Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

I asked about priming powder, and the shopkeeper had small horns for those. But he said you could just use the coarse powder and maybe grind it a little finer in the pan with the end of your finger. Nothing metal, because it might spark. So I just bought the big horn. It was too big to go in a musket bag. You just slung it over your shoulder on a cord.

By now you may have guessed what I almost forgot. It was not until the morning of the day we were going to leave that I remembered. Then I ran off quick and got a mirror, a comb, and a pair of scissors for Valentin.

I had been able to buy everything (and more besides, because I bought stuff for myself, too) from what I had made hunting. My money belt was still under my shirt. I had never let anybody see it, and I never touched the gold. When we were about ready to go, the others came to me one at a time, asking to borrow a little for things they really needed. Mostly it was powder, and lead to cast into bullets. They had gone through all the money they had made in months of hunting in just a few days-drank it, or gambled it away, or spent it on women. All three for most of them. I lent each of them a little because I wanted to get in good with them, but I kept the amounts small. They promised to pay me back before we went Tortuga again.

But to tell the truth, I was not sure I was ever going. Pretty soon a ship I liked that needed another hand was going to come by to buy our smoked meat. That was how I was thinking then. I kept thinking about the Windward, and how nice that had been. I was a good sailor by then, and I knew it.

So we paddled back to Hispaniola, me thinking to get a good berth and them just thinking to do more hunting as far as I know. We did hunt for a few more days, but before I get into that I ought to say that we had a piragua, a big boat made by hollowing out a tree, Native American fashion. They are very handy boats, those piraguas, although they do not have keel enough for you to put a mast and a sail in them. Or at least, a sail will not work very well unless the crew keeps its paddles in the water to stop the piragua from drifting too far to leeward.

The same day we got back to our camp, I went inland and found the cave, way up on a mountain, that Valentin and I had hidden our smoked meat in. I left the new musket and that musket bag there for him, and the mirror and so on. I left him my big powder flask, too, because by that time I had got to liking the horn so much I wanted to keep it. If you had asked me then, I would have said Valentin would be joining us in a few days. He never did, and pretty soon I was glad he did not. Now I wish he had.

It was not more than a day or two after we got back that the Spanish men-of-war came. There were three, one of about sixty guns, one of about forty, and a flushed-decked three-master of twenty. At first we thought they wanted to buy from us.

The officer who came talked to us in Spanish with the Castilian lisp. I could understand him, but nobody else could, and I played dumb. After that he used French about as bad as mine.

"This is the island of His Most Catholic Majesty," he told us. "You are here without his permission, which you will not receive. You are to depart it at once. If you do not, your lives are forfeit."

Melind asked, "Who is this who will kill us, Monsieur? You?"

The officer shook his head. "His Most Catholic Majesty."

"He must be a fine shot, Monsieur, to fire so from Madrid."

We laughed, but the officer frowned, and the men who had rowed him ashore looked like they were ready to kill us. I counted a coxs'n and twenty-two at the oars of the longboat, and it looked like every man had been issued a pistol and a cutlass.

"His Most Catholic Majesty has long arms," the officer told us. "This you yourselves will see, perhaps. He is a good and a humane king, however. Thus he sends me to warn you. You are to depart his island of Hispaniola by the couching of the sun, all seven of you. You are not to go to His Most Catholic Majesty's island of Tortuga when you quit this place. Nor are you to go to any other place in his domain. Other than that, you may go where you please. Depart, and you will not be molested. Remain, and you will be killed, or taken for slaves should you give yourselves up."

Melind started to say that we were doing no harm and had resupplied many Spanish ships, but the officer cut him off. "I will not dispute with you, as it would be without point. His Most Catholic Majesty has made the decision, not I. You will die or be enslaved if you remain where you are. You have been warned."

"We will not go," Melind told him, "and we will kill anyone who tries to force us to go."

A real Frenchman would have shrugged. The officer turned up his palms instead. There was more talk, but I have written everything that mattered.

As soon as he got back into his longboat, I started backing away toward the rain forest. I motioned for some of the others to come, too, but nobody did.

The longboat went back to the big galleon, and I watched the officer go up the sea ladder, and the crew go up, and the longboat hoisted back aboard. The galleon squared around and the hatches of the gunports went up.

I yelled for the buccaneers to scatter and get down then, but nobody did much of anything until the guns were run out. Then Melind shouted for everybody to get back.

Nobody had moved more than a couple of steps when the broadside went off. I had been on Capt. Burt's Weald when she fired her broadside at the Duquesa, but that had been smaller guns and a lot fewer. Besides, I had been behind them, and that makes all the difference. This was thirty big guns on two decks. For a second it was like being in a hurricane. Trees and limbs were falling, water was jumping up out of our little bay, and the noise was terrible.

As fast as it had come, it got quiet again.

One of the buccaneers was dead and so was his servant. I cannot remember the buccaneer's name now, but the servant was Harve. He only had three or four months left on his contract, and used to talk a lot about raising pigs. He knew more than I did about it, and I knew a lot. Joire's arm had been taken off, too. We did what we could for him, but he died that night.

The worst thing for me was the dogs. We had about a dozen, and four were dead or hurt so badly that we had to kill them, all of them good hunting dogs. We pulled back into the rain forest that night, and buried Joire the next day.

After that we went back to hunting, but we kept away from the beach and had the other servant watch the sea. He was supposed to tell us when a ship came.

What really came was more buccaneers, forty or fifty of them paddling down the coast in piraguas. They said there was a Spanish army on the island. They had fought and lost, and they were going to Tortuga until things quieted down on Hispaniola. They had not been able to bring the beef they had dried and had nothing to eat.

We fed them, and everybody talked a lot that evening. I said we ought to go inland and hide in the mountains. Melind told me it would not work. The Native Americans had tried it, and look what had happened to them. We might be all right until we ran out of powder, but when we did they would slaughter us.

"Like shooting the horses to see them die," I said, but nobody got it. Finally we bedded down, all of us having decided we would go to Tortuga in the morning.

It was the middle of the night when I woke up. I sat up, thinking I had heard a shot. All the dogs were barking. There was another shot, and I rolled out and grabbed my musket.

That was about as bad a fight as I have ever been in, and I have been in some bad ones. It was dark, and you could not be sure who you were fighting. I heard Melind yelling and recognized his voice, and ran over and helped him out. After that we called the rest over, shooting at just about anybody who did not answer in French. The sky got gray, and the shooting got better, everybody hiding behind trees and popping out to shoot. There seemed to be six or seven of them for every one of us, and they drove us toward the sea and finally out onto the beach.