False Colors (21 page)

“We shouldn’t have dirtied this pretty face, mates, should we?” Red-cap spun the chain. John, dangling from his wrists like a side of beef, did not trouble to raise his head again. He could feel their gazes on him without looking. “You need a wash, mate.”

Grabbing his blood-tangled hair, Red-cap pulled him upright, nodded, and his first mate emptied a bucket of piss over John’s head. John had thought himself safely in his own inner world, gone to hiding in a darkness from which no one could hunt him out. But at the splash every nerve awoke as though doused in acid. His world went white, then red, and he found himself once more struggling against his chains, laying his wrists open to the bone, awake, blazing up with fury and humiliated by the filth.

“There.” Red smiled, pleased. “Now how’s about we kiss it better?”
The camp erupted in hooting and cat calls. John ground his teeth.
I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to fucking kill you all….

Sitting on woven mats in the chief’s house, Alfie found himself plied with bowl after bowl of unidentifiable food. A second bowl, kept brimming, held liquor brewed from some herb the chief’s daughters were chewing and spitting into a bowl. It tasted as appetizing as it looked, a thin, milky liquid still with the strings of bark hanging out of the bowl, but after a couple of swallows it left a tingling sensation in the mouth, and it became impossible to remember the pressing reasons for self restraint and self denial.

Huge basins of the stuff were circulating among the men of the tribe, who mixed it with plundered beer and brandy from the fort and pressed it on their new friends. Beyond the open sides of the pavilion—for one could hardly call it a house— someone had struck up a jig on the fiddle and several of the tars were demonstrating the dances of Britain to a laughing, appreciative audience. No one seemed to care if the dancers were too drunk to get their footwork right, as long as when they fell a friendly bosom waited to receive them.

The
Britannias
ate like men possessed, and sang. They showed the ladies of the tribe the hornpipe, and other dances less suitable for public performance. The more shy men, blushing beneath the ribald comments of the rest, allowed themselves to be led by their island maidens into the private shade of the trees. The bold simply coupled where they sat, then sat up to drink again. King Cardinal, wearing a French captain’s coat, a number of bruises, and three severed heads on his belt tucked in to his dinner with a trencherman’s determination, slowly and steadily eating course after course. The queen, giggling like a debutante, with her eyes sparkling and the flowers falling askew in her hair, gave a speech of thanks to which no one listened, but everybody cheered.

By the end of the evening they too had retired behind a palm screen, and Alfie, looking up over the firepit, was struck to the heart by the sight of Farrant laughing with his officers. The firelight gilded him, but it was his own energy that added the brutal grace to his gestures; the king of a pride of lions, even in this happy mood. Thinking back, Alfie could not discover another memory of the man thus open, not even in the most intimate moments of sex. Where had he hidden all this joy, this flame of life that lit his face now more wonderfully than the fire, making him young?
Why
had he hidden it, and grown to be so crabbed and calculating? Victory suited him.

Farrant looked up, saw Alfie watching him. The shape of his smile altered, taking on something of the heat and debauchery of the night. “Help me up, Alfie. I think I’ll retire.”

Alfie got his shoulder beneath Farrant’s arm and half dragged, half supported him back to his tent. “Oh,” Farrant sniggered as he lay down, “this wound is so severe, I believe you’ll have to help me undress.”

“I’m shocked, sir.” Alfie chuckled, helping the man out of his coat and waistcoat, making a long, teasing business of unwinding the neck-cloth and unbuttoning his collar as he punctuated each movement with a kiss. “Could I not fetch your valet?”

Caught by his own stock, he found himself slammed into the floor, then pinned against the foot of the tent pole as the captain took control. “Damn my valet. Just get these trousers off and stop talking.”

Surrendering gratefully Alfie went down under the exuberance with no more protest. It was indeed a long time before he spoke again—in coherent sentences, at least.

“You’ll have to fuck me,” Farrant said, when he was sprawled on the blankets naked but for nightshirt and the bandage about his thigh. “Bastard got me with a bayonet, and I daresay I ought not to jostle it for a while.”

“I think I can manage that.” Kneeling, Alfie pulled Farrant’s arse off the blanket and into his lap, holding the wounded leg carefully over his shoulder, watching the expression on the captain’s face as he fucked him; carefully, gently, but very, very thoroughly. When they lay together afterwards Farrant deigned to fit his face into Alfie’s shoulder and sleep—an altogether new evidence of affection. Firmly telling himself it meant nothing, Alfie pulled another blanket over them both and held vigil.

The sounds of the party still going on, laughter and singing, faded by degrees into sodden sleepy silence. It was absolutely dark and private in the tent, and Alfie indulged a tenderness he was not normally permitted to show, pushing up the shirt, gently exploring Farrant’s body with light fingertips. Tracing the old scars, rubbing over the small brown nipples that perked beneath his touch, he worked his way down to the flawless silk of the skin over the man’s arse and thighs. And there his touch was balked by the rough linen of the bandage.

“Trying to sleep….” Farrant murmured. Yawning, he took Alfie’s hand in his own, and though he knew it was only a way to still it, a ridiculous joy welled out of Alfie’s heart at the touch.

“This bandage is someone’s cravat,” he pointed out, rather than confess any of the inappropriate, unwelcome things he wanted to say. “Did you tie this yourself? Have you been to the doctor at all?”

Farrant rolled himself onto his back and reached up to tangle his fingers in Alfie’s sun-bleached hair. Reflected firelight gleamed from his half open eye, crinkled at the edge into an affectionate smile. “No more bloodsucking leeches—no more doctors. Never again. And you, don’t fuss. Can’t be coming home to fuss. Get enough of that with m’wife.”

“I think I might love you,” said Alfie, settling down with the top of his head beneath Farrant’s arm and his nose pressed into the captain’s ribs. They hitched slightly, he thought with laughter.

“God knows why,” Farrant replied, but he stroked the top of Alfie’s head.
Coming home
, Alfie thought, with a catch of his breathing that almost felt like pain. “Maybe I have no sense of self-preservation,” he said, truthfully enough. Laughing quietly, Farrant fell back to sleep with the suddenness of exhaustion. Floating on contentment and alcohol, Alfie let himself follow.

Farrant, feeling thoroughly rumpled, with a thick and throbbing head, awoke to find Price-Milton,
Britannia
’s youngest midshipman, shaking him by the shoulder. The boy held a candle-lantern so close to his ear it was a wonder his hair did not singe. In deference to the child’s youth and delicate sensibilities Farrant reached down and drew the sheet up over Alfie’s sleeping face. Price-Milton, too focused on his own news, didn’t seem to register the movement. “What is it, Mr. Price-Milton?”

“The king says we’ll want to know there’s more French in Pirate’s Bay, sir. He says it didn’t occur to him before now, ’cos of seeing his wife again, he says. But if we was to go now, in the middle of the night, we could get there before they heard anything about this, and wasn’t expecting us. Begging your pardon for disturbing you sir, but it was the King what said it.”

The boy gave a sudden smile, full of the resilience of youth and unencumbered by a hangover. “They’re here already, sir.”
“Give me a moment to dress
.
Then you may rouse the men.”
“Aye-aye, sir!”
As soon as he had gone, taking the lantern with him, Alfie sat up and began rummaging about for his clothes, dressing rapidly, with a disgruntled air. He pulled up pegs and ducked through the back of the tent, maintaining the illusion of coming from somewhere else. Farrant found it faintly amusing, and yet faintly sad. But he dismissed it from his mind almost at once as he concentrated on manning the
Britannia
and the
Arc-en-Ciel
with every body who could haul on a rope; even some of the young women. He sent Lt. Carver over land with the king’s elite warriors and hurried to the attack.

Britannia
reached Pirate Bay in the still, cold hour before dawn, when the profound darkness and the silence teetered on the edge of infinity. No sign of activity stirred on the decks of the numerous ships at anchor on the placid water. If there were look outs they too were asleep or occupied. Making up boarding parties of men experienced in cutting out expeditions, Farrant sent them one by one by over the rails of the unwary ships. There, very quietly, they would pad through the sleeping men slitting throats until the vessels passed without a murmur into their control. In this slow, secretive way two hours passed, and half the fleet let down their sails and began to stand out to sea, British colors fluttering from their masts.

Then someone shrieked aboard the schooner. A shot echoed over the dark water, a rush of feet boomed hollow over deck planks and her bell pealed out the alarm.

Almost immediately, running figures burst onto the beach. Scarcely pausing as they saw their ships abandoning them, they heaved their longboats out into the white line of surf to give chase. “Lower your elevation,” cried Alfie to his gun crews, gauging the range and distance with a practiced eye. “Make ready to fire.”

With a series of thuds,
Britannia
’s cannons hunkered down. Her gun captains took the wheels off the carriages in order to aim low at the rowing men battling the surf. “Grape shot, Mr. Gunner please,” said Farrant grimly. “Fire as she bears.”

Britannia
’s broadside filled the night with over a ton of screaming iron shrapnel. The shore disappeared in a flume of red-stained water and flying wreckage. The gun crews hastily wormed and sponged, dropping uncombusted wadding in the sea. Barrels steamed at the touch of the damp sponge. Smoke parted on devastation. Five of the launches had burst into splinters and rags of flesh. Another three drifted, no movement aboard, the prone forms inside lapped over by crimson waves. But the last one limped back to shore. As
Britannia
fired a second time, Price-Milton raced up to the quarterdeck and hollered, “There’s some in the trees, the lookout says, sir! Sheltering, like.”

“Damn them!” cried Farrant, who by this time, Alfie thought with some concern, was looking unshaven and worn. He limped to the helm and back. “Launch the boats. You have the ship, Mr. Nyman. I’m going after them.”

Dawn’s cold light broke over the jungle as Alfie waded ashore in Farrant’s wake; sloshing through water that smelled of blood and shit, musket and powder flask held up above his head to keep them dry. The
Britannias
hunted the pirates through their coverts with something of the enthusiasm most gentlemen reserved for big game hunting. It was a disturbingly cheerful party.

Following the tracks of their enthusiastic people, Alfie and Farrant came to a wide, open clearing where smuts were beginning to settle over a scene that might have come from the head of Hieronymus Bosch. The very grass beneath their feet bent black and greasy beneath a thick layer of ash. Alfie nudged a dimly lit form with his foot. The body turned over, but the head remained, detached, in a jelly of cold blood. Tarnished
fleur-delys
braid on the back of the corpse’s uniform glimmered like its open eyes.

“God’s teeth!” Farrant bent down and picked something off the ground; a shiny polished brass button, with the English rose in the centre that marked a British midshipman’s uniform.

Looking up from the little flower, Alfie saw a scar of smoldering earth surrounded by stakes, where blackened bones and charred flesh heaped about the bases of a half burned wall. The stench was roast pork, but those were hands wrapped around the stakes, their finger bones white in the newly risen sun.

“We didn’t know.” Alfie put a hand on his wrist, remembering that they had been making love while this happened. Celebrating, not ten miles away.

Cold. So cold.
Ice seemed to have settled in the marrow of John’s bones, and he wished he could tell his captors that his shivering was from shock, not cowardice. But his teeth chattered like dice and his throat was too raw, and they would only laugh and hurt him again.

Somewhere in his inner world, he was screaming. He could feel it; all his emotions held away like a fire behind a sheet of glass. It was better to concentrate on the cold, the crystals of frost in his blood with their sharp little edges, the desolate moony white of winter; deep under snow.

Smoke curled across the ground, heavy and blue. As the rays of the rising sun stabbed through it, it billowed about Alfie’s feet like the Styx. Hell was too close. For a moment, seeing the bodies hanging from a stake in the centre of the clearing, he felt he had stepped out of the world, into the realm of his own nightmares. Horror drove through his chest like a thrown spear.

Later he would remember that all three men had been stripped, crimsoned with blood as if they had been painted with it. That the arms of the eldest were cuffed behind his back, and he hung from them, at an unnatural angle, the shoulders broken by his own weight. Later he would have time to remember and grow faint at the tar poured hot over the man’s face, skin where it showed suppurating with burns.

But at the time his eyes barely registered these things. He scarcely saw the other two men, as a hook in the centre of his chest pulled him towards the third. A month’s nursing, and every inch of that slender body was familiar to him; he could have told who it was just from the shackled ankles, without needing to look at the bent swan neck and drooping head.
John!