Steel (11 page)

J
ill was learning to always notice the wind, where it was blowing and at what strength, and how it played against the sails. You didn’t want the wind directly behind the ship—most of the sails’ surface would be blocked by each other and the rest of the rigging. But if the ship was at a slight angle to the wind, the yards slightly turned, then every single sail would catch the wind’s full strength and the ship would fly. And while you didn’t want to be moving directly against the wind, a ship could still move into the wind by tacking, traveling at angles like following switchbacks up a steep hill.

Between islands, she couldn’t have said where they were, and she could only vaguely guess their direction by the sun. The ship must have had a compass, a real one, and Captain Cooper must have had a map of some kind, or maybe she’d just memorized the location of every port and spit of land in the Caribbean. People were supposed to be able to navigate by the stars, but Jill hadn’t learned the trick of it reliably yet. At night before going to bed, she’d lie on the deck, looking up into the sky, a vast, dark expanse filled with stars, packed with them like sprays of glitter. She’d never seen so many—there were almost too many to pick out individual stars. But somehow, Cooper knew where they were going, and one morning, a few days after the battle with the
Heart’s Revenge
, the lookout high up on the mainmast called “Land, ho!” This time when Jill looked, she recognized the smear of shadow on the horizon that meant land.

The work began to trim the sails to take the
Diana
into port. Jill worked with the crew, pulling lines taut and tying off sails, until the ship rode the waves along New Providence Island and into Nassau’s harbor.

This wasn’t the Bahamas she remembered. When she came here with her family, Nassau was a postcard-perfect resort town. Rows of houses painted in bright colors had everything from shops to restaurants to government buildings. Crowds of tourists wandered on foot or took the little horse-drawn carts that lined up by the pier. At any given time a dozen huge cruise ships were docked on a long concrete jetty. A few miles away, a massive hotel dominated an inlet called Paradise Island. The only sign that the island had ever had anything to do with pirates or old sailing ships were the two crumbling forts looking out over the sea.

This was nothing like it.

She recognized the shape of the land, the long shore and sheltered inlet, the curved spit that would someday become Paradise Island, the hill that someone would look at someday and decide it would make a good fort, and the crowd of trees and vegetation, of which only a tamed remnant remained in the modern world. The forts had vanished—they hadn’t even been built yet.

A dozen ships anchored along the harbor, a forest of masts. There was no large pier yet, so the ships staked out their own area of clear water and their crews rowed small boats to shore, where a narrow wooden pier provided access. A settlement covered a clear section of land. There were streets, buildings, wooden structures that seemed solid enough, with roofs, porches, doors, and windows. Smoke from a dozen cooking fires rose up. The tropical sun blazed down on the scene.

People moved through it all. She could see figures on most of the ships, and the shore was packed with people, workers loading and unloading stacks of barrels and boxes from ships, streets packed with carts and pedestrians. It was almost a traffic jam.

All those people looked just like the crew of the
Diana
: loose shirts and trousers, beards, unkempt hair, rowdy dispositions. They couldn’t all be pirates, could they? But like nearly everything else she’d encountered since falling off the tour boat, the place seemed dangerous—even deadly. Still, she had to go ashore. This was where she’d started, where she’d found the rapier shard.

“Any navy friends?” Cooper asked.

“No,” Abe said, studying the ships and shore through the spyglass. “Clear as can be.”

“Any sign of the
Heart’s Revenge
?”

“Not a hint of her,” Abe said.

Cooper shaded her eyes and nodded out to a vessel at the far end of the harbor. “God, is that Rackham’s ship?”

“I believe it is,” he answered.

“Bloody hell,” she said. “Wonder who else is about?”

Jill wondered who Rackham was.

“Ready to drop anchor, mates!”

The crew came to new life, simmering with smiles and laughter, excitement about the chance to go onshore, to see faces other than the ones on the ship, to eat fresh food and drink clean—or at least cleaner—water. They were all so at home here, when Jill kept seeing threats.

She was standing at the prow, watching the crew drop anchor when Henry came up to her, the rapier she’d been using to practice in hand, along with a belt and hanger.

“Nassau’s rough. You’ll need a weapon if you’re going ashore,” he said.

“Am I going ashore?”

“Why not? You’re crew. But you only get to wear it if you can walk like you know how to use it. Otherwise folk’ll treat you like a target. Think you can do that?”

She took the rapier and belt. “What do you think?”

“Right, then.” He seemed pleased.

They tendered ashore using two rowboats. Just enough of the crew, a half a dozen, stayed aboard to “keep anyone from thinking they could steal her, but not so many that they’d want to steal her themselves,” Henry said with his usual smile. Everyone else seemed all too happy at a chance to see civilization again. If historic Nassau could be called civilization. Jill wasn’t too sure about that.

A wooden pier extended from the shore; smaller boats could tie up here. Rowboats, longboats, fishing boats with long oars and single masts. The waves lapped against dozens of hulls, and noises from the shore carried over the water. Donkeys and horses whinnying, goats bleating, chickens in crates clucking as they waited to be carried aboard ships heading out. Dockmen with rough leather shoes and caps, loose trousers and shirts, much like the pirates themselves, worked carrying wooden boxes and barrels, the cargo that had become so familiar. Everyone, from drovers on the street to fishermen in their boats, paused to take in the newcomers, Captain Cooper with her belted coat and her rowdy crew of pirates. Jill could almost see the rumor traveling from the docks through the streets to the town. The attention made her want to hide; but if she had to be here at all, she was grateful to be part of a group that seemed to inspire awe. Maybe people would leave her alone.

“Stand up straight, Tadpole,” the captain said over her shoulder at Jill.

Jill had been slouching, skulking, really, under all those gazes. Glaring at the captain, she rolled her shoulders back and tried to look cocky, like the rest of them.

Saul accompanied them to shore. The stump of his missing left arm was swaddled with a thick bandage, giving no clue as to what the wound looked like underneath. His face was pursed, knotted with pain. Every few minutes he took a swig from a flask, no doubt filled with rum. He stood tall and looked straight ahead, glaring almost, daring anyone to feel sorry for him. On the dock, Captain Cooper handed him a bag of coins—it was part of the articles, bounty for a lost limb. He took it, awkwardly holding the flask under his good arm while he shuffled the pouch of coins from hand to pocket. The captain squeezed his shoulder, said a few words, and the injured man nodded curtly.

Then he left the crew for good, walking off into town alone.

“Stay sharp, keep your ears to the ground. When it’s time to leave it’ll be in a hurry, so you’d best keep close,” Captain Cooper told the crew. With that, most of them scattered, moving off in small groups.

“You’re with me, Tadpole,” Cooper said to her, and Jill blinked at her, startled. Cooper took the broken piece of rapier from her pouch, let it dangle, and checked its direction: east, it settled. “He could be anywhere,” she muttered.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to track down the gossip on Blane.”

A group of them went into town together: Captain Cooper, Abe, a couple men of the crew, Henry, and Jill. The streets were packed mud, rough and rutted. They kept to the side to avoid the carts and horses that traveled back and forth, wagons hauling crates, or travelers on some mission. Henry explained there were settlements up and down the coast, plantations that a few hearty souls tried to keep working—despite the fact that the pirates had been running the island for years now, since the British governor had packed up and left. Now the island was essentially lawless. The pirates liked it that way just fine—they could bring their stolen cargos here and sell them to merchant ships with captains who didn’t much care where the goods had come from, only that they were cheap. Industry to support the pirate trade had also moved in—carpenters and ship-wrights; suppliers of food, ammunition, rope, and sails; and taverns, just waiting to cater to crews who had been at sea for weeks. Lots of taverns.

Cooper took them to one of these. They’d walked for ten or fifteen minutes from the docks, along the wider main street, then turned a corner to a narrow lane, then to an unpainted, sprawling house tucked into the first edges of wilderness—leafy shrubs, woody underbrush, stretches of grass and sand. A sign hanging above the door showed a painted ship and sea; it was the only clue that this wasn’t just a house. Henry was grinning like he knew the place and was happy to be here, but Cooper seemed grim. She led them through an open doorway.

They walked inside and it was like the sun shut off. The windows were blocked by drapes or shutters. The haze of tobacco smoke added to the sense of claustrophobia. For a moment, Jill couldn’t see anything. Slowly, her eyes adjusted, painfully blinking into sight.

The room was packed with pirates. She could tell without asking, just by the way they held themselves, the way they looked back at her, like they were sizing her up, judging her worth. And by the sly curves to their lips, the smiles that said they didn’t care about a damned thing in the world. She’d lived with pirates for weeks now, and she recognized that look. It was Henry on that first day, hefting a rapier and looking right through her. She understood what he meant now about only carrying the sword if she could carry the attitude along with it. These people had to believe she could use it or they’d never stop picking on her.

When the pirates saw Captain Cooper, they shifted and murmured. A few looked away, as if hoping to avoid drawing her attention. But the ones who met her gaze straight on, who drew themselves up, seeming to offer a challenge—Jill paid attention to them.

Mostly, though, she hid behind Cooper and hoped she blended in as just another part of her crew.

“It’s a bloody reunion. Everyone’s here,” the captain muttered to Abe.

“Then we should learn something of Blane,” he replied.

“Everyone?” Jill asked Henry. “Everyone who?”

He was studying the crowd as well, and without his usual cocky confidence. He was trying to cover it up, but he seemed wary. “If the Royal Navy surrounded this place right now and burned it to the ground, there’d be no more piracy in the Atlantic and whatever captain was in charge could buy a title with the reward money.
Everyone’s
here. Look.”

He pulled her into a sheltered corner behind the bar that ran most of the length of one wall. The spot kept them out of the way but gave them a view of the room. Head bent close to her, he explained.

“There’s Bellamy of the
Whydah
, and Stede Bonnet, who’s really just a crazy old man but he’s got a ship, so there you go. Charles Vane. Martel and Kennedy. Names to strike fear in the heart of any honest merchantman, though there’s no such thing as an honest merchantman, as we say around here.” He winked at her, like he expected her to laugh at the joke. Continuing, he nodded to a man sitting in the far corner. She’d noticed him already, a huge man, broad through the chest; he couldn’t help but draw attention to himself. He wore a three-cornered hat over an immense nest of hair, long, black, flowing over his shoulders and continuing over his cheeks, jaw, and chin, covering his mouth. The thick beard grew halfway down his chest, and the man had knotted ribbons in it. He smoked a pipe with a long stem and gazed quietly over the crowd with dark, shining eyes.

“That there’s Edward Teach. Even you’ve heard of him I expect.”

“Blackbeard,” she said, and couldn’t help being in awe. “He’s Blackbeard.”

“Aye, he is. And may you never cross his path in battle.”

She would just as soon never cross his path at all.

“And over there, the ones the captain’s speaking to.” They could see through a wide doorway into another part of the building, a room where a boisterous party was in progress. Captain Cooper stood over a trio in the corner. A man sat in a chair, mug in one hand and pipe in the other; he was outrageously dressed in a brightly colored jacket and flowered trousers. The two with him were women—at least Jill thought they were, though they dressed as men, in jackets and trousers, hats on their heads and hair bound up. One of them sat in a chair next to the man, arms crossed, glaring. The other stood behind them both, back to the wall and hand resting on the butt of a pistol tucked into her belt.

“That’s Calico Jack Rackham,” Henry said. “And the two pirate queens, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. As fierce a pair of witches who ever sailed. But not as fierce as our Captain Cooper, are they?”

“Are there many women pirates?” Jill asked.

“Hard to say. There’s plenty who don’t want to be found out, like Bessie and Jane, and no one hears about them. Only a few put themselves forward like them and Captain Cooper.”

Jill thought they were powerful and frightening all at once. Anne Bonny, seated, had dark red hair that caught the light. And she studied Marjory Cooper closely as the captain spoke, as though if Cooper said the least thing wrong Bonny would spring from her chair, sword drawn, and run her through. But only if Read didn’t get there first with her pistol. Read had dark hair and was more stout, more physical than Bonny. Bonny would use tricks in a fight; Read would just pound you.