The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  He retreated into the shadows between the storehouses as Koffler set off at a creditable pace, his footsteps clocking on the wet wooden boards of the docks. Left alone, Smith could hear voices and something that sounded like the tooting of a crude flute or pipe nearby. It could have come as easily from below decks on one of the merchant traders as from the tavern where candlelight guttered feebly through the slats of shuttered windows. There was no front door to close the place up, and he watched as Koffler’s shadow stretched in the pale elongated rectangle of lamplight that spilled from the entrance to the waterfront inn. And then he was gone, disappeared inside.

  Smith watched for a few minutes before withdrawing deeper into the shadows. His yearning to find Cady and be done with this time and place was aflame within his chest. He still did not know how long she had been here. Was it the mere twenty-four hours and some since they had been separated, or had he returned weeks or even months after their initial arrival in that field? The weather seemed the same, but it was impossible to know. If the working day had dawned he might inquire of the date from a passerby or seek out a news periodical of the day. With neither of those courses being open to him, Smith tortured himself for a few minutes more pondering how he might determine precisely where on the calendar he had fetched up. A preacher would know the date exactly, needing always to be feasting this saint or keeping sacred that holy day, but skulking in the alleyway between two tumbledown sheds on a deserted quay at the edge of the world, Smith knew it was possible he could have returned to Salem at any point within a hundred years of his previous trip here. Cady could be long dead, or not even arrived yet.

  Gah!

  He pushed these treacherous uncertainties away. He had to trust in her. She had so quickly puzzled out the secrets of the watch, where he had managed nothing more with it than to keep himself alive and stumble from one disastrous encounter to the next—until he had encountered her, of course. It was entirely within her nature to have intrigued at the establishment of something like this Colonial Historical Society, and Smith did not doubt she would be wholly unrelenting in exploiting everything she knew of past and future to ensure its survival as an instrument of her will.

  She would be here.

  She had to be.

  “She’s not here,” Koffler said from nowhere, and Smith jumped like a goddamned jackrabbit off a hot plate.

  24

  The power of the sea fell away as the Herald threaded through the islands guarding the entrance to Boston Harbor. Cady had never visited in her own time and had no mental map of the city’s later geography on which to project the sights now revealed to her. A large island appeared to sit just off the coast of the mainland, and she guessed it was the main settlement because of all the sailing ships and smaller craft that bobbed about the shore. Three prominent hills dominated the skyline, and on the nearest of them she saw a primitive fort or tower which commanded the approaches to the docks. A wide, shallow bite taken out of the island had been filled with wooden wharves, and dark gray buildings crowded down to the foreshore.

  The Herald’s decks and masts and dense forests of rope and canvas were alive with men as the ship rode the contrary swell through the narrow gap between two small islands, both ringed with palisades and bristling with cannon. The captured pirate raider Le Sournois had closed up the distance between them, and her rigging crawled with busy sailors. Bowditch had stowed her in a corner of what Cady thought of as the ‘wheel deck’, safely away from the broken railings. He promised she wouldn’t be in anybody’s way there, which was, just quietly, a major fucking relief. Cady had never seen so many men swarming in sync over such a small, confined space. During the fight with Le Sournois, the Herald had stormed with insane violence and madness, but this was very different. This was like watching a single organism merge from the mysterious actions of a hundred different men. She had no idea what any individual was doing, but taken as a whole the result of their efforts was obvious: they were coming in to anchor.

  Cady ignored the bellowing cries of the ship’s officers as they bullied and finessed the wallowing wooden tub through the narrows. Without a watch to translate their commands from old sea dog into English, she had zero chance of understanding what they meant. Perhaps if she’d played a bit more Sea of Thieves or Age of Wind the garbled jargon might’ve made sense, but without it Cady felt herself lost: at sea, and in time. As the Herald bellied through the choppy harbor swell, she felt the moment coming when she would have to make a choice.

  She had no idea where Smith had gone, or whether he was even alive. He hadn’t jumped using the watch he’d got from the old Chinese guy. He’d used Chumley’s, and fuck only knew where and when that thing had dropped him. With a sinking feeling unconnected to the rise and fall of the ship’s bow, she imagined him teleported to the magical time-travel Death Star where assholes like Chumley rolled off a production line like disposable storm troopers. He could be hanging from the walls of some dungeon beyond time itself, right now and forever.

  Cady shivered inside her bloodstained sheepskin jacket. Her fingers were numb with cold, and she squinted against the stinging sheets of salt spray thrown up by the Herald’s passage. She’d played Garvey before, holding out the prospect of doing business with him when she was reunited with Smith, but increasingly she was starting to worry that she might be forced into dealing with him, or somebody like him, just to survive. Because she might never see Smith again.

  She might be trapped here alone for the rest of her life.

  “Aye, yon harbor is made by a great company of islands, and those high cliffs do well shoulder out the boisterous seas, mistress.”

  It was Garvey.

  Looked like he’d detailed off all of his shouting and cursing duties to the junior officers and appeared at her shoulder while her attention was focused on her one-girl pity party. His arm still rested in a sling, and bruises had swollen one side of his face.

  “I am not… familiar with the harbor, Captain,” Cady improvised. “We traveled overland to Salem.”

  “Ah well, you be in luck wi’ your choice of company then, mistress,” Garvey assured her. “This place presents many fair openings and broad sounds which might unmake the unskillful pilot. But you have fallen in with the most masterly of them. There are sounds too shallow for us, though navigable by boat and pinnacle, but Boston is otherwise a safe and pleasant anchorage, having but one common entrance, and that not very broad. There scarce be room for three ships to come in abreast, but once within, there be moorings for full five hundred. And we will see you safe within, mistress.”

  “I thank you, Captain,” Cady said.

  She could tell he was edging up to something, some proposal or offering. Before Garvey could get there, however, one of his lookouts cried down to him from the rigging above that something wasn’t right ashore. Again, Cady had trouble understanding the literal meaning of the words they exchanged, but there was no mistaking the intent. Garvey raised a spy glass to his unswollen eye with his good arm.

  “God’s bollocks,” he said, surveying the docks. “Redcoats.”

  Cady peered at the still distant waterfront, her eyes watering in the wind. She thought she could see a thin slash of red standing out amid the dark grays and earth tones of the docks.

  The work of sailing the Herald into harbor continued around them. Le Sournois had closed to within about fifty yards as they threaded through the entrance to the inner harbor, but Garvey was now fixed entirely on whatever he had spied ashore. Cady watched the muscles bunch under his bruised and bristled jawline.

  “I had it from Mistress Bradbury’s man,” he said, “that you were both at contention with the magistrates in Salem town.” Garvey was still scoping out the waterfront with his primitive-looking telescope. “Well,” he went on, “it now appears that I too must contend with them. Damn their eyes.”

  Cady was really feeling the loss of her backpack. She had a sweet pair of binoculars that would’ve pulled the scene on shore in close
. But then again, so fucking what? It wasn’t like she could change the situation on the ground.

  “Mr Bowditch,” Garvey roared, shouting so loudly it hurt her ears.

  The handsome young officer, who had been supervising crewmen on the deck below, came up the wooden stairs to the wheel deck at a run.

  “Captain?”

  Garvey handed him the looking glass with one word. “Magistrates.”

  Using his good arm, Bowditch took in the scene onshore. “Damn.”

  “Indeed, Lieutenant. I do not imagine they have come to pay the head price for Quarrel and his dogs.”

  Both men turned to Cady, and she was struck by a fear that they were about to throw her over the side. Instead, Garvey pinched at his split lower lip, deep in thought.

  “Mistress Bradbury’s fellow did warn us of mischance,” he said. “Needs must we shall to-wry Mistress Smith from these dull wallopers, eh? Get her off the ship, Bowditch. Now.”

  “At once, sir,” Bowditch said, taking Cady by the arm in a firm grip.

  “Hey, fuck that,” she said and both men stared at her as if she’d grown a second head.

  “But we must conceal your presence quickly, mistress,” Bowditch insisted. “Lest the magistrates have away with you. Mistress Bradbury gave us keen instruction on the matter.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “The lieutenant will see you safe across to Quarrel’s ship, Mistress Smith,” Garvey explained. “They will look for you most fervently here. And even if they do inspect Le Sournois, Quarrel was a pirate and a smuggler and his vessel will be rotten with hiding places. It is one giant floating priest hole.”

  “Oh,” Cady said. “I’m not sure why we’ve segued to preachers’ buttholes, but it’s cool you’re not going to narc me out. What about Quarrel, though? Won’t he talk?”

  Garvey smiled. “No.”

  A few words muttered to a nearby sailor and the risk of Quarrel giving them away was addressed with a few smacks of a belaying pin to the side of his head. When he was bashed unconscious, Bowditch nodded in approval.

  “Mistress, you have done valiant service for this crew, and we owe you more than a share of the prize money,” he said. “You have our fealty.”

  “And you have that poison pump from Bezos of the Amazon,” Garvey reminded her. “On which and more we must yet discourse to both of our advantages, madam. Now go with Bowditch. He will make sure the redcoats do not lay one finger on you, for they cannot touch what they will not see. Go now.”

  The captain shooed her away and Cady went, reasonably certain that if they’d wanted to give her up, they’d have knocked her on the head and thrown her in chains by now. She followed Bowditch down the stairs and along the deck to a section where the rail had been removed. At first she thought a cannon shot had blown through the woodwork, but the gap was cleanly cut, like a hole for a gate.

  She could hear Garvey roaring at the crew behind her, and his shouts seemed to set off a lot of activity around the little gate. It happened quickly, which was probably for the best, because when she realized what the fuck they planned to do with her, Cady’s whole body stiffened in protest.

  “No fucking way,” she breathed.

  The crew rigged up a sort of rope and pulley system which they launched across the gap between the Herald and Le Sournois by throwing grappling hooks attached to long ropelines. The process was both simple and complicated. She could see they were going to haul her between the two ships in a basket. From the shouts of the crew and the cat’s cradle of lines soon running back and forth between the Herald and the captured ship, she didn’t imagine for a second it would be an easy trip with any guarantee of success. The two ships, which had seemed so small on the vastness of the open ocean, now appeared to her as giant wooden mill wheels, between which she could be crushed as easily as an overripe grape.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” she said as Bowditch and half-a-dozen crewmates wrestled her into the basket and over the side. She was too frightened to resist. Too terrified to comply or help. And she screamed like a Dementer when they pushed her off and she felt herself dropping through the void towards the churning waters below. The canyon created between the hulls of the two vessels amplified the roaring of the waves so that they all but drowned out her caterwauling cries of terror. The basket went up and down and side to side all at once, while great, crashing waves of icy cold seawater slammed into her every couple of seconds. Cady felt like she was trapped in the worst carnival ride ever, a malfunctioning vomitron designed by evil retards. The foaming breakers looked like clouds, but they hit with the force of solid walls, and Cady had to stop screaming after gagging on so many mouthfuls of saltwater that all of her energy was taken up by choking and holding onto the sodden wicker basket for dear life.

  She wailed in terror as the two ships seemed to lean in, as though to crush her between their dark timbers. And then it was over. Strong arms pulled her onto the relative safety of the French vessel’s main deck; rough hands dragging her limp and shaking from the heavy wickerwork hamper, and before she could even raise her head from the pitching deck, a pair of black leather boots crashed down directly in front of her nose and a great cheer went up all around her.

  Even with his injured arm, Bowditch had simply swung across the gap between the ships like Tarzan of the Navy. The humble-bragging fucker.

  He helped her up, brushing off the hands of the other men, one of whom she realized with creeping horror had been copping some grabass while they pulled her out of the basket. She’d been so numb with cold and fear that she hadn’t noticed. Even now Cady was partly inured to the groping by sheer relief at having survived. Bowditch was not, however, and he smashed the man in the face, breaking his nose with a swift crunching elbow.

  “Unhand the lady, you dog, or I will run you through.”

  That was kind of redundant, seeing as how the dude had let go of her ass as soon as Bowditch broke his face, but she appreciated the thought. Three of Bowditch’s men set to kicking the groper across the deck of the Sournois while he fussed over her.

  “My apologies, mistress,” Bowditch said. “We are shorthanded and must call upon those of Quarrel’s crew who have given us their ransom. Be assured no man of the Herald would take such a liberty.”

  Still numb, but slowly regaining her composure and the feeling in her extremities, Cady almost snorted with laughter. The men of the Herald looked as if they’d fuck the crack of dawn quicker than a two-peckered billy goat, but they were amusing themselves just then by kicking Cap’n Buttsqueeze over there to pieces.

  Like, actual fucking pieces.

  Parts of him were coming off like a big old Mr. Potato Head, except made out of offal and mutton bits.

  “Whoa, enough!” Cady shouted, waving her arms at them to stop. “He’s had enough,” she called out, uncomfortable with the idea of kicking a dude to death just for being a douchebag. “He’s had enough,” she said again, and taking in their confused expressions she reached for an appropriately old-timey way of telling them to back the Hell off and calm the fuck down.

  “Be done with him,” she said suddenly, pleased with the very puffy-shirt pirate princess sound of the phrase.

  The sailors from the Herald gave her a quizzical look, but shrugged. Their leader, a snaggle-toothed Popeye type, saluted her with two fingers.

  “Right you are then, missee,” he said, before ordering the others to pick up the twitching body and toss it overboard. It all happened so quickly, and Cady was so not expecting it, that she just stared at them as the screaming pirate went over the side and into the deep.

  She turned to Bowditch. “Er, that’s not what I meant.”

  Bowditch seemed as confounded as his men.

  “Did you wish that we should keelhaul the brute, mistress? I could have the gaffer fetch him back with hook and rope.”

  The ‘gaffer’, the same bloodthirsty old Sponge Bob Murderpants dude who’d just ordered the man thrown overboard, stepped forward w
ith a gap-tooth grin, swinging something that looked like a fishing hook big enough to catch Moby Fucking Dick.

  “Yaarr, m’lady,” he growled, “I’ll fetch ’im back for ye. Croach him fair through puckered arse with this ’ere bead-hook then, I will.”

  “No!” she cried out. “No arse hooking. Just… just leave him be. He can… swim away or something. Jesus. They said the me-too thing would get out of hand.”

  “Then we must hasten below decks, Mistress Smith,” Bowditch cautioned. “Our transfer was hidden from observers on the shore by the mass of the Herald, but we will soon enough be in range of the lookouts on Fort Hill. You are not dressed as a lady for travel but you are more comely than the general run of sea cur, no? They will not tarry long to burle you out from a knot of these ugly jack tars.”

  Cady wondered if Bowditch had just fugly-shamed his men, but they roared with laughter at whatever the hell he’d actually meant.

  “Back to it, men,” he ordered. “And remember not a word to the Lobsterbacks when they come aboard. We have this prize thanks to Mistress Smith, and the captain says there will be plenty more for the taking with her help, aye?”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” they cried back in a lusty chorus.

  The gaffer (presumably some sort of old school, nautical arse-hooking specialist) even threw in an extra loud “Yaarr,” and a big wink, just for Cady.

  “But what about Quarrel’s men?” she asked as Bowditch led her towards a hatch that went below. “Why wouldn’t they narc us out… I mean… er… you know…”

  Bowditch smiled.

  “I presume you fear betrayal by our prisoners. Fear not, then. The officers of Le Sournois all labor at the Herald’s pumps, in chains. The few wretched dogbolts you see about you here will do as they are told on a promise of their liberty and coins for convoy in their purse.”

  “But if they don’t?” Cady asked. It seemed a hell of a gamble, trusting pirates like that.

  Bowditch did not think so.