1637: No Peace Beyond the Line

by Eric Flint

  Garcia Blanca was nodding approvingly, no doubt trying to curry favor with Contreras, who would be carrying a report back to de Murga. “Captain Contreras has an excellent grasp of pirate tactics.” His dazzling, avuncular smile was beatific. “One might almost think he’d been fighting pirates as long as I have.” Contreras would have enjoyed voicing his speculations that Garcia’s skill came not from fighting pirates, but competing with them. And sometimes, apparently, cooperating: it was striking, how quickly he had managed to get the word of a Spanish-sponsored attack upon Curaçao to the Brethren of the Coast, and how facile he had been in negotiating the pecking order among those contentious and ego-driven captains. It was almost as if he already had personal knowledge of them all . . .

  The first wave of sloops had come to within a hundred yards of Thijssen’s ship. The petereroes sent out smoke and a dim, thin rumble. No response from the Dutch warship of almost forty guns. The pirate musketeers lined up on the leeward gunwale, aimed up toward the sail handlers in the Dutchman’s rigging, loosed a ragged volley. Several small black forms tumbled down from the yards and ratlines, small white eruptions marking the points where their descents met the lightly ruffled blue of the sea. And still no response from the Dutchman.

  “Hah!” cried Berrio. “Too much gin in his belly, and not enough fight!”

  “Watch,” counseled Contreras, narrowing his eyes against wind and sun.

  The second pirate sloop followed in the wake of the first, but, emboldened by Thijssen’s lack of response, closed to fifty yards before discharging her petereroes and the four demi-culverins she carried on her port side. Still no response.

  At forty yards, her musketeers stood, readied their pieces—

  The boom of the Dutchman’s fore-and-aft-rigged mizzen swung sharply. The big ship angled toward the smaller one.

  Seeing almost twenty culverins swinging about with purpose, the sloop’s master called her hard over. Her jib fluttered wildly as she bore into the wind, leaning, righting, and then beginning to heel again as her canvas came into a close-reach.

  But that rapid set of motions played havoc with the musketeers, whose volley was ragged and wild. If any of the crew on the Dutchman had been hit, there was no sign of it. And as the sloop’s bow came through the wind and her speed dropped, the Dutchman straightened her mizzen’s yard, held course, and stabilized.

  “Now,” said Contreras.

  As if the Dutch gunners had heard that as an order, the portside battery thundered. At seventy yards range, the shooting was quite respectable, considering that the target was a much smaller ship: three balls hit. One simply tore away rigging and a stay. Another crashed into a cluster of musketeers gathered near the gun closest to the bow. Kindling and bodies spilled out into the water, scattered backward onto the weather deck.

  But the third ball went straight through the quarterdeck, gouging a huge, saw-toothed hole in the planking from which a thin stream of white smoke began to emerge. The sloop veered unsteadily toward a broad reach, trying to make maximum speed away from the Dutchman while her badly depleted crew labored to stabilize the mast that had lost its stay. Seeing this, the second wave of sloops swung from a broad reach to run before the wind. Being fore-and-aft rather than square-rigged, this reduced their speed of approach, but left them with considerable freedom of movement.

  Contreras could tell from his peripheral assessment of the posture of the men around him that they had all shifted to face him more directly. Garcia was the first to speak. “You have spent more time on ships than you have revealed, Don Contreras.”

  “Strange. To my recollection, I have not revealed anything about how I had spent any of my time prior to our first meeting last month.”

  Garcia blew out his mustaches again, offered a large but discomfited smile, and gestured back toward Thijssen’s ship. “As we see, the gin drinker’s brief victory was to no avail. See how they box him in.”

  The inevitable was occurring: the moment the Dutchman had turned to port, the sloops waiting leeward off his starboard bow began tacking in aggressively. And as they did, two larger craft—up-gunned pataches from the look of them—began approaching him bow-on, just as the second wave of port-side sloops began edging in again from windward. Whichever direction he turned, he would be offering one of the attackers an undefended facing, and no matter how good his gunnery was, he could not defeat them all.

  “As I said,” Berrio shouted, “excellent sport! And more to come!” He gestured toward the two fluyts, waiting behind the warship in the channel. Small skiffs of pirates were angling in toward them with almost suicidal eagerness. Contreras frowned, wondering what their pilots had seen that so emboldened them, raised his spyglass to inspect the fluyts more closely.

  And saw women hurrying belowdecks. He saw smaller boats following the fluyts from further back in the narrow harbor channel, a trail of them leading all the way back to the rude wharf of Willemstad.

  Contreras lowered the spyglass, felt his stomach hardening. So. The Dutch had read the writing on the figurative wall against which they were to be executed. They had discerned that since there was not a single Spanish flag on the ships attacking them, that this was a purely piratical attack regardless of its instigation or backing. It might mean that some men would survive, those who were willing to throw their lot in with the pirates and seemed earnest enough in doing so. But what it meant for the women, and even the girls—

  Contreras turned his back on the scene. But it was no use. Looking astern, all he could see was a ragged parade of ships brimming with rageful, lustful, unshaven faces, over which swords and axes and pistols were brandished.

  Cannon spoke behind him. First the heavy Dutch guns, then the lighter pirate ordnance.

  “You are missing great sport, here,” Berrio almost shrieked. “Dutchmen killing pirates and pirates killing Dutchmen. All the devils of the world killing the other devils! I could watch this all day.”

  Contreras conceded that Berrio probably could. He also realized that, when the criollo captain ostensibly supervised the landing that the pirates would conduct however they chose, he would need to be watched. War was the business of killing and Berrio was authorized by his crown and his faith—God forbid!—to do so. But beyond that, the man’s nature was too close to that of the pirates whom he claimed to despise. So much so that he might join in on the other atrocities, just to show the uncivilized and brutish sea dogs the proper manner in which to commit mortal sins.

  Footsteps and creaking planks ascending the companionway from the officers’ cabins told Contreras that the landings were indeed at hand. The Spanish commander that Thijssen had driven off Curaçao last year, Lope López de Morla, heaved his considerable bulk up to the quarterdeck. His belly hanging over his belt in multiple folds, he showed many of the signs of broken-spirited dissipation. Addiction to food, to wine, and to women had each left him with different ailments, all of which were converging and conspiring to ensure that he did not live to see another decade of the seventeenth century, or possibly the end of the next year. Hollow eyes staring out of sallow sockets, breathing heavily through his mouth, he glowered at the coastline of Curaçao with an expression that seemed partly one of longing and partly one of intense hatred.

  “Don López,” Contreras prompted, “we have want of your expertise now. That is why Señor de la Plesa had you summoned, I believe.”

  “Yes,” López replied slowly. “You have already landed men to either side of the harbor?”

  “Three miles to the west and three miles to the east of the channel, respectively, yes.”

  “How many in each party?”

  “Two hundred.” Which was as close a count as anyone had been able to get from the pirates. With this many hulls of the Brethren this close together, there was no shortage of infighting, defection, even desertion of malcontents who meant to form their own band. One group of a dozen had commandeered a native piragua and demanded recognition as a new ship. Which Garcia had granted with
suitable officialese and modest pomp, observing immediately afterward that they’d probably be slain by lead or liquor within the first fortnight, so it was hardly a worry to have given them a piece of paper which would soon cease to have meaning.

  “Two hundred,” López repeated dully. “Well, that ought to do. Have each group spread out, extending inland until they come to the wide, shallow inner harbor, which the Dutch call the Schottegat. Keeping the sea on one shoulder and the Schottegat on the other, they should advance until they are a mile away from the Dutch town. Willemstad, I think they call it now.” He spat.

  “And once they are there?”

  López blinked. “They wait. As I told him”—he jerked his head at Berrio—“all the Dutch live in the town, and if you approach it as I’ve just instructed, you have cut off the two means of land escape to the rest of the island.”

  “But we have seen roofs further inland—”

  “Native huts. They keep a few to work the salt marshes. And as strikers, to bring in turtle meat. They won’t fight for the Dutch. I’m surprised they work for them at all. We had to keep hostages to get an honest day’s labor out of them. The brown bastards.”

  “And is there anything else we should know about the island?”

  López hooked a thumb at “Pistola” Plesa. “I told him. Weeks ago.”

  “I see. Well, it never hurts to hear the most important facts twice.” Or at all, since de la Plesa had never informed Contreras that he had debriefed López.

  López shrugged. “There’s not much to tell, except that this is where I died, Don Contreras. On September 19 of last year. Thijssen still has his four ships, I see. If everything else is consistent, he will have about two hundred sailors for them, and about two hundred and fifty soldiers. They have a foreign captain, a Huguenot heathen named Pierre le Grand who previously served the Dutch in Brazil. Their governor is some old Dutchman named Willekens. A true whoreson.”

  “He was a hard man, then, when you were his captive?”

  López looked away. “Worse. He was damnably agreeable, and convinced Thijssen not to work us as slaves. Met our request for being deported to Coro. And smiling, all the while. Didn’t say much, and made a great show of seeming patient, sympathetic. Damn him and his somber, gloating daughters. They all deserve what’s coming to them. Punishment for their false virtue is long overdue.” López’s hands were upon the rim of the gunwale now. They were white with grasping.

  “This gets better and better!” whooped Berrio. He pointed to a large pirate barquentine, at least twenty guns, maneuvering straight toward the Dutch ship, which was now closely beset from three sides. She had damaged another pirate sloop and one of the pataches, but had taken a variety of hits, one of which had taken down the top half of her foremast. Wisps of smoke trailed behind her as she struggled to protect herself and fight to open a gap in the swarming pirate ships through which she and the two fluyts might sail. Several hundred yards off her starboard bow, the Dutch jacht was now thoroughly overrun with pirates. The defenders had disappeared beneath the attackers like badgers under a swarm of army ants, and the torturing of the wounded had begun. Faint shrieks reached Contreras over the rushing of the one-foot seas and intermittent gunfire.

  Berrio stared at the barquentine’s swift progress directly toward Thijssen’s ship. “What is that madman doing? Ramming?”

  “That is no madman,” Pistola Plesa snarled. “That’s a traitor.”

  López glanced at the weasel-like man. “What?”

  Contreras cleared his throat. “The barquentine is captained by a renegade Dutchman, Mahieu Romboutsen. We asked him to wait for a moment such as this to press home his attack.”

  “Why?” asked Berrio suspiciously.

  Garcia provided the answer. “Because he can read Dutch captains and crews better than anyone else. He knows the pace of their actions, the significance of any resetting of their sails and rigging.” He nodded at the barquentine. “And I believe he has found the opening he was looking for.”

  At only forty yards range, the boom of the barquentine’s mizzenmast swung quickly as her daggerboards dipped down into the water. She heeled sharply leeward, her starboard battery coming around swiftly. Whereas she had been heading bow to bow, her amidships were now at right angles to Thijssen’s bowsprit.

  “He’ll finish her, now that he’s crossing her bow,” Contreras explained.

  Romboutsen demonstrated the effectiveness of his maneuver in the following moment. The guns of his starboard battery sent forth a loud blast, a wall of smoke, and, faintly, a humming of murderous bees.

  “Grapeshot,” Garcia explained. “And probably some sangrenel.”

  The Dutchman’s foremast splintered and came down. Deck gunners sprawled, dim maroon sprays marking those who’d had arteries severed by one of the infinitude of small balls, bullets, or nails which raked the length of the weather deck. The lower mainsail shredded. Several figures on the quarterdeck were struck down and flopped like hooked fish. The ship lost way, swung back toward a running position, her wheel unmanned or her whipstaff damaged. Or possibly both.

  The pirate sloops and pataches swung close, sails out into the breeze like so many stooping, white-winged vultures approaching a dying beast.

  Berrio fixed his morion on his tight black curls with a slap and a laugh. “And now Dutch killing Dutch? I don’t know if this day can get any better, but I’m going to find out!” He cried down to the weather deck. “Ho, boy there! Ready my skiff and send word to my sergeants. We shall lead our ‘allies’ ashore. But don’t raise the signal pennants until we’re in the water. I don’t want those piratical bastards getting ashore before us!”

  * * *

  Alonso de Contreras had only seen an actual crucifixion once before. It was in New Spain, used to punish a recidivistic mestizo whose return to pagan beliefs had led to a small and ultimately inconsequential uprising. Two Dominican friars had been killed, along with two soldiers, the criollo overseer of a minor hacienda, and a number of griffos. Some dozens of mestizos who had joined the uprising had been summarily put to the sword in their villages, along with their families. Since the uprising had been caused by, and subsequently targeted, members of the Inquisition, the suppression had been put in their hands as well. And the Inquisitors of New Spain were often of the opinion that it was a benefit to the ever-backsliding natives of the region to kill them before they could sin again. Or at all.

  Illustrating that same ready ardor to save the souls of the races over which Spain had been granted paternal care by the Holy Father in Rome, the Inquisitors had made a special effort to capture the mestizo ringleader alive. Apparently missing the irony of which part in the reprise of Christ’s story they were playing, the Inquisitors decided to crucify the poor fellow in the middle of a large native village, with a round-the-clock guard of well-armed troops.

  Contreras had not seen the barbarity himself. He had passed through the town in the aftermath, on the way to deliver a particularly sensitive parcel of messages to Vera Cruz. The mestizo who had renounced the savior whose name and origins had probably been meaningless to him was still hanging in the town’s center, however, much to the unremitting delight of the vultures.

  Now, as Contreras stepped out of a skiff and started up the smooth, gentle slope to Willemstad—or rather, what was left of it—two crosses stood starkly against the red glow and black smoke of the fire behind them. It might well have been a scene from hell. And Alonso de Contreras, who had seen barbarity aplenty in the service of Spain, had to wonder if, having had a hand in the events of the day, he was seeing a foreshadowing of his own eternal torment.

  In the rude streets that converged on the crosses, the Brethren of the Coast were celebrating the freedoms that were their ubiquitous social bonds: prodigious appetites for murder and violation. The only individuals being spared were, apparently, the smallest children. But then Contreras realized that they were being kept alive to witness what was being done to their fathers, mot
hers, brothers, sisters, and even grandparents. Clear streaks marked the passage of tears down their smoke-smeared faces, many now beyond crying or even making a sound. Contreras saw one child—he could not have been older than three—abandoned against the side of a burning house, quaking. He had become too unresponsive to be of any amusement to his tormentors.

  As Contreras walked up a lane flanked by two long tableaux of saturnalia more savage and sadistic than anything ever envisioned by Brueghel, he was confronted by one of the pirate captains, Diego de Los Reyes, striding with long, stiff legs back down toward the shore. Berrio was at his heels, berating him. “Get back into the fight, you mulatto dog!” the criollo captain shouted at the tall pirate’s back.

  De Los Reyes gritted his teeth and kept walking, saw Contreras, put a question in his eyes: And will I get the same order and insult from you?

  “Captain de Los Reyes,” Contreras said with a nod, not three yards away from where several reivers from the Mosquito Coast were testing the sharpness of their knives on the limbs of a wounded man. “Please respond to Captain Berrio’s charge against you. Are you deserting in the face of the enemy?”

  At first, de Los Reyes’ face became rigid with anger, but then Contreras’ calm tone and expression evidently registered and he realized he was being asked a serious question by a reasonable man. “There is no enemy anymore,” de Los Reyes asserted. “They are all defeated. I have taken my spoils and have sent my men back to my ship.”

  Berrio’s objection was shrill behind the tall pirate’s shoulder. “The Dutch may be defeated, but they are not all dead! And it is our mission, our holy mission, to slaughter the heathens wherever we find them. Those orders have come from Olivares himself!”

  For a moment, Contreras could not speak because he was unsure whether he would scream or laugh at Berrio, who could make speeches about holy missions while other human beings were, quite literally, being raped, tortured, strangled, vivisected, and crucified all within twenty yards of him. So Contreras turned back to de Los Reyes. “Captain, I commend the discipline you maintain over your men, that they have not joined in this barbarism. You are free to return to your ship.”