Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

He was sweating a lot, so after I caught on to what he was doing I followed him back inside. I found him in the patio, sitting in the shade and fanning himself with his big hat. "Padre," I said in Spanish, "why don't you rest here awhile and let me do that?"

"Would you, my son? It would be a most noble work of charity."

I said sure and that I was a sailor, and I gave him the name of my ship. After that, he showed me how to hook his jug to the well rope. You could not give it too much rope, because it would float and come unhooked until it got quite a bit of water in it.

When I went out with the jug I saw a scrap of rope, so I pulled off a strand and stuck it in my pocket. After that I climbed the scaffolding to where the slaves who got the stones in place were. I let them drink until my jug was empty, and talked to them a little, and went back inside. When I went to the well the priest wanted to know what I was doing, and I showed him how I could close the hook with a couple of half hitches. He shook the hook to see if the jug would come off. Naturally it did not, so we lowered it and pulled it back up when it was full.

"My son," he said, "you are an angel of God, but I should not have permitted you to do my work even once. It is my duty to bring the knowledge of Christ to those poor souls."

I said, "Well, I tried to do that too, Padre. I know I'm probably not as good as you at it, but I told them that God loved them so much that He had sent Jesus so they could be His friends again."

After that we sat in the shade and talked awhile. Then he took the jug out again. When he came back, he shut the hook the same way I had. It took him longer, but he did it. While the jug was filling, we sat down and talked some more. I said the slaves ought to be free, that nobody ought to be a slave.

"I agree, my son. But what benefit would they have from their freedom if they did not know God? They would not save their souls, because they could not."

"Maybe they could find God better if they were free to look for Him," I argued. "Besides, they wouldn't have to work as hard, and they could eat better."

"That last would certainly be true, my son, if they enslaved others as they themselves have been enslaved. The men who own them are free to look for God, I would say. Do you think they have found Him?"

I shrugged.

"Answer, my son. Do you?"

I had to admit that it did not seem like it.

"Can you free their slaves, my son?"

I shook my head. "It would take a cartload of reales, Padre, and I don't have any."

"No more can I, my son. But I can show the overseers and the guards, and the slaves themselves, how a Christian ought to act toward his fellow men."

After that he told me about another church a few streets away, and I went over and had a look at it. I did what I could there, and when I went back to the ship I was pretty tired.

Senor had stayed on board, with the bosun and Zavala, one of the old guys from the larboard watch. They made me come over and sit with them so they could kid me about girls and so on. I just grinned and shook my head, saying I had not even met any. Which was the truth.

When they saw they could not get me mad, they talked about other things. That was how I learned that Veracruz was a treasure port. A galleon would be coming to take the treasure back to Spain, and we were going to wait for it and sail back with it.

"To have the kindness of fifty guns" was how Senor said it. I wanted to hear more about the treasure house and find out where it was. I knew nobody would tell me if I asked, so I just kept quiet and kept my ears open.

A few more sailors came back, all pretty drunk. Senor let them sleep on deck or go into the forecastle, which was fine with me. After a while, I just lay down on the deck myself, and went to sleep listening to them talk.

Way too soon, the bosun shook me awake. I remember I did not feel like I had slept long at all, but the moon was up and pretty high, too. The captain had come back, there were more sailors sitting around talking, and Senor, the bosun, old Zavala, and I were going ashore to round up as many as we could.

So I ended up going to all the cantinas and talking with a few girls there, too. Some of them were pretty nice, and some were the pits. And just about all of them kidded me more and worse than Senor and the bosun had. "You come back alone, and we'll show you things you've never seen." "Sit with me and I'll straighten out that crooked nose."

"Yes! It will stand tall and proud." With a whole lot more, some of it pretty dirty. Italian is a real good language to talk dirty in, but sometimes I think Spanish must be the best in the whole world. Those girls had a great time teasing me, laughing at me and anything I happened to say, and enjoyed themselves so much that I told them, "Listen up! You owe me, all of you, and one of these days I'm coming to collect."

The next day the captain put me back on starboard watch. We worked until it got hot, cleaning up the ship and replacing some of the rigging that was getting worn, and then we got to go ashore again. This time I knew that most of the men who promised they would come back did not mean a word of it and would not come back until somebody came and got them.

Which I was not about to do again. At first I thought I would just find a place on shore where I could get some sleep, maybe in the church where I had gotten to know the priest. Then I decided that the thing for me to do was to sneak back on board without Senor's seeing me. If I could do that, I could come back early, sling my hammock in the forecastle the way I always did, and crash. That would be a lot better than sleeping in a hiding place in some alley-I had done that a lot before I joined the crew-and I would not be breaking my word. I had not promised to report back to Senor, or any such thing. Just that I would come back to the ship that night.

The first thing I did, though, was to strike up a conversation with somebody in the market and find out where the treasure house was. It turned out it was behind where the fort was being built, and I had been pretty close to it without knowing when I had watched the slaves work there.

I went there to see it and hung around looking at it, and pretty soon I had a real piece of luck. Mules and soldiers came-there must have been a hundred mules-and the big doors were opened. Those mules had been carrying silver bars, each bar heavy enough to make a pretty good load for one man, and I got to see the soldiers unload them and carry them inside.

The treasure house was not very big, or very high either-not even as high as our little chapel at the monastery. The walls were thick just the same, the doors were big and heavy and bound with iron, and the top of it looked like the top of a castle, with openings between the big stones for soldiers to shoot through. I was not thinking of getting the silver or anything like that then. But I saw right away that if somebody was, the thing to do was to get it while it was still on the mules.

After that, I went back to the harbor for a look at the Santa Charita before sunset. There I got lucky again. A big galleon was making port, and I got to watch the whole thing. It was about five times the size of our ship, with crosses on all the sails and a lot of carving and gilding on the stern.

It tied up at a different pier, and I went over there for a closer look and so I could see who got off. It was a pretty good show, too, with trumpets blowing and soldiers with red pants and polished armor escorting the captain. I jumped up and touched my forehead the way you are supposed to, and nobody said a word to me.

Walking back to the quay, I could see the starboard side of the Santa Charita, and I got an idea. If I could get something that would float that I could stand on, I could reach up and grab the edge of the anchor hawse, pull myself up, and climb in through the hawsepipe. That would put me on the weather deck, where the capstan was, forward of the foremast and right over the forecastle. Senor and whoever he had with him would be in the waist where they could watch the gangplank. If I stayed low, I could keep an eye on them over the edge of the weather deck. When they were busy with something, I could hold the edge of the deck and swing myself down into the forecastle. All I had to do was wait until it was good and dark, and borrow a boat to climb up from. I found a nice shady spot to sit in, and dozed off for a couple of hours. When I woke up I went looking for the kind of boat I needed, one small enough that I could manage it by myself but big enough that it would not capsize when I stood up in it. Of course it had to be a boat nobody was watching. Once I got into the hawsepipe, I would let it drift away. The owner would probably be able to find it without too much trouble unless the tide carried it out to sea. Still, he would not like what I was going to do, and I knew it.