The Buccaneers

by Iain Lawrence

  We went forward in a little group, up the weather side. The cannons strained at their lashings, their wooden wheels squeaking. Mudge started up the ratlines with a steady mindlessness that I envied. The mast swung so far and so quickly that I dreaded climbing to a yard that would tilt in every direction.

  But if I was scared, Dasher—above me—-was terrified. He stepped up to the rail, and his boots slipped away on the wet wood. Only the wind kept him from falling. It plastered his coat against the ratlines and glued him to the rigging. He could barely move his arms for the bulk of his wineskins.

  “I can't go up there,” he said.

  “You've done it before,” I told him. On the Dragons first voyage, Dasher had climbed right to the masthead to watch for a ship in the fog.

  “But not in weather like this.” He looked down, his face wretched with fear. “Not with the mast breaking off. And not in these wineskins; I can't move in these bladders.”

  “Take them off,” I said.

  “No chance!” he shouted.

  “Then climb.”

  He stretched out an arm, then a leg, and dragged himself up like a huge, red bat. A step; another. The Dragon fell from a wave, and his coat billowed past his shoulders. “John,” he said. “John, I can't do it.”

  Mudge was up at the crosstrees, hurtling round and round as the mast carved circles from the night. He looked down at me, I up at him, and Dasher was between us, frozen to the shrouds.

  A loud crack nearly startled the life from me, and the night glowed briefly, faintly, from the flash of Grace's gun.

  “He's shooting at us,” I said. “Dasher, can't you move?”

  “No,” said Dasher. He was crying. His head on the ratlines, his arms spread wide, he shook and sobbed, and his silly wineskins pulsed like lungs. “Help,” he said. “John, please help me.”

  “Stay where you are.” I reached up to pat his boot, then climbed down to the rail, to the deck. I went past the cannons, up toward the wheel. I drew Dasher's pistol from my belt.

  “Get aloft!” shouted Grace. He pointed the flintlock right at me, then down at Horn. One shot was left. “I'll blow his brains out if you don't.”

  A wave battered on the stern. Spray flew up from either quarter, and the Dragon lurched to starboard. Horn fell away from the binnacle, his hands reaching up for the string. The Dragon heeled farther, until the deck sloped away from me, down to the wheel and Bartholomew Grace.

  His knee was bent, his arm pressing on the spokes to bring the Dragon upright. Horn flailed at his feet, kicking for a hold on the deck, and the sea bubbled and churned at the rail. Grace glanced toward it, and I leapt down the deck.

  I flew at him, screaming at the top of my voice. He looked up, and the flintlock rose in his hand. I crashed into him as the Dragon settled in her roll, as the seas roared onto the deck. The gun fired wildly, and Grace tumbled backward, vanishing into the water that filled the deck.

  I grabbed the binnacle. Horn was hanging from his key string, his legs kicking, his hands grabbing frantically at his throat. With the blade on my pistol I hacked through the twine, and Horn slid feet first down the slanted deck, plunging into the same wave that had swallowed Bartholomew Grace.

  The Dragon broached. Another wave followed the last, and the topsail boomed in the blackness with a thunder that shook the hull. I hauled at the wheel, but the Dragon felt heavy and dead, as though she had drowned in those terrible seas. Slowly she shifted, and climbed from the waves. And the sea spilled from her decks in a churning foam.

  Then up from the water stood Bartholomew Grace.

  He glared at me with his dead man's face as the water tumbled round his waist. He hadn't far to come, and he took a step toward me. The pistol was still in his hand, the lanyard stretched tight to his neck. He took another step, then staggered and started clubbing at the water, raising little spouts and splashes. Then the sea went surging off the deck, and there was Horn, no longer tied, clutching at the pirate's coat.

  They tumbled down together and rose together, locked in a deadly struggle as the sea surged up around them. Grace twisted his fist in the collar of Horn's shirt; Horn clawed at the flintlock, then at its lanyard, and hauled himself up to the buccaneer's throat.

  They swayed and tilted, reeled and turned. They battled down the deck as the Dragon hurtled on. She bashed through a wave and into another. Spray flew up in sheets.

  Horn was bigger and stronger than Grace. His enormous arms bent and lifted the pirate clear off the deck. But Grace never let go of the shirt collar, and the pair went spinning down toward the rail. They hit against it chest to chest and wrestled there, each choking the life from the other. For a moment Horn was looking at me. Then he shouted, and his arms went stiff as boards. He held on to Grace with all the strength he had, and flung himself over the rail. They fell together into the sea; together they went, off the edge of our-wooden-world.

  “Horn!” I screamed. “Horn!”

  But he was gone, and there was no hope of trying to find him. The Dragon hurtled on, from wave to wave in a spindrift shroud. She reeled and shook, the topsail banged and clattered, and I looked up to see Mudge, a black spot high in the rigging, making his way up the topmast shrouds, going doggedly on to reef that sail. Dasher still clung to the ratlines, and I saw what little time had passed since I'd started aft to end all this. Now Grace was gone, and Horn with him, and I imagined the two of them sinking slowly through the ocean, tumbling down through fathom after fathom, embraced for all eternity.

  I stood by the wheel and stared at a ragged scar on the deck, a hole ringed by splinters to show where Grace's pistol had fired. But I couldn't dwell on it, or grieve for Horn. I heard a voice wailing faintly over the wind and the sea. Mudge was pointing forward.

  “Land!” he was shouting.

  The Dragon rose to a crest and I saw it myself, beyond the endless rows of whitecapped waves. A smudge of the earth, a line of cliffs dark in the dawn, lay directly before us. It vanished as the Dragon surfed to the trough, then appeared again. Within the hour we'd be right below them. And we couldn't turn away with the topsail set.

  I shouted for Dasher to take the wheel. I called as loudly as I could. But if he heard me, he misunderstood, for he started aloft then, inching up the ratlines in a swirl of crimson. He reached the crosstrees and squeezed through the lubber's hole, and the wind seemed to squirt him through it as his coat billowed above him.

  Mudge waited for him, and helped him up to the yard. They stepped out to leeward on a sagging rope, high above the deck, then high above the sea, as the Dragon rolled along. Betts cast off the sheet, Freeman the clew, and half the sail went streaming out. The men aloft gathered it in.

  My heart was up there with Dasher. I knew how frightening it could be to balance on a thread of rope and grab at canvas that tried its best to pull me off. I had never done it in weather as bad as this, on a mast that pitched so wildly. But Mudge—as thick as a loaf-when he worked on deck— was spry and nimble aloft. He dragged the sail into the yard, and Dasher tied the gaskets round it.

  The cliffs grew higher, darker, swifter in their coming. I saw the surf at their feet, a strip of green at their tops.

  When the topsail was furled, I turned the wheel. The Dragon flew along with the shore on her beam. And a spit of land came out to meet us.

  It blocked us like a wall, a tremendous hurdle that we couldn't cross. Wreathed with surf and spray, it was a jagged finger pointing south. I knew it at once as the North-ground Cape.

  In the past two years I had witnessed a shipwreck and a smuggling run, a voyage to the Indies. And it had all brought me back to the very same place where I'd started, to St. Elmo's Bay and the teeth of the Tombstones.

  Chapter 28

  THE WRECK

  We “wore ship and beat our way west. The tiny storm sails thrummed “with the wind as the Dragon clawed against it. I watched the land go by, the places that I knew. There were Sugar Bay and Tobacco Cove; every nook had a name that re
membered a shipwreck and the cargo that drifted ashore.

  I saw the cliffs where the wreckers had lit false beacons, and the whitened fury of the sea where it broke against the Tombstones. There lay the wreck of the Isle of Skye, my father's finest ship, her bones still resting among those of many others. Then Wrinkle Head was off the bow, a wall as steep as the Northground. And again we turned, to bash our way east, trapped between the capes.

  Butterfield had been tossed about his dark prison so badly that he was a mass of bruises. “He's black and blue from end to end,” said Mudge, who had found him fainted in the Cave and had carried him to the after cabin. “He's in a very bad way, I think.”

  Betts and Freeman had gone back to their hammocks, their chills worsened by the night. Only Dasher and Mudge and I were left to work the Dragon, and we beat back and forth across St. Elmo's Bay as the wind howled from the south.

  The waves that had pushed the Dragon on, that had slipped for miles and miles beneath her stern, now came tumbling toward her sides. They shattered on her planks in great booms and blasts of spray, or thundered right aboard to fill the waist from rail to rail. We rolled like a log in troughs so deep that the water there was streaked with sand. And on the starboard tacks, the topmast shook worse than ever, with an awful rattle in the rigging.

  Now I held her head up on the larboard tack as we bounded west toward Wrinkle Head. If we could round it, we were safe; the harbor of Pendennis lay just beyond the cape. But to round it, we had to pass the Tombstones.

  Mudge had heard of them. So had Freeman and Betts; there wasn't a sailor in England who didn't fear those jagged rocks. But Dasher didn't know them, and he gazed at the enormous spouts of water tossed up by breaking waves.

  He was full of himself now, after his trip aloft. “Speaking as a topman,” he said, “I don't care for this at all. I've been aloft, John, and I'll vouch for this: you don't want to take a ship in there.”

  I didn't tell him that I'd done so before, that it was I who had watched the false lights and shouted orders to the helmsman, that it was I who had guided the lovely Isle of Skye straight toward her doom.

  “But the water's flat behind them,” Dasher said. “I could see that from the yard, John. We who work among the birds can spot things from aloft.” Then he looked up at the topsail yard, and his courage seemed to leave him. “Lord love me. That thing's working loose.”

  He was right, but only by half. The yard swung side to side, though the braces were tight. It was the topmast itself that was close to breaking.

  “When you inspected the rig,” I asked, “what did you find?”

  Dasher frowned. “The cuff?” he said. “No, that's not right. The collar. I didn't go clear to the masthead, mind; I didn't see it for myself. But Horn said the collar was cracked.”

  It was all that held the mast up. The shrouds were shackled to that metal ring. If the collar broke, the mast would go.

  I steered for the end of Wrinkle Head, into the wind and the seas, into a current that swept us north. The waves broke on the point in a mournful drum, and I knew we'd never round it.

  I looked at the Tombstones coming closer, at the cliffs behind them, where I'd once climbed from the beach to escape the wreckers. At the top were people, dark figures that hadn't been there earlier. Women and children and men, they gathered along the cliffs’ edges like crows flocking to a rooftop.

  Dasher waved. “They've come to watch us pass,” he said.

  I shook my head. “They've come to see the wreck.”

  They'd come from Pendennis, up to the moor and south to the sea. They'd come as they'd done for decades, to watch a tiny ship struggle against the enormous sea, to watch her lose in the end. They'd be wondering now what she carried, a ship as small as this, and what fine things would wash ashore when the wind and the seas overcame her.

  “Ready about,” I said.

  Dasher and Mudge went forward to tend our little jib. I turned the wheel and the Dragon swung into the seas, round through the south. The sails emptied and flogged, then filled again, and we tacked to the east as all of Pendennis followed on the cliffs above us.

  We sailed right to the Northground Cape, fighting for a bit of sea room. But the waves pushed us back, and the wind moaned in the rigging, and we were no farther from shore when I shouted again, “Ready about.”

  The Dragon heeled up to the wind, and for a moment it seemed that she wouldn't turn. She hung there with her sails shaking, the waves sweeping over the bowsprit. She came to a dead stop, and the crowd on the cliffs pressed closer to the edge. In a moment she would start to drift backward; in another she'd be into the surf. But a crested wave hammered on the bow and gave her the mere little push that she needed, and back we went to the west: the ship; her crew; the people on the shore.

  We needed more sail, but we hadn't men enough to set it. We could only hope that the wind would change before the topmast broke, that it might ease enough to let us round the point. We could only hope for a bit of luck. But it seemed we'd had none of that since Horn had gone over the side.

  I steered the Dragon west again as the topmast shook and bent. Wrinkle Head came closer. The waves rolled below us, then on toward the shore. They shattered on the Tombstones, and the spray soared up to the tops of the cliffs, to the people waiting there.

  “A boat!” cried Dasher. He shook my arm and pointed.

  I saw it too, a tiny thing tilting over a crest. Rowed by a man and a boy, it staggered through the waves, coming east around the point. The boy, in a black sou'wester, rowed for all he was worth, then stopped to bail the boat. The man was huge; he worked his little craft through the waves and surf, and the current bore him on.

  “Bless their hearts,” said Dasher. “They've come to help us.”

  “Help us wreck,” said Mudge. “They'll slit our throats and steer the ship ashore, and who's to tell it happened? Not those vultures on the cliff.”

  “It's not like that,” I said. “Not anymore. Not here, at least.”

  But Mudge would never be convinced. He feared the wreckers more than the Tombstones, and he begged me to turn the ship around.

  “They'll kill us,” he said.

  But I kept my course. For all my life I'd wanted to be a seaman, and from childhood it had been my wildest dream to sail a ship that I commanded, to take her far and bring her home again. And now I was a captain, though on a ship with a toppling mast and a usable crew of only two, with a storm-tossed shore so close at hand that I could almost spit upon the cliffs. But I made my decision, and I kept my course.

  The Dragon shouldered into enormous waves and shook from her trembling mast. The little rowing boat burst through a plume of froth two crests away, and the man turned toward me as he skidded to the trough.

  “It's Simon Mawgan,” I said.

  “Mawgan!” shouted Mudge. “The Mawgans are the worst of them.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. That I was still alive was due in part to Simon Mawgan.

  He was a powerful rower. He turned the little boat so that he'd meet the Dragon as she passed, and the boy rowed with him, stroke for stroke. But the boat was heavy, and the seas swept over it, bow to stern. The boy shipped his oars and bailed; he bailed by the bucket as the water rushed in by the gallon.

  “Just who needs saving here?” asked Dasher.

  “Take the line when they come alongside,” I told him. “Mudge, you cast off the sheets when I luff.”

  “Luff?” he said. “Don't. Not here.”

  “Go,” I told him.

  The boat skittered across our path. I turned the Dragon up to the wind, and the jib snapped and flogged as the sheets came loose. Mawgan's boat—above me one moment, below me the next—came flitting from crest to crest as the waves slopped over the rail. The boy held a coil of line, and Dasher was ready to catch it. But the boat rocked and skidded sideways, and the Dragon heeled toward it. Mawgan backed his oars; then I lost sight of his boat past the curve of the deck. I was certain that we'd crush
it under the hull. But again he rose beside me, rowing furiously ahead, and the next wave picked up the boat by the stern and swept it over the rail. Mudge hardened the sheets, and the Dragon bore off to the east, and there the boat sat as the water fell away, flat on its keel on our deck.

  I would never have planned to do that; I couldn't have managed if I'd tried. Even Mawgan was taken by surprise, and he sat in the boat with the oars in his hands. He gazed around, wide-eyed, as though he'd been dropped suddenly from the stars. Then he saw me at the wheel.

  “By the saints!” he cried. “John Spencer!”

  The boy turned his head. He took off his sou'wester, and I saw it wasn't a boy at all. It was Mary, Simon's niece. She leapt from the boat and ran to meet me. We hugged each other as the Dragon raced along.

  Dasher laughed. “If I'd known the fishing was like this, I'd have brought a net,” he said.

  Mary was wet as a sponge, but I didn't care. She was two years older than last I'd seen her, and even prettier than before. I squeezed the water from her, and could have stood like that forever, I thought. But Mawgan stamped up from the waist, and the Dragon rolled the water from his little boat. I saw a long cable coiled in its bottom, the fluke of an anchor reaching out.

  “You were coming to Pendennis,” said Mary. Her lovely Cornish accent hadn't changed. “You were coming to see me. Edn't it true?”

  “ ‘Course he wasn't,” bellowed Mawgan. “He lost his way. He's got a topmast near to breaking, and he can't round the point for the weather.”

  Mary gazed up at me.

  “Yes,” I said. “We lost our-way.”

  “Where are your men?” Mawgan shouted. “Where's the rest of the crew?”

  “We're all that's left,” I said. “We've had fever and gun-fights and storms. The ship was taken, and taken back again. The captain's down below, and there are two hands in the fo'c's'le, and we're all that's left—Dasher and Mudge and I.”

  “Yet you kept her afloat?” Mawgan smiled. “You've done well, for a Londoner. Now let's get you safe and sound.”