False Colors (20 page)

God, please!
He pulled himself away from the tree, stretched his leg out, bending back like a bow, and managed to hook the tip of his shoe into the dead man’s belt. As he tried to pull the corpse towards him, the shoe fell off, but it was easier to get his stockinged foot back beneath the leather and drag the man towards them.

Flames caught eagerly in the brush inside the compound. Through the slats of the wall, he could see
Otter
’s crew—tied together with thin cables—trying to roll themselves on the conflagrations. Their dirty, frightened faces shone through the bars of their cage, sweat reflecting fire.

“If you can…” Smith got his own foot under the limp form and together they managed to raise him to waist height. The handle of a throwing knife protruded from his back. If they could only get the corpse high enough from the ground so that one of them could seize the knife, they could cut the irons out of the tree and…

The stockade blazed. Dooley, the boatswain, rolled himself deliberately into a fire, screaming as it ate away his bonds. With blackened, bleeding hands he tore at the ropes around his mates, freeing them, but even as he worked the flames spread. They reached the rum barrels stacked against the outside of the cage, crept over them like curious, nosing snakes, changing color to blue and purple. Then with a sound like an arm coming out of its joint, the barrels exploded. Flaming debris flung itself through the air like heated shot, spattering the men within the cage with blue-hot liquid.

John grabbed the body around the waist with his feet, held tight to his chains and lifted. Just for a heartbeat the knife hilt was within grasping distance of Smith’s hand. He made a grab. The corpse’s belt—supporting its weight—broke. It slid out of John’s grip.
God damn! No!

But Smith had dug his fingernails into the hilt. For a moment the whole weight of the dead man hung from them. Blood seeped out between nail and fingertip. Then, with a sucking noise, the corpse slipped off, Smith gathered the knife into his palm, and began to hack at his bonds.

“They hold him in a fort here.” The Queen brushed back leaf litter to expose the rich red earth, and drew a map of the French encampment with sticks and leaves. “There are many men. All those who came from the ship you saw…”

“The
Arc-en-Ciel.”
“Yes. And some more, left behind from other ships, to keep us in order.” The Queen favored Farrant with a sharp blaze of a smile. She had shown all the pleasure appropriate on seeing her son Tamane again, and he in return had abandoned his English dress, now standing by her side in feathers and fronds. Warmth, nevertheless, pervaded the camp, and outside the Queen’s house the
Britannia
s were being very much welcomed by the women of the tribe, both sets of allies still in the happy stage of being enchanted with each other.
“On this side the sea,” she said, “and here a tall wall of rock. They think no one can pass here, but we can come down on ropes. Lift him away.”
“While the
Britannia
creates a diversion.” Farrant nodded approvingly, crouching down himself to study the dirt map. Privately, Alfie thought that he and the Queen—whose name no one had dared to ask—were two of a kind. They had certainly recognized each other’s talents the moment they began to talk strategy. “Two forces, I think, here and here.” Farrant pointed, indicating the scratch which represented the coastal path, more suited for goats than Englishmen. The bay itself, however, was encircled by shoals, and the landing perilous enough if all else was peace. Defended, there was no possibility of assailing it from the sea.
“Mr. Donwell, you may take a company and two cannon. I will lead a second down this stream and come at the fort from the mouth of the river, creating a crossfire. In the ensuing firefight, her majesty’s forces may come down the cliffs unobserved and free King Cardinal. After that, we may as well take the fort for ourselves.”
“Yes sir.” Farrant made everything sound so easy, as though he had never known doubt or loneliness in his life. For a moment Alfie understood why he and John seemed to think that duty was enough. A kind of martial glory shone about them both like the halo of light about the drawn blade of a sword. Trying to be worthy of them, he turned, gathered his men together and departed.

Farrant watched him go, bowed to the queen and called together his own followers. An hour later found him working his way down the river at the head of a procession of men disgruntled at being called away from their diversions. The soft mud of the river bed oozed around his feet with each step, sucking him down, making every movement a struggle. He fell back to watch the cannon, to make sure that the men carrying it held it out of the water—and to make sure they did not break themselves under the task. Pride, after all, was not confined to the upper classes.

At points the river silted up and they found themselves slogging through reeds. Thin, slimy things wriggled in his shoes. When the first sailor fell from exhaustion, he called a break, and burned the leeches from his legs with a cigarillo, passing his case around so that the men could follow suit. Then he chewed on a lump of last night’s plum pudding, which his steward had put into his pocket this morning, wrapped in a handkerchief.

Clouds of biting insects, too numerous to swat, crawled into his shirt. The heat made him feel like a suet pudding being slowly boiled ’til tender. He put his head in his dirty hands. How nice it would be to be sitting at home with a cup of tea and the newspaper.
Am I getting too old for this? Should I do as Isabella asked; go back to England?
Shock his father into the apoplexy for which he was long overdue, reorganize the Admiralty, take up a seat in Parliament, and court scandal in the cruising grounds of the Inns of Court.

Or perhaps, now he’d tried Bentley’s way—tried to exhaustion the idea that he would ever change—he could even allow himself to love. If he set up a certain young man in an establishment somewhere deep in the obscurity of the countryside, with a small pension, he could even, quietly, run a second household with him. The picture enraptured him briefly—
driving up the grassy lane to a hidden cottage, sheltered by beeches, his lover greeting him at the door with a charming, lopsided smile and obvious, genuine happiness….

Shaking his head, he pulled himself to his feet; got the men moving again, slogging onwards. At the mouth of the river, coming out onto the bank, the men carrying the cannon slipped, and he was under the harness in an instant, saving the gun, hauling them up without thought. Fantasy aside, Farrant knew Alfie was hardly the sort of pampered Ganymede he could keep in a box for occasional use. Nor could he do that to his wife. So he couldn’t give this up, not really. Not if it meant a life of false and frigid peace at her side.

On the other side of the fort, Alfie paused to breathe and eat a handful of biscuit crumbs. Even the hard tack had not been equal to withstanding the last climb, when they managed to winch the cannon vertically up a chimney of rock onto this perfect little concealed platform. From here, one or two good shots should take out the gun emplacements in the fort. Strenuous though the climb had been, he felt well satisfied with the morning’s work. He settled down with a glass to observe the doings of the French in the fort.

Almost directly below him, Lt. Jameson, with the bulk of the
Britannias
, set up their own cannon in preparation for attacking the wall as soon as the signal came that Farrant’s men, and the Queen’s, were also in position.

Sucking the biscuit crumbs from his teeth, he took his coat off and allowed the fresher breeze up here to dry the sweat on his back. Then he saw to it that the cannon was secured and in working order, set up a system to lift the shot from the ground, and watched it stockpile with satisfaction. When the captain’s party was in position to begin their attack, he was ready to make sure they faced only bullets, not cannon balls from the fort.

Hunkering down beside his resting men he looked out at the fort, trying to see the captive chief. Why did some men get everything—a kingdom, a wife who would fight a war for him—when some were lucky to be allowed to scrape up the leftovers?
And why can’t everything in life be as cut and dried as siegecraft?
If only there were tactics for storming a heart, or at the very least, for subduing his own.

Smith drove the throwing knife into the bark of the tree, gouging out a great notch to the side of the pin which held his irons. A flare of mad hope leaped up in John’s heart like the fire that was spreading all across the clearing. Smoke veiled the red light, throwing into shadow the frantic faces inside the stockade. Darkness and fog turned the night into a vision of the pit, and somewhere in among the captive
Otters
the screaming had started.

Chopping a second time, Smith wrenched at the pin. It wiggled. Pulling it with all his weight, throwing himself from side to side, he wrenched it out of the wood, turning in triumph towards the roped up gates of the cage. Running forward, knife in hand, to cut the ropes and let the prisoners out of the burning pen, he did not see the pirate until the oar came whistling through the darkness and smashed into his forehead. Lifted off his feet, he flew backwards, landed in a crumpled heap at John’s feet.

Involuntarily, John yelped, a sharp
“ah!”
of sympathetic pain and despair, and the pirate walked forward out of the smoke to look at him. It was the red-capped man from before, the fuses in his beard smoldering, lighting his face from beneath by their glow. Smoke curled around his eyes like the whiskers of a dragon.

Smiling, he placed the tip of the oar just below John’s adam’s apple, pushed until he had lifted John off his feet, the rounded wood driving all John’s weight into his throat. Agony transfixing him, his heart racing and blood thundering in his ears, he grasped his chains, pulled himself up and away, coughing out blood. “Stop the fire! They’re
dying!”

The man’s comrades came to his shoulder and jeered at John. French blood ran from their fingertips as though they’d washed in it.

“Please, the fire, you can’t let—”
“You’re right.” The leader showed his rotting teeth in a broad, unfriendly smile. “I can’t
let
them die. But, you know, they’re not a lot of use to me live.”
He shouted instructions in Jamaican patois. John sobbed with relief as the pirates stamped out the blazes in the clearing, and caught the breath again in horror when he realized they were wedging extra supports into the walls of the stockade. Flinging tinder in, they hacked the fingers off the hands that gripped the top, sending the climbing, frantic men tumbling back into the flames.
“No! No!” John shook his head, as if he could shake away the screams. The broadening light showed him pirates laughing, warming their hands at the blaze as though it were a Guy Fawkes-night bonfire. They passed great round-bellied bottles of rum from hand to hand while their captives burnt, watching the deaths like a seasoned audience at a play. Occasionally—for a particularly blood-curdling scream—they would cheer.
“Fucking animals,” whispered Collins, forgotten on the other side of the tree from John. Still seeing phantom stars, his whole body shivering from the attack on his throat, John reached a hand around, and Collins brushed his fingertips in mute, terrified, fellow feeling. The air filled with the smell of roasted flesh.
Red-cap returned, still with his oar in his hand like the scepter of a king, but with his beard extinguished; a sooty, sweaty look about him, and a swagger. At his word, they picked up the fallen form of Captain Smith and poured seawater over him until he

sputtered back to consciousness. Groggy as he was, a plump, elderly man, he tried to fight them with the chain of his irons as a weapon. It amused them for a while, until a Lascar smashed a bottle on Smith’s head, felling him again.

Doubling his arms behind his back, they hung him up by them next to John. As his shoulders ground out of their sockets, he woke with a scream.

They tortured him for most of the night, until he had no voice left with which to cry out.
John leaned his cheek against the bole of the tree, closed his eyes, but could not stop his ears. Through his flank, pressed against the captain, he could feel the spasm of every agony, almost as if it was his own, but do nothing to take it away. Clinging on to Collins’ hand, he tried not to give them the satisfaction of seeing his fear. When it was his turn, he would not let them break him, he would not give them the satisfaction.
But God!
If only he wasn’t so damn scared.

John’s mouth filled up with blood, cloying copper sweet, as he lay still, pretending to have swooned. It flooded his nose and throat, gagging him, and he coughed, gasping, before he could drown in it. Mocking laughter beat at his ears, almost covering the sound of Collins weeping. Raising his head, blood and mucus hanging out of his mouth in red strings, John tried to see if Smith was dead, tried to avoid seeing what they were doing with the boys.

It was too dark. Dark as the pit that seemed to have opened in his soul. His wandering mind returned to Algiers and for a moment he was the one stuffed into the tiny prison, clay so hot his skin melted off, sticking to the walls.

A hand under his chin dragged him upright, pressing on the bruises. Someone else took the chain of his manacles and hammered them back into a post. Drool and blood began to slide down over his naked chest, and he felt the lash wounds in his back bleed anew. He had long forgotten his initial shame over being stripped naked for the amusement and remarks of the crowd—it was now too much of an effort to breathe, to chase down human thought through the twisted corridors of his darkened mind. What had started as unbearable pain had become something quite different. A new world, blossoming behind his eyes like a black rose. But the slave pens were there, with their stench, and he could not remember if he was there or here, where
here
was, who he was….