen were heavily armed.
No one needed to point out the harbormaster to Thomas. He spotted the fellow half a league away. He sat tall and erect by the cannon of the lead boat, a smoking slow match in his hand as if he planned to fire on the Manhunter. Thomas and his shipmates stood at the railing, quiet, guns ready. Thomas noticed Maggie checking on all the gun crews.
They put down a gangplank, and the Weasel thumped up it, using a broad-bladed native spear as a walking stick. His right leg was gone below the knee, replaced with a wooden peg. His right hand was a mass of old scars, as was his face. Despite these injuries he stood straight and walked with an arrogant swagger. A cutlass hung from his belt as well as a brace of pistols. Several of his men followed him up the gangplank, while the rest manned the small cannons on the rowboats or held muskets in their laps, alert and wary.
Captain Seawolf and Frenchie stood at the head of the gangplank to meet him.
“Weasel, you ugly gimp!” the captain bellowed. “You’re still cursing the world with your foul presence?”
“That I am, you Nancy boy. Have you turned into a real man yet?”
“Not on your miserable life.”
“May I come aboard?” the harbormaster asked. Thomas was surprised to see him ask Frenchie this question and not the captain.
“That you may, unless there’s a way to conduct business upwind from your stinking hide,” Frenchie replied.
The man came aboard with some of his guards. The crew parted for them but everyone kept ahold of their weapons, Thomas included. He felt grateful that Bill Husk was up in the crow’s nest again. Thomas hoped that this time, he was pointing at the Weasel and not his own captain.
The business at hand did not take long because the Weasel was not one to haggle. He named a price and you either went with it or didn’t. He declined the sugar, saying he had too much of it already, and accepted the rum, it being in high demand in his town. He also took the calico and all the manufactured goods on offer with the remark that several new stores had opened since the last time the Manhunter had docked at the cove. “My town is growing,” he said with obvious pride.
While the price came to well below what it would sell on the honest market, it came to a good amount all told, and when the Weasel returned with more rowboats to offload the goods and with gold enough to pay for his purchases, Thomas’s share came out to more money than he had ever held in his life.
Now came the time eagerly awaited by any man of the sea, whether he be the most God-fearing Christian or the most bloodthirsty pirate—shore leave. Even though Thomas did not share in the pleasures that so many of his fellow sailors enjoyed in the harbor brothels and taverns, he looked forward to coming into port as much as the next man. He enjoyed strolling the streets, sizing up the townsmen and exploring the shops. It was also a relief to get some good meals made from fresh food instead of the wormy meat and hard biscuits that was the usual sailor’s fare.
And so, it was with good cheer that he boarded one of the rowboats and manned an oar along with his new shipmates, Seamus, Lafayette, Osier “The Bear” Soames, Azenkua, and a few others he didn’t know as well. One of them was Hiro Watanabe, the man with the yellow skin and strange eyes unlike any he had ever seen. When Thomas had first met him, Hiro introduced himself with a bow and said in broken English that he was from a place called Nippon on the far end of the Pacific Ocean. Thomas had wondered how he ended up in the Caribbean, but the man rarely spoke and did not volunteer any information. Seamus had taken Thomas aside the morning after his initiation and told him that one of the unspoken rules of the Manhunter was that you did not ask a man about his past. Some, like Seamus and Doctor Hartencourt, volunteered such information. Many more did not.
Osier, being the most senior man, had been voted commander of the shore party. If anything went amiss, he would lead them out of it. Thomas had seen him work and had seen him fight, and he felt confident having such a man in charge.
The weather had grown fair, and the rowboat cut easily through calm waters. To the west, a few clouds turned crimson in a brilliant tropical sunset. Thomas worried what would happen to Osier when the moon showed its face. It was now well past full, but would it still affect him? He didn’t have the courage to ask. When Thomas had discovered his secret, Osier had voted to throw him overboard. He didn’t want to give umbrage to “The Bear.” He tried to reassure himself that the werebear could control himself, otherwise Frenchie would have locked him in the brig.
“So, what shall we do, lads?” Seamus asked the men as he pulled on his oar.
“A roast pig, some fresh fruit, and a few mugs of cold ale sounds about right for starters,” one of the pirates replied.
“I’ll put my vote in for that,” Thomas said, his mouth already watering. “We have until sunrise. What else does this town offer?”
“Everything you can possibly imagine!” Osier said. The pirates laughed.
“Even for men such as us?”
“Oh, there are some lady boys who will happily sell themselves to you.”
“I can get all I want on board for free,” Thomas said.
“Quite right. Most of their trade goes to those pirates who pretend to be normal.”
That brought a chuckle from the others.
“There was many a man on my old berth who fit that description,” Thomas said. “So this is a friendly port for us?”
“Friendly for us as pirates, but they hate our proclivities as much as anyone else. While the Weasel won’t throw us behind bars for what we do, there’s many a man who would be happy to slit our throats,” Osier said. “Watch your step here, Thomas, and don’t go anywhere alone.”
Thomas’s mood sank a little. He had been hoping that the Manhunter wouldn’t be the only place where he could be himself.
“You worry too much!” Lafayette said with a carefree laugh. “Our reputation precedes us. They know we’re the toughest crew on this side of the Atlantic. We get some sour looks, to be sure, but no one dares cross us.”
They docked on a pier where one of the Weasel’s guards stood watch with a musket and sword. He wore armor of Spanish make; a breastplate of fine steel plus the unusual curved helmet called a morion, although the man looked more Scandinavian than Spaniard. Thomas smiled. Apparently, everything was stolen here.
Leaving the boat in the care of the guard, they tromped off the pier and straight into a horde of people hawking their wares.
“Rum, my friends?” said a man holding out two bottles. “Finest rum straight from Jamaica.”
“We just stole a shipment of that ourselves,” Osier laughed.
“Lovely ladies, sir. Right this way,” an older woman beckoned. “It’s a clean house with clean girls.”
“Don’t bother with them, Beatrice,” said a buxom harlot in a shrill voice. “They’re from the Manhunter. They’re just a bunch of fairies.”
That announcement made several of the salesman leave, heading for the crew of another rowboat that had just docked. Those that remained were selling something other than female flesh. Within ten paces, Thomas had been offered brandy, beer, Madeira wine, hemp to smoke, a new shirt, a ladyboy, pearls that even in the dim light of dusk looked fake, and invitations to at least five games of chance.
“Out of the way!” Osier bellowed. “We’re headed to the Hope and Anchor, and we’re not interested in anything you have to sell.”
That did not get rid of all the peddlers. A small but determined crowd followed them up the street. Suddenly, Lafayette turned and belted one in the face, then drew his rapier and held the tip to the man’s throat.
Everyone froze.
“Come now, my friend,” Thomas said. “As annoying as they may be, there’s no need for violence.”
“I felt his hand touch my pocket.�
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Instantly Thomas felt his own pocket. To his relief, the coins remained within. He had experience in port towns and had sewn a row of buttons at the opening of the pocket where he kept his money. It was an inconvenience, but it put him more at ease and had probably saved his pay on more than one occasion.
Everyone else checked their own pockets. No one had been robbed. Yet.
Lafayette sheathed his sword and kicked the would-be pickpocket in the balls. The rest of the salesmen scattered.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” the Frenchman told the man as he lay curled up and puking in the dirt. “If you are here when I return, I will kill you.”
They continued on their way unmolested. Osier led them up a wide street that appeared to be the main boulevard to this settlement. Several shops that would not look out of place in a market town back in England lined both sides of the street, as well as taverns and at least one brothel from which ladies showed off their wares from the upper windows. Thomas noticed Azenkua looking at them appreciatively.
“Tempted?” Thomas said, raising an eyebrow.
“By women, yes, but not by those harlots. Too many diseases,” the former slave said.
“You surprise me.”
“Life is too short not to enjoy all the pleasures it offers. I am not the only one aboard the Manhunter who thinks this way.”
Thomas shrugged. If some of his shipmates wanted to waste their time bedding women, it was none of his business. He supposed the two ladies on the crew were safe from their clutches. They knew how to handle themselves.
Night falls quickly in the tropics, and the sky had turned black except for a faint red tinge to the west. The street was lit only by the candlelight from the open windows and a few torches carried by other travelers. Thomas had difficulty telling the difference between the pirates and the townsfolk. All looked rough and everyone went armed. Women were few, and there were almost no old people or children. A score of rogues passed them by and openly sneered.
“Filthy Ganymedes,” one of them muttered.
