Isle of Swords (30 page)

Darting between casks and crates, she navigated the storage and saw Padre Dominguez. A lantern hung on a peg behind him. He sat on a small crate and had a barrel in front of him as if it were his private table at a pub. He held a small leather-bound book in one hand and a honey cake in the other.

“Padre Dominguez!” Anne said, trying to startle him. “Nubby said those cakes were for me.”

Padre Dominguez didn't even flinch. “Odd,” he said without looking up. “He told me not an hour ago that I could have them.”

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “Besides eating my cakes, that is.”

“It was the only place I could risk a bit of light.” He smiled and said, “And this isn't the last cake. There are two more. Pull up a crate and join me.”

Anne did as he requested. He held out a brownish-gold rectangle, and Anne received it happily.

Munching, she leaned over the barrel table on her elbows.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“The Holy Scriptures,” he said. “The Twenty-third Psalm. I turn to it whenever my heart is troubled. Would you like to . . . I mean, can you—”

“I can read,” said Anne. “My father taught me.”

“Here then.” Padre Dominguez handed her the leather-bound volume. It fit comfortably in her open hands. He pointed to a very large and fancy gothic “T.” Anne angled the book to get more light and began to read.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He re-storeth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of right . . . righ–tee—”

“Righteousness,” he corrected gently. “It means to be on the path of truth and honor.”

Anne nodded. “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—”

A muffled boom came from above. Her eyes big and white in the flickering lantern light, Anne looked up from the pages of Scripture.

She said, “That was Stede's thunder gun.”

Nubby had just wheeled a barrel into Captain Ross's cabin when full-out war erupted topside. He drew a long carving knife from inside his heavy coat and ran to the windows behind Ross's desk. He threw open a window and peered out just in time to see a dark mass hurtling down. He ducked back in as the body plummeted past the window and into the murky water below.

“We've been ambushed, and no mistake,” he muttered, starting toward the cabin door. He stopped short, hearing voices on the stairs. He closed Ross's cabin door and locked it. “Buy me some time, maybe.”

He looked frantically around the room. Remembering the pistol the captain left in the upper-right-hand drawer of his desk, he raced to the desk and opened the drawer. The gun was there. Nubby put the knife in his teeth and grabbed the pistol. The doorknob rattled behind him, followed by a sharp bang.

“You would do well to open this door,” came a high, nasally voice from the other side. “My master, Captain Bartholomew Thorne, shows little mercy to those who delay his efforts!”

“You mean, no mercy whether they deserve it or not,” muttered Nubby through his teeth gritted on the cold blade. He considered hiding behind the desk.
No good,
he thought. Another slam to the door. A loud crack in the wood. One more shot like that, and they would kick it in. Nubby rushed to the cabinets on the left side of the room. He barely had the cabinet door open, and all manner of clothes, books, and other assorted items began to topple out.

“Slob!” Nubby shouted, slamming the cabinet shut. Then he looked to the window. He ran over, gazed down, and saw several bodies floating in the water. But there were also ropes, ropes from the intruders' grappling hooks, dangling from the unseen rails above.

“You had your chance, Ross!” shrieked the voice. Nubby climbed up over the sill, tried to put the pistol in his coat, but missed. The gun fell and disappeared into the water. Keeping the knife in his teeth, Nubby clutched one of the ropes just as the cabin door crashed open.

“How in the world are we going to get the cannons down this hill?”

Ross asked. They'd been climbing for over an hour.

“I have specially made carts, my friend,” said St. Pierre. “Remember, these cannons are forged with a new process. The iron-bronze alloy is pumped full of air bubbles as it cools—it is lighter than you are used to. My men at the fort and your brawny crew should have little problem.”

“Whatever they weigh,” said Jules, “I can handle it.”

Cat looked at him and didn't doubt him for a minute. Jules was massive, and his upper arms were bigger around than Cat's legs.

“Ah!” St. Pierre exclaimed. “It is just around this bend! Follow me.”

They emerged from the tree line and navigated around a rocky outcropping, and there before them, high on a hill, was St. Pierre's fort. “Something is wrong,” St. Pierre whispered. And they all saw it. Smoke poured from the windows of the square complex and its three turrets.

“No!” St. Pierre blurted out. “This cannot be!” He drew a pistol in each hand from his holsters and charged up the hill.

“Swords! Muskets!” Ross yelled. Stede pulled his two machetes; Red Eye and Cat drew their cutlasses. Together they raced after Jacques up the hill to the fortress.

But they were too late. They found Jacques St. Pierre on his knees, weeping, in the wide doorway of his main keep. And beyond him, strewn among still-smoldering fires, were dozens of bodies.

Cat shut his eyes. “This b' Thorne's wark,” Stede muttered.

Just then, Ross heard a muffled explosion. He sprinted out of the keep and looked all around. “Where?!”

“East,” said Stede, pointing over the treetops from which they had just emerged.

Declan Ross could not see his ship from where he stood, but he could see the widest part of the dark bay. To his horror, three massive dark ships stretched almost the width of the inlet. Fire flashed from their sides. The booms sounded a second later. “The
Wallace
!”

Ross yelled. “Anne!”

“Get away from the fort!” St. Pierre yelled. Then they all heard an odd kind of
whoosh
.

Ross turned and looked past St. Pierre into the keep. A harsh orange glow burned beneath the heavy door on the far side of the room. Ross's mouth dropped open, and he might have died there, but Stede grabbed him by the shoulder and rushed him down the stairs. The rest of the crew, some running, some leaping from the walls, got away from the fort just before a thunderous explosion.

Fire, debris, and smoke sprayed into the dark sky. Chunks of wood and stone rained down among the crew as they ran. Several men were struck and fell. Others behind them grabbed up the fallen, unsure if they carried someone alive or dead. Ross stared hopelessly ahead and led his men recklessly down the hill. He knew that, somehow, Thorne had been in wait for him to arrive. And that meant he was too late to save his daughter.

32
THE FALL OF THE WILLIAM WALLACE

K
eep reading,” said Padre Dominguez.

“What?” Anne lowered the book and stared at the monk. “But the
Wallace
has been boarded. We're under attack!”

“They will be among us soon enough,” he said. In his dark eyes dwelt a strange kind of melancholy—like one who is sad when a long journey has ended, but is at the same time still happily immersed in the memory of it all. “Please . . . read.”

Heavy footfalls thumped from the stairwell on the other side of the cargo hold where the gunpowder kegs were kept. Then came muttered curses as men in the darkness bumped into sharp crate edges or bashed heads on low-hanging beams. “Have you lost your mind?” Anne asked, staring at the still-open door to their side of the hold. “We can't just—”

“READ!!”

She went back to the beginning of the Twenty-third Psalm, to the large “T,” and began to read. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

As she spoke the words, Padre Dominguez stepped from behind the barrel-table and looked back at her once more. His eyes smoldered with a cold fire so powerful it made Anne look away. Then, with his arms behind his back, Padre Dominguez faced the open door.

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” Anne continued.

“He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.”

At that moment, the first enemy pirate squeezed through the barrel walls. Others appeared on either side. Some held swords or daggers. Some pistols or muskets. Anne saw Padre Dominguez's hands drop down to his sides. His fingers moved and twitched.

“Louder!” said the priest.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. . . .”

The pirate in the lead advanced slowly on the monk. He raised his pistol. At the same time, Padre Dominguez reached into his robe and drew out two pitch-black shafts of some kind.

Anne continued, trying to watch the monk and the enemy out of the corner of her eye. “Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

The pirate cocked back the hammer of his pistol. Padre Dominguez suddenly whirled around and cracked the pirate's wrist with one of the black weapons. The gun fell to the ground, and the pirate began to wail. The other pirates surged against Padre Dominguez. And he took them on.

Anne was so surprised she almost dropped the book.

“Read!” he called back to her.

“Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” Padre Dominguez ducked a nasty slash and drove his two weapons into an attacker's stomach. He blocked another sword swipe, caught the man's hand between his two sable rods, and flung him headfirst into the barrel-table. The man lay unconscious at Anne's feet.

“Thou anointest my head with oil,” she said, a tremor in her voice, “my cup runneth over.” Padre Dominguez stood, arms outstretched like a cross, as another pirate came on. This pirate had more skill than the others. He slashed and stabbed with a short sword. Padre Dominguez blocked and parried, moving backward.

The thin blade clipped his robe, but caught no flesh. The monk was too fast. He slammed a rod into the middle of the short sword, and the blade broke in two. Then he kicked the pirate so hard in the jaw that he flew backward and crashed into a barrel. A crimson flood ensued, and the next two attackers slipped and fell from their own lack of balance.