Roaring in excitement, the men agreed to take them.
After commanding Ziare to signal to Reid’s Broken Shell to follow suit, Mason shouted to his men, “All hands make sail, helmsman alee, ready the guns, and light the fire of hell in your souls!”
The release of anxious tension on deck was akin to the power of lightning striking the earth, and the action now swarming around me was like the fire following the electric assault. Filling barrels of saltwater, sprinkling sand around the decks, and prepping their weapons for war, the crewmen sang and chanted a fearsome tune; their frightful melody harmonizing with the flapping of the canvas sails above and the thrashing of the wooden hull against the tumbling sea beneath us. Mason’s encouraging howls were the loudest of the bunch, feeding the intensity of this hellish wildfire like kindling. Not a pointed finger or a shouted command was given without swift response, but as the chaotic symphony unfolded around me, I stood there like an idiot.
As far as the filthy men around me knew, I was but a man among them, but among them I knew that this was simply insane. I was bleeding my monthly release all over the rags wrapped around my legs, for heaven’s sake! How the hell was I going to sail, or fight, or do anything at all in this condition? Though I suddenly wished that I had indeed awaited my lover’s return from my luxurious room at The West Wind Inn, I hadn’t. I was here, and it was too late to wallow in my senseless regrets. War was conspiring around me, and in order to keep my masculine shield intact, I had to act like the man I was pretending to be. I did not want to see what the captain and crew would see fit for punishment if I acted with cowardice.
Though I knew plenty about Esmerelda, I still had no idea how to sail her, and the absurd amount of speed we’d picked up assured me that these mighty sailors were in no need of assistance. The guns which were so particularly cared for were being stocked and loaded, but once again, I knew not the reasoning behind the tune they played in this horrendous song. Covered in a frightful sweat, I figured it’d make the most sense to help the men loading the barrels of water. Keeping fire at bay seemed reasonable.
The hours to follow passed like days, and the stamina of the men making way impressed me greatly. Their hunger for gold was one that far surpassed anything I had ever craved. Once Esmerelda and her dashing consort finally came in range of the massive Spanish beasts, I was outright exhausted. Short of breath and soaked in sweat, I wiped my dripping brow. Perk laughed at me. “It’s only begun, my fine young gent. Take a shot of rum and ready your pistol. We’re about to come into musket range.”
“I don’t know how to shoot,” I yelped, foolishly exposing my lack of skill.
“Ah, damn you blaggard sea artist. You ought to just stay in the blasted chartroom.”
“Aye, that you should.” Mason picked me up by the collar. “This little feather-wielding pansy won’t do us any good out here in the war zone. Get your arse to the chartroom and keep that cry baby Seth from drowning himself in his own tears.”
He shoved me on my way. Without a word of dispute, I went below.
As Esmerelda came about hard on her portside, I scampered down the teetering gangway with the timbers groaning around me. My mind ran as fast as the ship hopping the ramped waves, but my nerves were nowhere as slick as her glossy keel. Finding Seth balled up in a corner behind the desk in our darkened chartroom hugging a bottle of rum, I sat down beside him. “Captain Bentley told me to keep you company.”
He leaned over the bucket beside him and threw up. Washing down the taste of vomit with a shot of rum, he belched. “This is Hell. Hell itself. I can’t imagine Satan’s favorite pits being any worse than this.”
One ray of light shone through a crack in the timbers above, and in the dusty glow I could see just how green and sickly he looked.
“How many times have you been through this?” I asked, trying my best to be stronger than he was.
“Too many.” He gurgled on his slobber. “Too many to ever be sane again.”
Sane. Ha! Sanity was so far gone from me that its loss was not my concern. But I did want to keep my life. And I wanted Mason to live, as well.
With the fearsome possibilities ringing in my mind, the roaring on deck intensified above us. Esmerelda dipped low into a swell, rising with a quickness that almost made me feel sick. The moment she balanced on her tide, a shot rang out from her starboard side. This was much different from hearing it as I had many months ago. This time, I felt it. The deck trembled from the blow and the daunting smell of sulfur drifted into the darkness surrounding me. Another shot mirrored it. From the sound of things I assumed it to be Reid. We were closing in around our victims.
The sound of musket balls escaping their chambers echoed in the air, and the savage roaring magnified as the Spanish sailors voices also came into range. Amidst the terrorizing shouts of the master sailor and the master gunner, I heard bodies dropping to the ground and footsteps falling hard on the timbers. My mind could only imagine the horrific reality that was raging above me. I closed my eyes in a fruitless attempt to hide from it all, and with them shut I heard Mason’s monstrous voice blast over the chaos. “Fire!”
With Seth crying and shaking in the background, the loudest most horrendous sound I ever heard struck the air. A broadside. All seven guns from our starboard side fired at once! The thump was unruly, the explosion was out of this world, and the sound of the heavy balls ripping through the galleon’s timbers tore my heart to bits.
Before I had a chance to catch my breath, Reid fired a similar volley, but rather than a shattering blast following the thump, it was a ripping, tearing cry. Chain shot. Mason had told me about how the heavy balls, linked together by a mighty chain, would fly through the smoky air, plow into the rigging, ripping apart any hopes to flee. Death. Death and destruction at its finest—or its worst, depending on which side of the blaze you stood on, and while feeling the next few blasts bash through Esmerelda’s hull, I was unsure of which fate would be whose.
After a wild tilt of the timbers, we soared without further damage for a moment’s time, but there was no peace in the lull. When hearing the timbers of another ship coming in range, I braced for another broadside. Repeating the same tactics, Reid and Bentley pummeled the second escort. Though a few more shots were fired at Esmerelda, none of them affected the dark place where Seth and I hid. Once the Spanish ship was no longer able to retaliate, Esmerelda once again came about so wildly that my gut churned with sickness. Regaining my composure as she straightened on the tide, I hoped the worst was behind us, but the ferocity in which Mason shouted for his men to take the queen, assured me that the worst was yet to come.
“How long does this go on for?” I asked Seth, who appeared to be sucking on his thumb in the corner.
“Forever,” he whined. “Forever and ever.”
Knowing that there was only one ship left to take, I fanned off his exaggerated whimpering and hoped that the queen would collapse as fast as the guards.
Coming upon the roaring Spanish sailors, I covered my head and prayed that God would get us through this, unsure if the good Lord gave a shit about men who killed each other for gold.
This time the Spanish fired first. Hearing the heavy balls blast through the hull downwind from our safe haven, Seth flipped the desk over to block the bulkhead behind us. The sight of our hard-worked maps and important tools flying about, rattled my nerves, and the moment the next shot was fired, my hopes for swift and safe blasted to bits with the bulkheads above us. The shards of wood hit the bulkhead across from us like daggers and darts. Though the perilous wreckage shook my soul to the core of its existence, the heavy wooden desk kept us free of any serious injury.
The pummeling continued for what seemed like forever, as Seth had said, but it was quite apparent that the dish of death which Reid and Bentley were serving would be seasoned with Spanish blood, for not another shot rang out from the queen after they blasted her with a nonstop volley of gunfire.
The world seemed eerily quiet after the
final shot cleared the air. When I heard Mason command his men to board her, I prayed that God would guide him with the same good fortune he had granted Seth and me. There would be no success in my world if I lost him today.
The roaring sounds of hand-to-hand combat filled the air with the same strangling effect as the gunpowder. I think I bit off every fingernail on my hands as I awaited the avail. Soon enough, the intensity above took on a roar of conquer. Since the rowdy exclamations were proclaimed in English, I knew that we had won. Whatever the hell that meant.
Chapter 4
Rich and Free
Death. So much of it that I wanted to vomit. The sight of guts and splattered body parts and the smell of blood and sulfur made me so sick that I did. I threw up. Yet, amidst the carnage and through the smoke, I saw Mason’s buccaneers carrying wooden chests of loot across the gangway. He was with them! Oh, thank God!
Mason had no shirt on, his bare side was covered in blood, his face was coated with gunpowder, and his lip was bleeding on one side as much as his temple was bleeding on the other. But he was alive. And he was laughing. Laughing. They were all so happy. How the hell could anyone be happy after all of this horror?
Wanting nothing more than to hug him, or Feather—who had somehow survived the wreckage as well—I stood alone knowing I could do neither. The most I could do was look into Mason’s eyes as he passed. With all of his men behind him, he winked at me, casually confident as always, with no mind for the blood gushing down the side of his face. Oh, my. This was all too much for me.
Hopping over an arm—yes, an arm detached from the body it had been born to—I ran to the gunnel and threw up into the ocean. With the world spinning around me, I caught my breath and regained my balance. Cowardice is a punishable crime, I reminded myself, then gathered the strength to report to my captain. “What can I do now, sir?”
His bloody lips lifted with an ear-to-ear smile as he chuckled, “Did you keep Seth alive?”
Stunned, because that was all he said to me, I nodded my head. “I did. Well, he did. He saved us by flipping the desk over…” Having not spoken in hours, my voice was terribly hoarse, and being traumatized beyond belief, I ended up rambling like an idiot about everything that had happened.
With his arms crossed over his blood-splattered chest, Mason listened with a ridiculous smile on his face. Gruff and Perk were staring at me, too. Shit.
“He talks!” Gruff laughed.
“Of course he talks.” Perk shoved his shoulder. “He’s smarter than the lot of us combined.”
Quickly shutting my stupid mouth, I took note of the tattered and injured men around me. My horror was petty in comparison to whatever it was that they had endured.
“All right, all right.” Mason patted me on the shoulder. “We still have a ton of loot to transfer over, and a shitload of Spanish survivors to set adrift, so why don’t you get your shit together and help that thumb sucking mother’s boy chart a course to Tortuga.”
“Tortuga!” Perk and Gruff howled in unison. It was at that moment that I realized how much I cared about them. They were alive and I was so happy. Apparently Mason was not the only person in the world I cared about. My mind was so far gone that I outright loved these dirty, rotten, murderous buccaneers, and I wanted to hug them all. Wait…Where was Ziare? I loved him, too, and he was nowhere in sight. Like a mother missing her child, I began to panic. The painted giant had been teaching me about the stars, and though I hardly ever responded to his colorful tales about the night skies, I suddenly wished that I would have spoken with him more.
With tears filling my eyes, I looked around, hoping that none of the loose body parts were his. Soon enough I heard a pain-stricken cry. It was Ziare. Shark and Fred were helping him across the gangway. My heart flooded with hope, but just as I felt a smile cross my face, I realized why he was moaning. His entire forearm had been blasted to bits and there was a shard of plank wood sticking out of his bicep.
Reaching Esmerelda’s deck, the massive warrior dropped to his knees. Mason helped him to lie down. “All right, mate. You’re going to be all right. The surgeon lost more than an arm himself.” He fanned his hand at the doctor’s headless body. “So, I’m going to have to do what I can myself.”
“Just kill me, now,” Ziare laughed deliriously.
Mason slapped his cheek. “You don’t trust me by now, ol’ boy?”
Ziare smiled through his pain, but when Mason called for Gilroy, the cook, and Jones, the carpenter, to gather the needed supplies, Ziare started to panic. “What you calling them for? Don’t let them hack me up!”
Mason gritted his teeth. “Here, this’ll keep your mind off it.” As Ziare wailed, Mason ripped the splinter out of his bicep.
Quickly wrapping the gaping hole with a rag, Mason told Ziare everything was going to be fine, but Ziare continued to curse Mason to the Hell he came from, until his greater opponents showed up. The cook and the carpenter.
I know Mason had directed me to chart a course for Tortuga, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene before me. Mason shouted at the closest men to help him hold the quartermaster stiff. As they braced him to the blood-coated deck, he did his best to break loose.
The cook and the carpenter argued for a moment—neither of them wanting to chop the worthless limb—but their childish dispute was settled when Mason roared, “One of you does it or I’ll chop both your heads off with a cold, rusty saw blade!”
Rather than arguing about who wouldn’t, they began arguing over who would. While they yanked the saw back and forth between them, Mason growled like a savage beast, jumped to his feet, and tore the tool from their hands.
And then, on his very own, he sawed clean through what was left of Ziare’s arm.
Ziare’s screams sliced right through me like the blade itself. The gush of blood that followed left me feeling icy cold in the thick Caribbean heat. Feeling weak on my feet, I leaned over the rail and threw up again. With an empty gut, I heaved and gagged until there was nothing left to expel, but my stomach wouldn’t stop convulsing. Falling to my knees, I spit and shook, and as the world went dark around me, I heard Mason yelling at his men, “The next son of an ugly fat-arsed whore who disobeys me will have his tongue pulled out with hot pincers!”
X
Waking up in my bunkroom with Feather snuggled against my cheek, I wondered how the hell I got here. And how long had I been there. Last thing I remembered was passing out on deck, and as soon as my mind flashed over the reasons why, I began to feel sick, again. Refusing to dwell on the rancid memories, I sat up and took a deep breath.
The sun had nearly set, and while staring at the red-colored light on the wooden floor, I said to my cat, “I do not want to be a buccaneer.” He meowed. “I know. I thought I did, and though I am not going to cry and suck my thumb like Seth, I am certainly going to wait ashore next time Mason leaves to sea. Now, I know the difference, and I would much rather face the troubles I had in town.”
Noticing that someone had left me a plate of food and a washbasin, I debated over what I’d rather do first. Feeling my stomach rumble, I decided to eat and quickly devoured the bread and meat without tasting it at all. After washing down the meal with the mug of water I was granted, I made use of the washbasin. The water was warm but refreshing, and the soap that I was surprised to see, smelled much better than the tar and sweat I had been coated in for days on end.
I removed the rags on my legs that I was no longer in need of, and washed every part of my body as quickly as I could. It was dreadful to revisit the filthy clothes I had been wearing, but with a clean body and wet hair, I felt much better about my shitty place in the world.
Sitting on the floor, I combed out my tangled hair and took the time to make three braids. Hoping that the long lost art would help ease my weary nerves, I took a deep breath and spoke to Feather as I played with my hair. “Seeing that we are sailing northeast, I assume that Seth is doing his job well enough, so I am just going to spend my evening wit
h you, friend.”
He meowed and tilted his head to the side.
“I know. I am confused, as well.” Taking note of the rowdy howls ringing out from the celebration above, I shook my head in irritation. “Oh, Feather, this troublesome mess I have found myself in just makes me miss Thomas. There was a time—a time that now seems so long ago—that I was the wife of a good-hearted man who loved me for who I was, and I loved the dream we shared of living a peaceful life together in London. But that dream is lost. Gone with his life’s breath, and now, here I am, pretending to be a buccaneer to survive my dreadful memories of his death, and the rumors which followed my part in it.
Yes, I love Mason, I do. He is still my hero, but this life he lives is all too much for me. I have seen a side of him which I want nothing to do with. In fact, now that I have seen him covered in the blood of others, I am not sure if I want anything to do with him at all.”
The very moment the words left my mouth, I heard footsteps coming down the hall. It was him. Expecting the usual knock and goodnight, I was surprised to hear him say, “Come out here, Midnight.”
Suddenly terrified as to what the hell might be awaiting me outside of this quiet sanctuary I had finally found, I stood up, covered my hair, and quickly wrapped that uncomfortable fabric around my breasts to flatten them. Opening the door, I answered him with a rude grumble, “What?”
He scrunched his face, looking caught off guard by the attitude I displayed. “Uh, I just wanted to see if you’re all right after all that.”
“Yes. I am fine.” I lied through my teeth. “Couldn’t you just knock and ask through the door like you always do?”
He squinted at me. Though his expression spoke of many other thoughts, he closed his eyes and shook his head before he said, “Come here.”
Queen Of My Nightmare (Uncharted Secrets, Book 2): Endless Horizon Pirate Stories Page 4
