The Buccaneers (23 page)

“Yes,” I said.

“Lord love me.” His face was pale as snow. “He got the better of Horn?”

“And he has a pistol,” I said. “The only one on the ship.”

“Well, not quite the only one,” said Dasher. He brought out his other boot and turned it upside down. Onto the deck tumbled the most sinister thing I'd ever seen, a tiny pistol set atop a short and wicked blade. Dasher passed it up to me.

The blade was rusted and dull, the tip broken away. I saw why Dasher's socks were in the state they were. “It's been in your boot all this time?” I asked.

Dasher nodded. The blade was speckled with rust, the flintlock frozen shut. I tried to pull it back, and Dasher winced.

“Is it loaded?” I asked.

“Lord, no,” said Dasher. None of his pistols were ever loaded. “I'm afraid you'll break the hammer off, that's all.”

Flakes of rust came away in my hand. The gun hadn't been cocked in years, if ever. But Grace wouldn't know that. I shoved it into my belt, below the tails of my shirt, and shook Mudge from his hammock. Freeman and Betts were already up, but both were still so sick with the fever that they could only stand by holding on to each other.

“Can you get to the deck?” I asked them.

They nodded, their teeth chattering. I wanted Grace to see them, to know for himself that he hadn't men enough to work the ship.

“Follow me,” I said.

We went aft in a straggling line, hunched against the wind and spray, finding handholds where we could. The
Dragon
thundered on, far faster than when I'd last calculated her speed. The hours that I'd thought we'd take to fetch the land were shrinking quickly.

She corkscrewed down a wave, and I darted through the waist with Dasher clinging to my arm. Mudge lumbered behind us, and poor Freeman and Betts lagged far behind, hobbling along as waves roared over the rail and buried them waist-deep in water. But we climbed to the quarterdeck and stood before Grace, as pitiful a crew as ever had been assembled.

“Get aloft,” he said. “I want the topsail furled.”

“We can't,” I told him. “Look for yourself.”

He stretched his hand toward the noose at Horn's neck, and I had no doubt that he would twist the life out of him.

“Don't,” I cried. “We'll clew it up to the yard. Isn't that enough?”

“You'll go aloft.” He pointed at me, at Dasher, at Mudge. “You and you and you.”

“Dasher?” I said.

“He's a topman, isn't he?”

I groaned inside. It was just like Dasher to have told a tale like that. Beside me he quivered, his eyes gazing up at the mainmast as it reeled through a blackness streaked with gray. Dawn was coming to our wasteland of water.

“Now,” said Grace. He shoved his pistol at Freeman, then Betts. “You two. Cast off the sheets.”

We went forward in a little group, up the weather side. The cannons strained at their lashings, their wooden wheels squeaking. Mudge started up the ratlines with a steady mindlessness that I envied. The mast swung so far and so quickly that I dreaded climbing to a yard that would tilt in every direction.

But if I was scared, Dasher—above me—-was terrified. He stepped up to the rail, and his boots slipped away on the wet wood. Only the wind kept him from falling. It plastered his coat against the ratlines and glued him to the rigging. He could barely move his arms for the bulk of his wineskins.

“I can't go up there,” he said.

“You've done it before,” I told him. On the
Dragons
first voyage, Dasher had climbed right to the masthead to watch for a ship in the fog.

“But not in weather like this.” He looked down, his face wretched with fear. “Not with the mast breaking off. And not in these wineskins; I can't move in these bladders.”

“Take them off,” I said.

“No chance!” he shouted.

“Then climb.”

He stretched out an arm, then a leg, and dragged himself up like a huge, red bat. A step; another. The
Dragon
fell from a wave, and his coat billowed past his shoulders. “John,” he said. “John, I can't do it.”

Mudge was up at the crosstrees, hurtling round and round as the mast carved circles from the night. He looked down at me, I up at him, and Dasher was between us, frozen to the shrouds.

A loud crack nearly startled the life from me, and the night glowed briefly, faintly, from the flash of Grace's gun.

“He's shooting at us,” I said. “Dasher, can't you move?”

“No,” said Dasher. He was crying. His head on the ratlines, his arms spread wide, he shook and sobbed, and his silly wineskins pulsed like lungs. “Help,” he said. “John, please help me.”

“Stay where you are.” I reached up to pat his boot, then climbed down to the rail, to the deck. I went past the cannons, up toward the wheel. I drew Dasher's pistol from my belt.

“Get aloft!” shouted Grace. He pointed the flintlock right at me, then down at Horn. One shot was left. “I'll blow his brains out if you don't.”

A wave battered on the stern. Spray flew up from either quarter, and the
Dragon
lurched to starboard. Horn fell away from the binnacle, his hands reaching up for the string. The
Dragon
heeled farther, until the deck sloped away from me, down to the wheel and Bartholomew Grace.

His knee was bent, his arm pressing on the spokes to bring the
Dragon
upright. Horn flailed at his feet, kicking for a hold on the deck, and the sea bubbled and churned at
the rail. Grace glanced toward it, and I leapt down the deck.

I flew at him, screaming at the top of my voice. He looked up, and the flintlock rose in his hand. I crashed into him as the
Dragon
settled in her roll, as the seas roared onto the deck. The gun fired wildly, and Grace tumbled backward, vanishing into the water that filled the deck.

I grabbed the binnacle. Horn was hanging from his key string, his legs kicking, his hands grabbing frantically at his throat. With the blade on my pistol I hacked through the twine, and Horn slid feet first down the slanted deck, plunging into the same wave that had swallowed Bartholomew Grace.

The
Dragon
broached. Another wave followed the last, and the topsail boomed in the blackness with a thunder that shook the hull. I hauled at the wheel, but the
Dragon
felt heavy and dead, as though she had drowned in those terrible seas. Slowly she shifted, and climbed from the waves. And the sea spilled from her decks in a churning foam.

Then up from the water stood Bartholomew Grace.

He glared at me with his dead man's face as the water tumbled round his waist. He hadn't far to come, and he took a step toward me. The pistol was still in his hand, the lanyard stretched tight to his neck. He took another step, then staggered and started clubbing at the water, raising little spouts and splashes. Then the sea went surging off the deck, and there was Horn, no longer tied, clutching at the pirate's coat.

They tumbled down together and rose together, locked in a deadly struggle as the sea surged up around them. Grace twisted his fist in the collar of Horn's shirt; Horn clawed at
the flintlock, then at its lanyard, and hauled himself up to the buccaneer's throat.

They swayed and tilted, reeled and turned. They battled down the deck as the
Dragon
hurtled on. She bashed through a wave and into another. Spray flew up in sheets.

Horn was bigger and stronger than Grace. His enormous arms bent and lifted the pirate clear off the deck. But Grace never let go of the shirt collar, and the pair went spinning down toward the rail. They hit against it chest to chest and wrestled there, each choking the life from the other. For a moment Horn was looking at me. Then he shouted, and his arms went stiff as boards. He held on to Grace with all the strength he had, and flung himself over the rail. They fell together into the sea; together they went, off the edge of our-wooden-world.

“Horn!” I screamed. “Horn!”

But he was gone, and there was no hope of trying to find him. The
Dragon
hurtled on, from wave to wave in a spindrift shroud. She reeled and shook, the topsail banged and clattered, and I looked up to see Mudge, a black spot high in the rigging, making his way up the topmast shrouds, going doggedly on to reef that sail. Dasher still clung to the ratlines, and I saw what little time had passed since I'd started aft to end all this. Now Grace was gone, and Horn with him, and I imagined the two of them sinking slowly through the ocean, tumbling down through fathom after fathom, embraced for all eternity.

I stood by the wheel and stared at a ragged scar on the deck, a hole ringed by splinters to show where Grace's pistol had fired. But I couldn't dwell on it, or grieve for Horn. I heard a voice wailing faintly over the wind and the sea. Mudge was pointing forward.

“Land!” he was shouting.

The
Dragon
rose to a crest and I saw it myself, beyond the endless rows of whitecapped waves. A smudge of the earth, a line of cliffs dark in the dawn, lay directly before us. It vanished as the
Dragon
surfed to the trough, then appeared again. Within the hour we'd be right below them. And we couldn't turn away with the topsail set.

I shouted for Dasher to take the wheel. I called as loudly as I could. But if he heard me, he misunderstood, for he started aloft then, inching up the ratlines in a swirl of crimson. He reached the crosstrees and squeezed through the lubber's hole, and the wind seemed to squirt him through it as his coat billowed above him.

Mudge waited for him, and helped him up to the yard. They stepped out to leeward on a sagging rope, high above the deck, then high above the sea, as the
Dragon
rolled along. Betts cast off the sheet, Freeman the clew, and half the sail went streaming out. The men aloft gathered it in.

My heart was up there with Dasher. I knew how frightening it could be to balance on a thread of rope and grab at canvas that tried its best to pull me off. I had never done it in weather as bad as this, on a mast that pitched so wildly. But Mudge—as thick as a loaf-when he worked on deck— was spry and nimble aloft. He dragged the sail into the yard, and Dasher tied the gaskets round it.

The cliffs grew higher, darker, swifter in their coming. I saw the surf at their feet, a strip of green at their tops.

When the topsail was furled, I turned the wheel. The
Dragon
flew along with the shore on her beam. And a spit of land came out to meet us.

It blocked us like a wall, a tremendous hurdle that we couldn't cross. Wreathed with surf and spray, it was a jagged finger pointing south. I knew it at once as the North-ground Cape.

In the past two years I had witnessed a shipwreck and a smuggling run, a voyage to the Indies. And it had all brought me back to the very same place where I'd started, to St. Elmo's Bay and the teeth of the Tombstones.

W
e “wore ship and beat our way west. The tiny storm sails thrummed “with the wind as the
Dragon
clawed against it. I watched the land go by, the places that I knew. There were Sugar Bay and Tobacco Cove; every nook had a name that remembered a shipwreck and the cargo that drifted ashore.

I saw the cliffs where the wreckers had lit false beacons, and the whitened fury of the sea where it broke against the Tombstones. There lay the wreck of the
Isle of Skye
, my father's finest ship, her bones still resting among those of many others. Then Wrinkle Head was off the bow, a wall as steep as the Northground. And again we turned, to bash our way east, trapped between the capes.

Butterfield had been tossed about his dark prison so badly that he was a mass of bruises. “He's black and blue from end to end,” said Mudge, who had found him fainted in the Cave and had carried him to the after cabin. “He's in a very bad way, I think.”

Betts and Freeman had gone back to their hammocks, their chills worsened by the night. Only Dasher and Mudge and I were left to work the
Dragon
, and we beat back and
forth across St. Elmo's Bay as the wind howled from the south.

The waves that had pushed the
Dragon
on, that had slipped for miles and miles beneath her stern, now came tumbling toward her sides. They shattered on her planks in great booms and blasts of spray, or thundered right aboard to fill the waist from rail to rail. We rolled like a log in troughs so deep that the water there was streaked with sand. And on the starboard tacks, the topmast shook worse than ever, with an awful rattle in the rigging.

Now I held her head up on the larboard tack as we bounded west toward Wrinkle Head. If we could round it, we were safe; the harbor of Pendennis lay just beyond the cape. But to round it, we had to pass the Tombstones.

Mudge had heard of them. So had Freeman and Betts; there wasn't a sailor in England who didn't fear those jagged rocks. But Dasher didn't know them, and he gazed at the enormous spouts of water tossed up by breaking waves.

He was full of himself now, after his trip aloft. “Speaking as a topman,” he said, “I don't care for this at all. I've been aloft, John, and I'll vouch for this: you don't want to take a ship in there.”

I didn't tell him that I'd done so before, that it was I who had watched the false lights and shouted orders to the helmsman, that it was I who had guided the lovely
Isle of Skye
straight toward her doom.

“But the water's flat behind them,” Dasher said. “I could see that from the yard, John. We who work among the birds can spot things from aloft.” Then he looked up at the
topsail yard, and his courage seemed to leave him. “Lord love me. That thing's working loose.”

He was right, but only by half. The yard swung side to side, though the braces were tight. It was the topmast itself that was close to breaking.

“When you inspected the rig,” I asked, “what did you find?”

Dasher frowned. “The cuff?” he said. “No, that's not right. The
collar.
I didn't go clear to the masthead, mind; I didn't see it for myself. But Horn said the collar was cracked.”

It was all that held the mast up. The shrouds were shackled to that metal ring. If the collar broke, the mast would go.