Cross of Fire

by Mark Keating

  ‘But Dandon protected you all!’ He ran his gaze over the pirates.

  ‘He only gave what he knew when he learned your captain was a murderer before the pirate! That he ran from London with blood!’ He turned enough to show his back to Devlin.

  ‘Did he not tell you so? Murdered he who had taken him in? How many murders to make him captain?’

  Peter Sam listened, watched Devlin’s lowered hat.

  They had made him captain when only he had returned that night in the Verdes. Seth Toombs had survived alone, had they known it, but Devlin had shot him through the mouth soon enough to silence him when the chance came. And there was Thomas Deakins – Peter Sam to hold him close no more.

  ‘This true, Devlin?’ Peter Sam stepped from the wall of men. ‘Who else did you kill to get this ship?’ His hand crept to his blade’s pommel.

  Devlin looked to his quartermaster, opened his mouth only to have it cut by an Irish voice hailing from the fo’c’sle.

  ‘All true!’ Kennedy shouted over the deck, and the heads swivelled to look at him. He had slipped from the Standard, had taken advantage of the grappling ropes and the wood so close together. From a king’s ship to a pirate. And he knew pirates.

  ‘That dog killed my father! My name is Captain Walter Kennedy.’ He jumped the steps.

  ‘Captain Kennedy of the great pirate Roberts!’ He sucked in the looks and whispers that the name evoked.

  ‘Brought from the noose to have my due,’ he pointed to Devlin across the deck, ‘with that man there.’

  Devlin walked forward, Coxon forgotten.

  ‘I didn’t kill your father and you know it.’

  Peter Sam stood between them.

  ‘As you didn’t kill Seth? As you didn’t kill Deakins. My Deakins. And the rest?’

  Kennedy could feel his time arrive, his chance. Coxon had hanged him back in London this very day. He had been newborn this day and now was back among his kind. He could not have planned it better.

  ‘I call my right as brethren. By sword, by pistol, for my slight!’

  Devlin looked up at Peter Sam.

  ‘This is not the place, Peter. We don’t do this. Not you and I.’

  Peter showed nothing. There was chaos here. The beating rain, the king’s ship. Confrontations will out under such, will end under such.

  Coxon rang his sword against the bell.

  ‘Enough!’

  The ship upon him again.

  ‘My orders are for Devlin! Give him up and I swear you no harm. Be free with your gold. All of you free with your ship! What do you owe him who has brought the king upon you?’

  Adam Cowrie walked out of the line. Showed Coxon the fat scar in the palm of his hand where a poker had been rammed for stealing a pair of clogs.

  ‘We don’t owe him nothing. We don’t live like that. I got this scar and six weeks for owing somebody. Reckon you owe, too, Cap’n. That’s why you’re here. We takes all what we could never have. Neither borrower nor lender be. That’s Shakespeare, Cap’n.’ He put a hand out to Devlin. ‘And he taught me that when men like you would have me shovel their shit.’

  Coxon pushed him back, lifted his sword.

  ‘Good for you! Patrick!’ He came on. ‘Kennedy can wait! If your men won’t deal than I shall!’

  Devlin walked away from Peter Sam, a palm behind to order him to hold.

  ‘Give me Dandon. Show him to me,’ he mirrored Coxon’s sword.

  Coxon began to circle again.

  ‘I have orders for your head. Subdue me. I’ll give you your friend.’

  ‘And my ship?’

  ‘That’s for their next captain to decide.’

  ‘I beat you before, John. On The Island, remember? Nothing’s changed.’

  Coxon stopped walking, his feet set.

  ‘Everything has changed!’

  He thrust forward and Devlin hit away the blade, gave his pistol to the crowd with his free hand and pulled his dagger with the same. Coxon stiffened at the speed of him.

  ‘John,’ Devlin was calm as they walked the wet cockpit of their fight, the crowd shifting back. ‘I ain’t your boy no more. I done this many times. I’ll show you your back through your chest.’

  Coxon shook his head.

  ‘Not this year!’

  He thrust again, turned into a sweeping strike with a turn of his feet and still Devlin’s blade was there.

  Nothing grand. Not under the rage of the storm. Devlin had fought Trouin and that had been glorious, but that was on a clean summer deck on still waters. Here the deck yawed and the two of them pitched and brawled like drunkards across the sopping oak.

  Nothing of skill showed in their hacking; their blades struck clumsily and Devlin tossed away the advantage of his dagger to grip wood for balance. Peter Sam stamped on the black blade as it slid to his foot. He picked it up. His now. To give back or to remember by.

  Elbows to jaws, knees to guts, steel and brass filling their senses as their guarded knuckles closed to their heads.

  Above, the men in the tops kept their swivels to the deck of Standard’s men craning to view, Howard and Manvell keeping order, holding onto the shrouds for a better look, and they gritted their teeth when Coxon slipped to his knees as the ships turned in the squall, the storm reminding everybody where they were, under its eye.

  The pirate took a breath, held out a hand. The captain beat it away, steadied himself with his sword into the oak, saw a gap. A boot out and the sweep of a leg.

  Devlin’s back hit the deck and he looked up blindly at the rain firing into his face, his masts rolling in circles above. He came up slow.

  He would not give quarter again.

  They hunched over to keep their weight low, cutlasses to the deck. Together they wiped their mouths of the rain and sweat and again charged.

  Years before they had spent Sundays sparring when Mass was done, the captain seeing the promise in an Irishman that could read. The captain teaching the young man the art of the astrolabe and Davis quadrant. He might have become a sailing master under Coxon’s tutelage, aspire beyond his birth. Instead he had become the pirate when Coxon had been taken from him. Devlin’s first act of piracy had been petty – to take Coxon’s own sword and silver case of lighting pine-sticks bequeathed from his father. He had probably eyed them through all their years together and always dreamt of taking them, unknowing that Coxon would have willed them to him. He had after all no hearth and wife waiting, no son at his knee. Instead he had spawned a pirate that had pissed on every step of his career. And now he sold yards of cloth in Boston, brought back to the king only for his knowledge of the damned. All his years of service reduced to sniffing out his old steward’s arse from the stench of others’.

  His cutlass’s scalloped guard punched into Devlin’s face, scraped up to his eye. He did not wait for the blood and punched it again, the crunch rolling up to his shoulder. Devlin’s head went back, hand to his face, white shirt open. No room to thrust so Coxon swiped, rain arcing off his blade, and watched the watery red seep through the shirt, its boldness inciting enough for a back slice and another glorious stripe of red running with the rain drained down the pirate’s ribs while Coxon’s chest filled with the sight.

  Devlin fell back. Arms caught him, hands across his chest as it drooled with his blood. They pushed him forward with private abetting slaps and then looked at their hands, looked down at their bloodied palms before the rain almost instantly rinsed them clean.

  Devlin’s vision was blurred: a white shirt and black coat was before him, sword up, defending with two inches of steel. He shook his head clear just enough to see the silver edge flying at his head.

  His guard caught it, ran down to meet the other and slammed it back with all his weight to hit the snarling face that he could no longer remember.

  Devlin staggered to wood, steadied himself and as the cold blood on his body reminded him, recalled where he was. He sensed his open back, the feeling of space on his spine, and twisted from t
he sword whistling through the rain.

  He watched the blade cut and stick deep into the wood, the arm heaving to pull it free, and looked along it to the bared teeth and wide eyes.

  He raised his cutlass high.

  The cutlass was short to stay clear of ropes when boarding and swinging, was crude and heavy to cut canoes and carcasses of meat. It cleaved. Ordered for the purpose.

  Devlin tasted his own blood, the salt of the tropical rain in his mouth. The spice of slaughter. It cleared the fog for him to recognise the face just enough.

  He held back the hacking blow, slipped his edge to Coxon’s throat, felt the flesh hang over it and used his free hand to prise the fingers from the stuck sword one by one. His strength proved greater than Coxon’s resistance to it – one finger prised back and free for every year Devlin had served him. His hand was now a fist and he sent it flying to the sternum of his former master with a hammer blow that slammed him to the deck.

  He stood on Coxon’s arms, sword tip to throat. Coxon bucked for a moment, enough for pride, and Devlin let him do it.

  ‘That’s it finished, John,’ he said. ‘We’re done for the years.’

  His blood dripped on Coxon, the rain spattering it like freckles. He pressed the blade just enough to draw pink, a shave for his men to see.

  ‘Give. And give me Dandon.’

  He did not expect the laugh.

  ‘He is gone!’ Coxon mocked. ‘Escaped! To the sea. Dead I hope! I have nothing for you. Nothing!’

  ‘So why do we do this? I promise I have no gold.’

  ‘Am I lying about Dandon? As you lie about the gold?’

  The blood brought sweat to Devlin’s lips. More spice to grind with his grist. His eyes swam unfocused with the wounds about him.

  Just push down with the cutlass. Push down through the neck to the deck. End his past.

  He faltered. The wind and rain battered his reason and the roar of the world dulled as if he were already under the sea, back to diving into the pool of Levasseur’s cave. He needed to rest, to sleep. He tried to recall the names of the faces of his men about him; the mystery of a ship against his broadside.

  Kennedy whipped a hanger from an idle belt and ran across the deck.

  ‘A coward is it?’ he cried. ‘I’ll show how a pirate deals these dogs!’

  He slapped off Coxon’s hat, pulled him up by his hair just as the fog slipped from Devlin and he heard the howling cry as Kennedy drove his blade through Coxon’s chest and twisted it free.

  ‘That’s the way of it!’ Kennedy held his sword high. The blade was clean, the blow too fast to even carry blood.

  His mother swept into the bedroom, her dress as white as the curtains that billowed out from the summer window.

  ‘John Coxon!’ she frowned as she bent and gathered up his school-clothes. ‘Am I to spend forever picking up after you, young man?’

  ‘No, Mother,’ he said. He was as tall as her and that was not true.

  ‘Not forever.’

  The clothes fell to the floor where she had stood and now vanished. The curtains blew harder, wider, rolling above his head. They were sails now, grey with the smut of cannon. They came back and forth through the window in heartbeats. Only the beats were the wet sound of a mop slapped to a deck. Grey sails. Rain on his face.

  ‘It’s a sucking wound,’ Peter Sam said to Devlin as they looked down at Coxon’s bubbling chest. ‘His lung has gone. Drawing air through him. He’s not even here any more.’

  ‘What’ll we do?’ Devlin asked, watching as Coxon’s eyes looked through him glassily.

  Peter Sam pulled his pistol, pushed it past Coxon’s lips with a terrible scrape of iron against tooth, and fired with a hand over the barrel to cut the spray of blood. ‘We do that,’ he said and turned Devlin to Kennedy who was dipping his blade out to them both.

  ‘You see, lads!’ Kennedy laughed. ‘That’s a captain’s work! Let me spare Devlin and I’ll lead us to glory, boys! I be your captain now! I’ve come from Roberts and escaped London to find my way again!’

  Devlin could see the fear in the slitted eyes and the bravado of the bully – but without the meat and muscle to back it up. He looked back to Coxon’s slumped and portly shape. He suddenly looked heavier than before. Heavier because his lungs had expanded, had shifted in his chest, and his neck had swollen as the air had ballooned there. His face was a bloody mask.

  Peter Sam pushed him round to where the Standard’s men were all leaning along the gunwale and staring down. Manvell and Howard hung in the shrouds.

  ‘Do something. Before they do. We’re taking in water.’

  Devlin saw only Kennedy.

  ‘Axes.’ Devlin was breathing hard. ‘Cut us loose. They can’t fire close or damage themselves. Make sail. Get ahead. She has no chasers. We do.’ He stroked the blood from his face. ‘And give me a minute.’ He took his dagger from Peter Sam’s belt and with his cutlass crossed the planks to Kennedy.

  ‘One minute.’

  Peter Sam bellowed his orders and every hand that held one slammed a boarding axe through the ropes that bound the broadsides and the Shadow got more scars for her end of days.

  A handful of the Standard’s crew had climbed the gunwale to leap. The sudden heave of the deck as the tension snapped from the ropes drew in their courage. And the storm had not done with them yet.

  The ships pivoted and spun apart. Together they had been almost eight hundred tonnes of wood and cordage but torn loose they were paper boats in a drain hole and the tempest let them know it.

  Kennedy’s heels tripped back from the bloodied form coming on.

  ‘Now, Patrick. I just did what you could not. Don’t be showing these lads that you’re sorry I took the life of a man against us. I’m choosing to fight. You be the one choosing to swallow. Let thems declare on who they want as captain. That’s the way.’

  Devlin did not speak.

  He had words. He had platitudes. He had Virgil and Shakespeare ready to sprout and vilify. But men that are only ‘things’ deserve only silence.

  Manvell, from the shrouds, watched the pirate captain as he advanced. He had seen Devlin and Coxon fight, then had seen Kennedy run Coxon through. Now, now as the ship pulled away, only two men existed on the deck before him.

  Howard was below him, shouted up.

  ‘We could fire the sixes, sir!’

  Manvell looked down.

  ‘You are in command, Thomas.’

  ‘Your advisement, sir?’

  Manvell raised his eyes to the guns set in the tops.

  ‘They have not fired. They could cut us down if they wished,’ he said. ‘And I want to see this.’

  Kennedy swallowed, wished for a pistol and then Devlin was inside his sword’s length and had cut his edge across Kennedy’s wrist.

  The hilt fell out of his hand as if he were already dead, the blood falling with the rain and he clasped the severed veins with his good hand.

  He gasped at it. He had never even seen it happen and still Devlin came on, too close for the cutlass and then Kennedy’s eyes looked down to the dagger sticking out of his chest and he had not seen that either; as his father had not seen.

  He fell to his knees and still Devlin did not speak. Kennedy felt his chest pulse against the blade. He gripped his wrist tighter, fought the need to let go the staunching of the blood to pull the dagger free.

  Then the blade had been pulled – too precious to lose – and he was in the air, tumbling over the side as Devlin cradled him, lifted Kennedy’s knees and, pulling him up by his throat, sent him into the sea.

  Devlin sank against the gunwale, his wounds draining him again now his lust was spent. He watched a shark leap on the body and hoped Kennedy was not yet dead enough.

  There were birds on the fish’s back, and the thrashing of more sharks, the rolling white bellies that always followed the ships. He looked up to the sky clearing, the rain only coming down now and not from every angle, great wings and cries about the cros
strees.

  Sharks. Birds. Life coming back to the sea. The edge of the storm.

  He looked to Manvell watching from the shrouds. Devlin’s cutlass and dagger went back to his belt. Done now. Put away. He tipped his fingers to his hat and at the man in the shrouds.

  For another day. I have avenged. Avenged him.

  The figure nodded back.

  Aye. Another day. I have your face now. Your ship is holed. If you taunt I will destroy.

  And Manvell climbed down the shrouds.

  Devlin swung back to his crew, to the Shadow.

  ‘Any other want to call for captain? I’m yet only half-dead.’

  He saw only the backs of heads and he clasped his ribs, leaned with his ship, with Peter Sam, the doubts no longer on his face.

  ‘Out of here,’ he said and the Shadow heeled to his word.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The main course fell, the Shadow’s quarterdeck already at the fo’c’sle of the Standard and Devlin yelled for Lawson to brace them back.

  ‘Hold!’

  He knelt by Coxon’s body and brought him forward to his shoulder, dead arm along his back. He tried to stand. Peter Sam caught his stumble and Devlin pushed him by and rose with his old master over his shoulder.

  ‘To them. Not us.’

  He staggered to the gunwale, his eye on Manvell and Howard, and waited for the ship to gain. His hand went to the rail to steady his legs then returned a breath later to holding the arm draped about him.

  The derrick came and Coxon’s body was lashed beneath his arms and swung across. Devlin painted red by both their bloods.

  He watched the body being lowered to the Standard, watched Manvell and Howard carefully unbind him, and then let Lawson give the cry to slip away. He took his hat and threw it across to their deck.

  Howard saw it travel, watched it fall along the scuppers. He would pick it up soon enough to prevent some liar proudly claiming it as a token. He tapped Manvell’s shoulder.

  ‘I went for the papers, Christopher. As the captain said. I thought them orders.’ He put them out to Manvell, the seal broken: a purple seal.