“If you have to shoot something, go up on the stockade and shoot the first stray dog you see. Nobody’ll miss that,” her father answered. “And after you do, get one of the slaveys to chuck the carcass into the bay. Don’t leave it lying there to rot and stink. Does that suit you, you little rakehell?”
“I’d still rather shoot a copperskin,” Ethel said. Red Rodney’s face must have sent up storm warnings, for she backtracked in a hurry: “A stray dog will do, I suppose. Better than nothing.” She hurried away.
A few minutes later, a pistol banged. Rodney was tearing into roasted honker then, and couldn’t hear the dog howl. He guessed it did, though, because Ethel didn’t come back unhappy. A smile spread over his face. He’d done what a father should do: he’d pleased his little girl—and he’d got her out of his hair for a while.
He didn’t smile so much about the honker. “What have we got here?” he demanded. “This sorry bastard’s no bigger than a rooster’s drumstick.” He exaggerated, and by no small amount, but he’d seen plenty of bigger honker legs.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but it’s the best the hunters brought back,” the cook replied.
“Likely tell, likely tell,” Rodney said. “When I was Ethel’s age, by Christ, the honkers were three times the size of this miserable bird.”
“Hunters say, sir, that the big ones are all gone—at least from close enough to Avalon to bring them back before they spoil,” the cook told him. “They have to shoot the smaller, scrubbier kinds instead. Even those are harder to find than they were once upon a time.”
“Sweet suffering Jesus!” Rodney poured himself more rum. “Will we have to start raising sheep and goats and cows? Are we farmers or are we men?”
The cook maintained a prudent silence. He was no pirate himself. He’d cooked for the governor of Nieuw Haarlem in Terranova till Red Rodney captured him and carried him back to Avalon. After eating some of his food, Rodney refused a ransom for him. The cook hadn’t done badly here—or rather, he might have done much worse, and he was smart enough to know it. If he said too much, his lot might change in a hurry.
“Running out of honkers!” Rodney said. “Bloody hell! What’s Atlantis coming to if we’re running out of honkers?”
Meinheer Piet Kieft had impressive waxed mustaches and an even more impressive pot belly. The governor of Nieuw Haarlem nodded to William Radcliff. “I do not love your cousin,” he said in gutturally accented English.
“Well, your Excellency, I must say that I’d wager I’ve not loved him for longer than you have,” William replied. “He has robbed me, plundered my ships, done all he could to hurt me.”
Piet Kieft snapped his fingers and poured more rum into his pewter cup. “Did he ever make you jump out a window naked when you were about to futter a serving girl with the best tits in the world?” He paused meditatively. “It was a second-story window.”
“Oh, dear,” Elijah Walton said before William could respond to that. “I’d heard you were somewhat discommoded in that raid, your Excellency, but I confess I did not realize the full extent of your, ah, difficulties. Please accept my sympathies.”
“And mine,” William added. He hoped, for the serving girl’s sake, she’d been about to get on top.
“This is not even the worst of it,” Kieft continued. “That son of a sow of a Red Rodney Radcliffe, that black-handed bastard, he stole from me my prime cook, and would not sell him back to me. It is war to the knife between me and him.”
Yes, you look as if you’ve spent all the time since starving, William thought. Piet Kieft hadn’t come to Stuart to be mocked, though. “Well, your Excellency, now is the time to see whether we can pay him back.”
“Pay him back for sacking my town—ja,” Kieft said. “I sack his. Pay him back for stealing Cornelius and making Katrina giggle when she sees me instead of opening her legs?…Even if I cut his heart out, it is not enough.” His piggy little eyes flashed. He wasn’t pretty, but William Radcliff wouldn’t have wanted him for an enemy.
“You have ships,” Walton said. “Mr. Radcliff here, our kindly host, has ships. I also have ships at my beck and call. If we gather together our separate contingents and sail against Avalon with overwhelming force—”
“It will be the greatest miracle since the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Radcliff finished for him.
“Your lack of spirit is distressing,” Walton said.
“I don’t lack spirit—no such thing,” William replied. “But who will bell the cat, and when, and how? I admire you, sir, for persuading Meinheer Kieft to confer with us. Nevertheless, people have been mooting the fall of Avalon since the pirates first seized it. That is many years ago now, but they hold it still.”
“They go on holding it, too, if we don’t work against them,” Piet Kieft said. “I aim to work against them—and most against Red Rodney—no matter what you do. But Master Walton is right. We have a better chance if we work together. I will do this. I do not even claim command.”
That made William Radcliff blink. That a Dutchman would take orders from an Englishman at sea…was no small miracle itself. The Dutch reckoned themselves the best sailors in the world, and the English would have been hard pressed to prove them wrong. England and Holland had fought two naval wars in the past generation, and the Dutch had got the better of it both times.
“Well, well.” William Radcliff turned to Elijah Walton. “If our comrade is so generous, can we fail to match him?”
Walton frowned. “My instructions are that an Englishman should lead the fleet against the corsairs.”
“And what am I if not an Englishman—and the man on the spot?” Radcliff asked angrily. “If you call me a damned honker, sir, as if I were a New Hastings man, I will wish you joy of our enterprise—and much luck in taking it anywhere without the aid of Radcliff of Stuart.”
“Be not overhasty, Mr. Radcliff, I pray you,” Walton said. “All these insults come from your own mouth, and none from mine.”
“You say this. Can you prove it? Will you prove it?” William pressed. “Or, by saying I am but an Atlantean, will you make me out to be a worthless settler, not deserving to associate with, let alone lead, his betters from the mother country?”
Coughing, Elijah Walton answered, “You cannot deny, sir, that your roots have been transplanted away from English soil these two centuries past.”
“Bugger my roots. My heart is English,” Radcliff said.
Piet Kieft stirred. “You started this, Walton. You set the pot on the fire. Will you now take it off and let it go cold because you cannot get all of your way? Or did you come here for just that purpose, so you could go back to London and say, ‘I tried, but we could reach no agreement against these corsairs’?”
“Before God, Meinheer Kieft, I did not!” Walton exclaimed.
Kieft looked around William Radcliff’s baroque jewel box of a study: the bookshelves, with volumes in English and Latin and French; the polished brass astrolable on the wall, part decoration, part tool; the ready-cut quills and the jars of ink; the coffee simmering over a low fire; the calico cat curled up asleep on a cushion. “This place seems English enough to suit me. Does it not seem to you the same?”
Perhaps Walton flushed, or perhaps it was a trick of the light streaming in through the south-facing octagonal window. The veritable Englishman’s gaze fixed on a honker skull, cleaned and polished, that held down one of the piles of paper on Radcliff’s desk. The honker seemed to stare back from empty eye sockets.
“Oh, come now, sir!” William said. “Come now! You might see the same, the very same, in a merchant’s residence in London, or a scholar’s, as a curiosity of natural philosophy. Deny it if you can.”
Instead of denying it, Elijah Walton grunted. “Oh, very well,” he said—most grudgingly, but say it he did. “Shall we style you Grand High Admiral of the Hesperian Gulf, then?” He gave a mocking seated bow.
“I care little what you call me,” William Radcliff answe
red. “If I do what I set out to do, everyone who comes along will try his damnedest to filch the credit from me. And if I fail, I’ll be that stupid honker from Atlantis, and all the blame will come down on my head. You win either way, Mr. Walton.”
Piet Kieft chuckled and nodded. He too knew what being a settler meant. As for Walton…he did not seem entirely displeased at the prospect.
A pigeon fluttered into the roost at Black Hand Fort. Pigeons had spread with men in Atlantis. Several native varieties of dove lived here, including a couple with wings too stunted to let them fly, but there had been no pigeons till people brought them hither.
This particular pigeon had a piece of parchment tied to its left leg. The handler who spied the parchment gently removed it, read the note on the inner surface, and hotfooted it to Red Rodney’s chamber.
His knock didn’t quite interrupt the pirate captain at play, which was lucky for him. Rodney’s companion squeaked and yanked a silk coverlet—loot from one of the small, Spanish-held islands south of Atlantis—up to her chin. “Don’t fret yourself, Jenny. He wouldn’t dare bother me if it weren’t important,” Radcliffe said. As he pulled up his breeches, he also raised his voice: “What’s toward?”
“A pigeon from Stuart,” came the voice from the other side of the door.
“Ha!” Red Rodney threw on his shirt, too. He was still barefoot, but he didn’t care. He went without shoes aboard ship more often than not, the better to feel the deck under his soles. “I knew it had to be something that mattered.”
“And I don’t?” Jenny said sulkily, but he was already striding toward the door.
His mind moved perhaps even faster than his feet. Of course he had spies on the east coast. Who in his right mind wouldn’t? He assumed his foes had spies in Avalon, too. They had reason not to love him and reason to try to find out what he was up to. With luck, he could feed them full of lies.
And maybe they were trying to do the same to him. Well, he’d find out. His thumb came down on the latch. He scowled at the man in the hallway. “What’s going on, Mick?” It had better be interesting, his voice warned.
“Pigeon just in from Stuart, skipper,” Mick repeated, and held out the message the bird had carried.
Red Rodney needed to squint to read it; the handwriting was precise but tiny, to cram as much as possible into a small space. As he read, he started to swear. “You’ve seen this?” he demanded.
“I have indeed,” the Irishman answered.
“Well, keep your mouth shut about it till I decide what to do. Can you manage that?”
“Sure and I can.”
“You’d better, by Christ. Dutchmen and Englishmen and my own cold-hearted cousin. If that’s not a mix cooked up in hell, I don’t know what would be. They aim to gut us, Mick, gut us like a honker after you knock it over the head. Are we going to let them get away with it?”
The pigeonkeeper muttered something in Erse. Rodney Radcliffe didn’t know what it meant, but it didn’t sound as if the man favored giving their enemies an easy time. No one in Avalon would. What the English did to pirates they caught could make the hardest man shiver of nights. And what the English did was a mercy next to what happened when the Spaniards got hold of you. The Spaniards liked whips, and they liked fire….
He read the scrap of parchment again. The Spaniards didn’t seem to be part of the gang William Radcliff was putting together. Rodney assumed his cousin crouched at the center of the plot. Where else would a spider go?
Returning to English, Mick asked, “How do you aim to stop the spalpeens, now?”
“We’ll have to fight ’em. We can’t very well run away, now can we?” Red Rodney said. The other pirate shook his head. Rodney muttered under his breath. Could freebooters fight as a fleet? They would have to, wouldn’t they? He could see the need. Would his fellow great captains be able to? How many of them were in Avalon right now? How many would get back soon?
“You’ll need a grand parley, won’t you?” Mick said.
“I was thinking that very thing,” Rodney answered. “A grand parley. Been a while since we had one.” The pirate chieftains of Avalon were independent princes. They parleyed to keep from fighting among themselves: rarely for any other reason. Would they hearken when Rodney summoned them?
They’d better hearken, by God, he thought. Otherwise, the first we’ll know of the enemy is when he starts cannonading us.
Even figuring out where to hold a grand parley took more in the way of diplomacy than most corsairs had in them. He couldn’t invite his fellow captains to Black Hand Fort. Oh, he could, if he aimed to start the squabble he wanted to head off. They would think he was trying to lure them all to one place at the same time so he could get rid of them at once. If he got an invitation like that, he would think the same thing himself. He had to find neutral ground.
Some unkind or possibly jealous soul had called Avalon the Sodom of Atlantis. A visitor from the other coast, the somber coast, had marveled that so many pirates were sick. Then he saw how the freebooters drank, and marveled even more that they weren’t all dead.
Mary’s Paradise would do if no other place sufficed. It was the biggest, bawdiest, grandest brothel and tavern in Avalon. Red Rodney knew he would have to pay Mary Carleton a goodly sum to take her establishment out of circulation long enough for the chieftains to meet there. No one in Avalon did things from the goodness of his—or her—heart. Maybe he could get some money back from his fellow captains. Or maybe not.
Jenny squawked when she heard that Red Rodney purposed talking with Mary Carleton. “You want some poxy trollop!” she shrilled. “You’ll swive her, and then you’ll fetch the foulness back to me!”
“I’d be poxed if I tried buggering Goldbeard or Cutpurse Charlie, that’s certain sure,” Red Rodney replied with a laugh, “but I want ’em there to do them a favor, not to try to take their favors.”
“Oh, yes.” Jenny didn’t want to believe him. “And you won’t even look at the doxies falling out of their dresses. They’re as common as a barber’s chair, they are—one’s out and the next one’s in. And who was the man who paid five hundred pieces of eight just to see some strumpet naked?”
“I’ve heard the story, but I don’t know the sorry bastard’s name,” Radcliffe answered. “It wasn’t me—I’ll tell you that. If I’d laid down so much silver, I’d’ve got more than a look for it.”
“Sure enough—likely you would have got the gleets,” his lady love said.
However snide Jenny was, Rodney sent a man he trusted to dicker a price from Mary Carleton. She proved more reasonable than he’d expected. “I know which side my bread’s buttered on,” she told Radcliffe’s emissary. “We’ll get enough of the ordinary business now that the Black Hand’s back in port.”
That being settled, Red Rodney sent messages to the other chieftains of Avalon, to the men who would have to lead the fight against the Dutch and the English and the eastern settlers if there was going to be one. Some of them were, or had been, his foes. He sent to them anyhow, under flag of truce. He hoped curiosity would bring them to Mary’s Paradise if nothing else did, for he was not in the habit of doing that. A captain of an earlier generation, when a priest asked him on his deathbed to forgive his enemies, answered, “I have none—I killed them all.” Red Rodney wasn’t quite so deadly, but not from lack of effort.
Some of the other pirate lords promised to come. Others said no at first. Patiently, Rodney sent to them again. You hurt only yourselves if you stay away, he wrote. If you want to go on doing what you’re doing, you need to hear me.
When he went down to Mary’s Paradise, he wore a ruffled shirt—not quite clean—and a jacket of velvet shot through with gold threads that was splendid even if it didn’t fit him quite so well as the Spaniard for whom it was made. He carried a cutlass, a dagger, two pistols in his belt, and a tiny one in his boot. His guards dressed more plainly but carried just as many weapons.
“You can futter the wenches if you find any you
fancy,” he told them. “But God help your scurvied souls if you get drunk. You’re here to fight if you have to, and not to fight if you don’t need to. No brawling for the fun of it, not today.”
And maybe that would do some good, and maybe it wouldn’t. His crew was better ordered than most, but men who’d put up with Royal Navy discipline didn’t turn pirate to begin with. And even Royal Navy sailors roistered ashore. Besides, if one of the other chieftains’ men started trouble, or if his own followers could claim they did…
Well, he would worry about that if he had to, the same way he would worry about Jenny slipping hemlock into his beer. He tried not to think about how black her scowl was as he left Black Hand Fort.
He had a standard-bearer carrying his banner, and another carrying a white flag to show he didn’t intend to fight unless he had to. Similar processions wound down from the other fortresses. No one pulled out a pistol or fired a matchlock. It wasn’t quite a miracle, but Red Rodney took it for a good sign.
Mary Carleton greeted him under a red lantern. “Welcome,” she said. “The room is waiting.”
“Thank you, Mistress Mary,” he said, more respectfully than he’d thought he would. She had to be at least thirty-five, but she was still a fine-looking woman.
Rum and roast meats sat on the table. A couple of captains had got there before him. They were already eating and drinking. One of them nodded to him, saying, “This is a good spread. What kind of nonsense are you going to spout?”
“I wouldn’t throw away this kind of money to spout nonsense,” Red Rodney answered. He poured himself some rum and waited to see who would come and who wouldn’t.
To his surprise, all the captains he’d invited showed up. Some of them scowled at him. Some scowled at one another. But nobody grabbed for a sword or a gun. “Let’s hear your lies, Radcliffe,” said Bertrand Caradeuc in buzzing Breton accents. A gold hoop glittered in his right ear.
Opening Atlantis Page 20
