TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings (Book 7)
Page 34
Liam had spent seven months in the past this time, longer than in Kramer’s time. Longer than in King John’s time. Seven months as a pirate. He was fascinated by the notion that, if Maddy hadn’t come across Modyford’s account of their escape from his attempt to arrest them for piracy, he would have gone on to live a very different life.
He wondered if, in that other life, his twenty years’ living as some sort of king of a pirate kingdom, there had been people he may have got to know and love. A weird thought that. That he might have had a wife and children and all that business.
Jay-zus … twenty years would have made me nearly forty.
An old man. Sort of.
Rashim would have been closer to fifty!
He wondered how he felt about being back. Was he glad to be here? Yes and no. He wasn’t going to tell Maddy that he’d missed her and Sal, that there had been many times he’d pined for them, yearned to return to their homely dark dungeon. She’d only make fun of him. There had been times when he thought they were going to be stuck there for good. So, yes … he was glad to be back with the girls. The support units. Back home with his odd, odd family.
But then there had been several times he’d wished he could be back there. Golden moments that would be so hard to explain, to describe to someone who hadn’t experienced them. Moments like, for example, watching the last of the sun vanish behind a table-flat horizon. The sound of a lazy sail slapping against the stout oak of a ship’s mizzen-mast in the still heart of night. The soothing creak and groan of a ship’s hull. The tarry smell of caulked wood mixed with the ever-present tang of salt. The bad-eggs smell of powder smoke and the reek of damp hemp rope. The downward thump, the upward rise of our girl, the Pandora, bearing three-quarters to the wind as she rides through lively, white-topped crests and leaves a tamed trough in our wake.
Aye, she was a good ship, the Pandora. A fine ship, so she was.
Last night in the dungeon, while the others were asleep and Liam lay on his bed of mattresses and packing crates, he’d cupped one hand over his ear and fancied he could actually hear the distant rumble of the sea. Even though he knew what he was hearing was the rush of his own blood. But, listening to that, he could almost feel the gentle rise and drop of a ship at sea and pretend that the darkness of their dungeon was the darkness of the gun deck. And imagine he could see his crew, his lads, curled in their hammocks, stirring, fidgeting, farting in their sleep.
Liam wondered what became of them all.
He hoped it was not the same fate that Rashim and he might have gone on to face one day.
I hope those good fellas – young Will, Old Tom, John Shoe, Gunny, Pasquinel, Kwami – I so hope they all managed to make an escape and find their own destinies, whatever those may be.
Chapter 74
1687, somewhere off the coast of Florida
He looked up through the rigging at the clear blue sky and savoured the warmth of the sun on his face. He closed his eyes for just a few seconds and let his senses drink in the moment: the gusting wind against his cheeks, the sounds of his ship cutting through a choppy sea, the crew about their business. The smell of woodsmoke coming from the galley and tobacco smoke from his clay pipe.
A perfect morning.
He remembered some words of wisdom from that Irishman who’d once saved him. ‘Make sure you catch those precious moments, lad. Hold them close like a lover and cherish them.’
So long ago now he could barely remember what he’d looked like. Slim, dark-haired, with that strange grey tuft of hair and the modest fluff of a young man’s beard. That man for a while had been like an older brother, no, almost like a father, to him. God, he wished he could remember his full name.
He could just remember the first. That was all now. But that same name is the one he’d proudly christened his young son, waiting for him back home in Nassau, New Providence.
All so long ago now and memories can play tricks on you. Is that really what happened? Did he just disappear over the side during that fight? He and the darker man, Captain Anwar? That had troubled him for years … that they could just leave them like that. So suddenly. Vanish amid the smoke as it were.
He bore them no ill will, though. If they’d escaped too, then good for them. Somehow he was certain that’s what had happened. They’d escaped and not been shot, killed and fallen dead over the side. They’d made their escape and, what was more, he had an instinctive feeling that those two were still alive somewhere.
He smiled. Wherever you are, Liam … I wish you Godspeed.
Just then a call came down from the crow’s-nest. The first mate, Jacques Pasquinel, climbed the ladder up to the afterdeck. ‘Skipper! Sighting of a Yankee merchant ship off the port bow!’
Captain William Hope grinned.
‘Well, what’re we waitin’ for? Let’s go get ’em!’
Epilogue
1889, London Bridge, London
Sal too had taken herself for a walk to get away from the gloomy confines of the dungeon. She was watching the very same barges coming in to disgorge their cargoes and fill their open holds with sacks of coke, bundles of leather, spars of pig-iron to be transferred back down the river to smoke-stacked factories hungry for more raw materials from which to mass-produce items to be sold across the colonial empire. But she was watching the work from London Bridge. If both had known where the other stood, they might even have been able to make each other out, less than half a mile apart, and offer a friendly wave.
She looked down at the cold grey river, polluted with chemicals from tanneries, potteries, textile factories. Even less inviting than New York’s East River had been.
Everyone was back, safe and sound, and history seemed to be back to how it had been before Liam and Rashim had meddled with it. The same as it ever was. But not quite the same. She realized she loved Liam and was so relieved that he was home, safe, unharmed. Loved Maddy too. And yes, she was even fond of Rashim and the support units. Even that stupid yellow lab unit.
But the more she thought about it, the more she dwelled on it, the more she cared for a certain girl who wasn’t going to be born for another one hundred and twenty-three years. Saleena Vikram. A very real girl who Sal was determined was going to live a long life.
Sal was merely the ghost of that girl. The pale copy. A lost echo of her.
Yet here she was with the others a century and a quarter before Saleena Vikram’s due time, with a machine that could so easily derail the delicate sequence of events that would eventually lead to a young man called Sanjay Vikram meeting Abeer.
You can’t let that happen, her nagging voice chimed in softly.
Sal nodded. She quite agreed.
‘I promise you, Saleena Vikram, I won’t let them do that to you.’
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