Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  He let it roll in his mouth, allowed the brandy to wallow down his gullet like an oyster. Too much of what he drank and ate was stolen. Rarely was it gifted.

  He let the waves roll him. The boat had a sail and he would make something of that soon.

  For now he hugged his brandy, for the burns, for his closed eyes and aching organs that had taken the blows of his silence, and lastly for the apothecary boy he had once been.

  He hugged his brandy and wept.

  For no-one could see him do it.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  It had been a silent dinner. Thomas Howard apologised that a brief sickness had come over him and meant he was unable to attend. Manvell was in irons in the same quarter. For a moment Coxon thought on the words they could whisper to each other through the thin hemp walls.

  His table spelled misery now. Just the drunken doctor and the dull sailing-master. He was unable to discern which of them was worse company and felt strangely disembodied as he watched them tediously chase their peas around their plates; Coxon saw the tragedy of himself seated and eating with them.

  When they first met he had seen them as men holding out for their pension, forgotten and aged, wasted and dilettante. He had scorned them and chortled about them with his strong young men, his favoured companions, as stalwart as he saw himself in the mirror that showed no age. Now he was sitting in the dark corner table at the wedding feast with the forgotten cousins and spinster aunts; the table where the servants forgot to pour. The sound of cutlery scraping irritating his teeth like chewing iron filings.

  ‘Doctor,’ he said at last, leaning back. ‘Perhaps if you were to pierce your peas with your fork. Might that suffice? Rather than concentrating on your tongue between your lips for us all to view and sweeping them with a broom.’

  ‘Sir?’ Doctor Howe flushed more than usual.

  Coxon demonstrated with his own remnants.

  ‘La!’ He popped the pea satisfactorily between his teeth.

  Doctor Howe followed, confused and unsure, like an ape given a mirror. He smiled bashfully as he skewered his strays.

  A knock on the door was welcome distraction.

  It was the bosun, Abel Wales. Since Manvell had been indisposed Coxon had made a point to learn the man’s name. Abel wrung his cap through his hands and tapped his forehead twice.

  ‘Beg your pardon, Captain, sorry to disturb.’

  ‘What is it, Wales?’ Coxon wiped his mouth and pushed back his chair. He knew the face of a man scared to talk but bound to do so.

  ‘The man Kennedy is dead for the drink.’ Wales wrung his hands. ‘And we’re missing a boat, Captain.’

  He quickly moved aside as Coxon’s advance looked set to collide with him. He stumbled on his last words, used them as a shield as he called after the captain.

  ‘The pirate is gone.’

  Coxon exploded into the mess. Instinctively men stood or covered their plates and mugs as if they were stolen. The only place to look was towards him and the bosun and his team with their belaying pins.

  ‘Who let the pirate go? Which of you has done this treachery?’

  He ducked through the water bags and isinglass lanterns expertly yet still seemed at full furious height to them.

  ‘I will take this as mutiny!’ He looked at them all.

  ‘If the man does not present himself I will cast you all as mutinous! Every man will be punished!’

  They looked back at him now with puzzled eyes. But he had seen those looks before also.

  ‘Do not think it cannot be done!’ He wheeled back to the bosun with accusing finger.

  ‘That includes you all! You are all in this! If you do not find this traitor you will be cast as the rest! The dereliction of your watch is enough to get you the lash!’

  He saw his arm pointing, saw it tremble. He pulled it back and drew from his past resolve to damp his ill humour, the same resolve from decades ago when French frigates glinted on the horizon and midshipmen flapped about his decks. He straightened his cuffs and waistcoat.

  ‘I trust you, lads, to root out the criminal. Someone has cost you your gold. That is what has drawn my anger. My concern for you. It is troubled times for all of us unless you be kings and Whigs.’

  He moved back towards the stair, through the bosun’s team playing with their wood and knotted rope and found Thomas Howard standing waiting at the foot.

  ‘It was me, Captain,’ Howard said and braced himself. ‘I let him go.’ His face drained white, a boy again as Coxon loomed over him. ‘No other is to blame.’

  Coxon only felt his shoulder move but he was sure that it must have been only him that punched Thomas Howard’s face and sent him skidding on his back all the way to the scuttlebutt.

  He watched the lieutenant sit up and rub his face then climbed the companion for air, for space where there would be no other face to look at, but the bosun, Abel Wales, was already at his back.

  ‘Captain?’ he said and waited for the head to turn.

  ‘What do you want done with him? With Mister Howard, Captain.’

  Coxon straightened for a deep breath, put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry for my words before. I was angry. I must consider what has occurred.’

  ‘And Mister Howard?’

  Coxon withdrew his hand.

  ‘This is an Article of War, Mister Wales. You will be part of the ship’s court. Mister Howard will be kept fasting and awake. You will see to it that he knot his own cat by dawn.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  They began at dawn. Thirty of them came now, rowed from the ship under lantern in the night from the Shadow. And the wall grew. And the tide kept back. And the cave appeared with the sun.

  Devlin threw his mug of tea to the sand and came down the beach.

  ‘That should do it,’ he said and planted his hands on his hips like a boy admiring his first garden fort. ‘Enough to take a boat in.’

  Peter Sam admired less.

  ‘We don’t know how many are in there waiting. They’d have seen the water fall. Cocking their arms to us to come.’

  Devlin looked back.

  ‘Why would that hinder us? Only men. Only guns.’

  ‘It’s pirates and guns,’ Peter Sam snapped. ‘That’s three or four guns a piece and grenadoes and maybe a cannon or two. As we would.’

  ‘As we will,’ Devlin said. ‘Pound of lead for pound of flesh.’

  The men began to return from the wall, slapping each other’s backs. Peter Sam came in closer to Devlin, so as not to be heard.

  ‘And suppose that Levasseur has gone with the greater part of the gold? That this here is his cave. Men protecting. That this is where they hide out and it’s just food and a hold for dyes and sail-cloth and we’re chasing a tartar?’

  ‘Look at that dawn, Peter,’ Devlin stood aside as if that was the only way Peter Sam could see it. ‘If what you say was true it would be raining now and that wall would fall. Instead we’ve got maybe six hours before the water comes back. Let’s to it.’

  The pot rattled over the fire-pit and the ash blew and picked up the sand and Devlin and Peter were too slow to close their eyes as it swathed them.

  They turned away, felt the wind-blown grains scratch their necks. Their men ducked and shielded their eyes as the sand danced along the beach like powder and whipped around the white rocks. The trees crashed like the surf, appeared to walk towards the waterline.

  Then it was gone and all was still again. The birds recovered before the men and their whoops and whistles told each other of what had happened like gossiping market-wives.

  Peter Sam brushed his beard and eyes.

  ‘You were saying there, Patrick?’

  Inside, beneath the earth, within the earth, Levasseur had not slept. He had sat on his throne of stone after he had made his preparations, his reparations, and waited for a sign in his own cathedral.

  He heard the pool complaining as the wind pulled it away. He came to the
edge to watch sand shimmer like diamonds in the shafts of light as air rushed through the narrow hole opposite.

  Sign enough.

  He looked down at the pool and the bodies whirling like driftwood.

  That would shock them. He wiped his sweating lip. Slow them down with the horror of Levasseur about to face them.

  He giggled his way back to the cross and patted it as if its gold were shoulder to shoulder in his conspiracy. He loaded his belt with pistols and cutlass and regretted that he had not taken the time to carry them to the outcrop of rock beneath the hole. But then he had been exhausted, having spent the night dragging the six-pound cannon up there to stare down, and the bodies into the pool to surprise.

  He watched the water steady itself and become glass, and the sand drifted down on the bodies as they slowed in their spinning. A few seemed to stand in the water as if alive but bobbed like fishing lures as they swelled with the water. Priests and pirates linking arms and kissing, O’Neill’s body chief amongst them, staring up with his black hole as if in song. The priest’s arrogance quelled.

  Levasseur went to wait by his gun.

  They did not need a light. The water glowed beneath the boat, lit by the day receding behind them as they paddled further in, the oars out of the thole pins for silent running. The eight pirates were dappled with the supernatural light, the surface of the water misting in the heat as they cut through it.

  Devlin was first, seated at the bow, then Peter Sam, always behind him. Hugh Harris, Adam Cowrie and the four others crouched at the oars and tiller. They did not speak. Any word would echo forwards to the cavern, announcing them as surely as gunshot.

  The tide played against the walls and Peter Sam noted where the mark was greenest and alive: nine feet above their gunwale. How quickly did that nine feet fill? he wondered. How quickly would their boat and bones be crushed?

  He looked back at the mouth of the sea-cave, as distant now as if looking up from the bottom of a well; and then Devlin put his hand to him and was holding out his other over the bow.

  Ahead they saw a brighter green, alive by shafts of light like the lattice of the rays through the deck hatches. And then they reached for their pistols as the first of the heads revolved into view.

  Someone cursed as a floating body turned lazily into the light. Devlin glared behind him as the miscreant’s voice echoed around them and the pirate ducked his head away from his captain’s stare.

  They pulled in the oars as bodies flapped against them. Grey faces scraped against the boards. Flaccid arms appeared to try to push them back. Devlin shared a look with Peter Sam and then down at the carrion circling the boat like sharks.

  Levasseur had heard the English oath and slid himself along the rock to the vent of the gun, the smouldering match wrapped around his wrist. He would only have to put the heel of his hand to the touch-hole.

  A string sack of fifty half-inch balls of grapeshot waited in front of the bag of powder, already pierced. It was sixty feet from the gun’s black mouth to where the cave met the pool. The powder would hiss and flare and crawl to its home. Then, that pause, that prick of doubt wondering if the trail had gone out, and then the roar and bellow and the flying carriage and cry of pain from the iron. And skulls and bones would become skulls and bones. Apparent and apart. Ragged with meat.

  Levasseur’s gun did not have the room to recoil. He would have to leap clear; not knowing where it would spend its fury with only a mountain to fly back against. And then he would pull his brace of pistols and finish the job. And they would leave his gold. Leave his kingdom. Join the rest of the traitors and their stinking traitors’ flesh.

  He wiped his face clean of sweat again, checked the match. And then they came.

  They had turned an oar into a bowsprit as the bow peeped out of the cave and their traitor’s black rag dipped forward into the water.

  Did they think he would fear that? That he would shiver at a skull in a compass rose with crossed pistols?

  He saw the first of their huddled bodies, crouching like cowards and he put his wrist to the powder and scuttled away. Half the boat now and more bodies. He hid in the shadows, a chameleon against the rock, as he had been for weeks with the dust and the damp, almost a lichen. He pulled his pistols and aimed at the bodies hiding in the boat.

  Cowards. Traitors.

  The powder’s hiss vanished down the vent, seeking its purpose. It met powder and bit down, came alive. And the cavern exploded with its life. Life to end life.

  The flag ripped, its grinning skull’s teeth rent. The balls chewed through the boat and the men. The thunder of the cannon seemed almost visible and echoed cracking round the cavern long after the gun had shattered the rock behind and jumped to the pool. The water boiled as it swallowed, the iron to lay there forever.

  Levasseur shook the ringing from his head and levelled two pistols. Dust fell on his arms, then chips of stone. He ignored, fired down into the stunned bodies, the ones not already wrecked, his shots muffled by the pounding echo now ripping stone from the ceiling.

  He stood, panting, the cannon-smoke hanging.

  He surveyed his work, dropped the spent pistols and pulled more of his guns to punish the interlopers.

  The boat limped in now, its flag spread on the water. He puffed his chest at the bodies splayed all about.

  Their grey faces were familiar. Drawn and putrescent. Their bodies fat and drowned.

  A crack from the water and a shot sang and split the rock beside his head, sending dust into his good eye.

  Only Peter Sam had been strong enough to heave the dead bodies into the boat. He wedged them into place and slipped over the side to join the others treading water and pushing the boat into the cavern. He had to hang onto Hugh Harris; Peter Sam was not the strongest swimmer.

  They had left their weapons and loads in the boat, for wet powder was the end of the game, all except Devlin who held his load above his head and clung at rock and then had crept along into the cave as the cannon splintered the boat.

  The water bucked, dust fell, the sound blinded, the cannon ploughed into the pool and Devlin had fired at Levasseur, calm as turning a page in a book.

  Levasseur bolted from the shot, and the pirates went to the sinking boat for their pistols and musketoons. They held beneath the gunwales, the steel at their hip dragging, their bodies anticipating more lead and they looked to the cavern’s smoking walls for a bank of enemies.

  Nothing. Empty. A tomb. A grave for the already dead and broken now slumping into the water; drowning with the pirates’ guns. Hugh Harris, with Peter Sam weighing him down, yelled as the pool took his twin Dolep pistols. He beat his fist against the water. The others sculled to the far side and watched Devlin find purchase and climb the wall as two more pistol shots peppered the stone around him. He did not stop and made the ledge as Levasseur ran to his stockpile of arms.

  Hugh Harris struggled with Peter Sam wrapped around him like a cape. ‘I thinks you too fat, Peter,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour,’ he pushed him to the last wood of the boat still floating, ‘don’t drown.’

  Peter Sam clutched the wood as Hugh followed his captain.

  ‘Damn you, Harris!’ he scowled and dug his nails into the boat.

  Devlin belted his pistol. He pulled his hanger, cleared the ebony knife from behind his back. That would be the way now. Steel. Close quarters. Teeth and fists. There was only one man here. Nothing new, not even worth a deeper breath.

  He pressed on around the walls. Soaked and heavy. An empty pistol and his blade running wet. Against the pirate who had taken the largest prize on the earth.

  Levasseur set himself now to meet the man who would take it from him.

  Outside, the other boats had heard the blast, had seen it quake across the water. High up against the mountain, against the green, they saw smoke rising from some other place attached to the cave. They picked up their oars and powered to the cave without word or hesitating thought.

  Devlin moved to the o
utcrop where the cannon had been, where it had recoiled to smash against the rock, only now the rock had cracked, stone had fallen, was still falling, and what must have been a small fissure was now an opening. He looked inside and up. Light. The descent where O’Neill had run to, surely.

  While he climbed he had not seen Levasseur when the pistols missed. Was this his escape? Had he run from him?

  A ringing report at his ear and he ducked, the shot spitting stone into his hair where his face had been.

  He crouched and spun. Levasseur was on the ledge behind, with another pistol set, and for a blink Devlin avowed the colossal image of a pirate.

  Pistols and apostles holstered across the chest. An eye-patch, a scar running beneath and to his lip. A snake-like form wrapped in cannon-smoke and clothes that could have been a hundred years old and cut for other men.

  A pirate.

  And for a moment, just a moment, Devlin felt his sword heavy. Too heavy.

  Then the pistol cracked and he could see the ball and flame, his eye attached to it as it blurred over the pool and the heads of his men looking up at him, Peter Sam’s last of all, and then he watched his left shoulder slam away from him.

  He had never been shot at from the front before. On that day last year with Trouin it had been a ball to his back, a larger bore. From across the cave, from old powder, this was like a schoolboy’s shove. Still, a spark went off in his brain, his heart in his ears and against his ribs as his body shocked.

  He fell back, his legs failing him.

  But the sword held.

  One hand stretched to the sand but the fist with the steel in it was white and declared his signature across the chasm, to that pirate form ruling its stage.

  Devlin was far from done.

  He stumbled down the shale path, holding the steel before him as the terrible pirate, larger now, pulled again.

  Words.

  There were hollered words following the shot but Devlin could not hear them over the breaking and splash of rock. He saw Hugh Harris’s head and boots rolling onto the ledge before him.